omenti

the black hole that terrorized a city

Someone asked if I liked to watch horror/scifi movies.  It depends...

 

A few years ago I was trapped on a cross country flight and saw The Black Hole - one of those scripts that is so bad it is almost, but not quite, worth watching.  Check out the trailer...

 

Most special effects and animated movies take liberties with physics.  Starting with Disney many of the classic animation films created increasingly more interesting variations on physics to improve the storytelling physical worlds.  There were any number of tricks to trick the viewer to better immerse them in the story.¹

 

Special effects tend to suffer.  I'm able to enjoy films like Guardians of the Galaxy, but poor scripts and acting break the story telling and I find myself spending most of my time thinking about the physics.  

 

With that a mini-analysis of The Black Hole - (no plot is spoiled as I didn't notice one)

 

Somehow an there is an accident in a secret physics lab a hundred feet below St Louis.  Physicists have managed to create a tiny black hole that escapes and trolls around under the city coming up for buildings like the great white shark in Jaws.   At this point I'm completely out of story space and am thinking about small black holes.

 

Hmmm... about 30 meters underground and buildings on the surface are collapsing.  I'll make the assumption it is a miniature classical black hole, more on that later, and suggest that the gravitational force from it at the surface is about ten times Earth's gravity - that should be enough to flatten a building.  I could have picked other numbers, but we're just doing a little thought experiment and don't need to accurately understand how strong buildings are.  With this you can work out its mass - roughly about twenty trillionths the mass of the Earth - a bit over 100 trillion kilograms.  Now we're getting into interesting territory..

 

The event horizon of a black hole that mass is roughly a tenth of a trillionth of a meter -  about ten thousand times smaller than a hydrogen atom.²  Put it on the ground and it won't feel any resistance to any material on or in the Earth.  As soon as its created it will fall toward the center of the Earth picking up speed as it goes.  It whizzes through the center at about eight kilometers a second and starts slowing down as it heads towards a point, judging from my globe, on the surface of the Indian Ocean well off the Australian coast. Maybe it dines on a fish before reversing direction and heading back about 42 minutes later.³  Back and forth, back and forth - we have an odd sort of clock.

 

Games like this turn out to be a central part of play in physics.  You make a non-physical assumption -  assume a miniature black hole is created just under St Louis - and follow what happens using established physics.  In the process you can quickly deal with many questions and decide on those that are the best candidates for serious study.  Now that we have our black hole tic-tocking between St Louis and the Indian Ocean, let's look at smaller black holes.

 

I mentioned this was a classical black hole.  In 1974 Stephen Hawking proposed black holes can evaporate. The time required for one formed from a collapsed star is extremely long - it would take about 10⁶⁷ years for one with our Sun's mass ... approximately forever when you consider the age of the universe is 13.8 billion years.  But the rate of evaporation has a strong dependence on the black hole's mass and lighter black holes evaporate faster.   The little St Louis black hole would last about a hundred times longer than the current age of the Universe.

 

Smaller black holes can have lifetimes small even on time scales we're used to.  One with the same mass as a small car - about 1,000 kg - would evaporate in a billionth of a second and would be about 200 times as bright as the Sun.  These super tiny black holes would make a very powerful and completely impractical doomsday devices - even more impractical than antimatter.  In other words the perfect plot device for a movie.

 

I'll end with a problem for those who like to work things out.  Send mail if you'd like hints.

 

The Master from Dr Who or a slightly annoyed Vogon captain approaches the Earth with a super slicer beam that instantly makes a cut through the Earth.  What happens if the cut is through the equator and is  one centimeter wide?  What happens with a one meter cut?  How about ten meters?   Now work the problem with the same three cuts, but this time slicing from pole to pole.  How does humanity make out in each scenario?  

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¹ If you have the slightest interest in animation The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation by Olie Johnson and Frank Thomas is just wonderful.  Go for the hard cover and treasure it.  Disney did amazing groundbreaking work, and other expanded wrote new rules.   Chuck Jones created an animation for roadrunners and coyotes that is an art form.  Even today the tricksters are still at it.

² the Schwarzschild radius is proportional to mass r_s = 2GM/c².  The point is it only goes linearly with mass while the mass of a star goes as the cube of the radius - the event horizon get small very quickly as mass drops.  The Sun has an event horizon of about 3 kilometers ... far too small to contain it.  r_s for the Earth is 0.9 centimeters.  

³ 42 minutes through a frictionless tunnel is the result everyone calculates in physics 101, but that assumes the Earth's interior has a uniform density.  Recent work giving a better understanding of the Earth's density distribution cuts a few minutes off the transit time.

 

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Recipe corner

 

I grilled some asparagus and used a homemade olive based dressing.  Ideally the trick would be to layer pieces of tomato on a bed of the grilled asparagus before adding the dressing, but it isn't good tomato season (yet).  Here's the dressing...

 

Olive dressing

 

Ingredients

 

° 3 tbl finely chopped kalamata olives

° 3 tbl extra virgin olive oil - a good one pays off

° 3 tbl red wine vinegar

° 3 tbl crumbled feta (leave off if you want it to be vegan)

° 2 tbl finely chopped red onion

° 1 clove garlic - very finely chopped or grated

° 1 tbl honey

° 1 tbl dijon mustard

° 1 tsp oregano

° salt and pepper to taste

 

 

Technique:-)

 

° mix the ingredients

 

visual storytelling

At the 1986 SIGGRAPH conference a short computer animation from a small company called Pixar wowed the audience.  Technically it was a breakthrough, but more stunning was the audience's reaction.  The technical crowd was not asking questions about the new animation techniques it highlighted, but wanted to know if the larger lamp was Luxo Jr's mother or father.  They finally had a viable story telling technique.  John Lasseter and Ed Catmull were able to apply the animation principles developed by Disney's Nine Old Men decades earlier to create an emotional story.

 

Mention advances in computer animation and conversation often turns to the uncanny valley hypothesis.  While there is some evidence to support it,  more interesting is how we respond to the a variety of media types - the spoken word, literature, paintings, music, film and their variations emotionally.  

 

Think about it.  We look at a piece of paper with small regions of contrasting reflection that follow a simple pattern.  Our mind decodes these patterns and transforms them into an artificial world in our mind - a world that, when guided by a master, can have exquisite beauty and compelling power.  Power that goes well beyond entertainment plucking at our deepest emotions.  A plateau of emotional believability.

 

The same can be said for the other storytelling media.  A new media develops and it takes the storytellers a generation or two before it finds its voice and power.  Old media are rarely completely replaced.  Should she master it, the story teller has acquired a new arrow for her quiver.  

 

Technical papers are usually dry.  The audience is assumed to be expert and aware of the the work's contextual place.  This can be disorienting for nonspecialists presenting something of a barrier to cross-disciplinary work.  Some people make an effort to remedy the problem.  Good talks often have an introduction explaining why the work is relevant tailored to what may be a diverse audience.  Sometimes review articles offer the additional context and even popular press descriptions in Science, Nature and Scientific American and even podcasts are useful. 

 

Last weekend a friend pointed out a supergravity paper I normally would have skipped.¹  A graduate student co-author spent some time with iMovie and put together a trailer that gives a strong motivation for why you might want to read the paper.  It worked and I did:-)

 

Reacting to this another friend noted his company,  large investment bank that relies on some rather complex algorithmic processes, took on an intern from CalArts this Summer.  She is an animation student with the goal of working at a studio like Pixar, but they wanted to see if she could help with visual storytelling.  Specifically little videos to motivate complex documents for non-specialist clients.  The model they wanted to explore is the one pioneered by minutephysics:

He was very impressed by some of her work and said she has been offered work after her graduation, but that she was much more interested in a conventional animation studio.  He doubts that anyone in their organization is cross-disciplinary enough to do this sort of work.  I suspect if they looked at more recent hires they might find some video literacy.

 

Twelve years ago I began to devote a considerable amount of my time to issues associated with the acceleration of global warming. The fit seemed good at first - after all, it involves energy and I'm a card carrying physicist.  It turned out I didn't understand the problem. 

 

For years I thought education was the answer and, with the help of a friend who wasn't a scientist, tried to put together a book.  Despite her best efforts I'm not a good storyteller and I wasn't finding the right path we could use to connect.  She had some great ideas which have influenced my approach, but in the end we realized the education path didn't make sense and I began to explore other channels.  A dear friend (that would be you Juliette) suggested  I should be concentrating on video -  very foreign to me, but completely natural to her.  

 

I've been exploring storytelling with some experts in getting science across to the public - science communication and popularization.  I've learned a bit about making stories simpler - Colleen, my writing partner, told me I had a tendency to 'Matryoshka doll' everything going deeper and deeper into explanations trying to offer background along the way.²  I've made some progress breaking away from that tendency, but a using a less ancient media is central if there is to be any progress.

 

The language of video and cinema is becoming important in areas I hadn't imagined.  A few weeks ago, corresponding with a student planning on astronomy, I advised at least a few courses in film making and be very serious about them.  And I should be taking my own advice...  you are rarely too old and I know some experts.

 

Other forms of storytelling are emerging.  I was lucky enough to meet Horace Dediu last year.  We share a few fascinations including the basics of cinematic storytelling.  He has helped fashion a tool with Pixxa to support the technique combined with some ideas from Tufte - and gives beautiful presentations.  If you or someone in your organization gives quantitative storytelling presentations I strongly recommend attending one of his Airshow presentations.

 

Finally the written word is still very powerful.  It and music offer some of the deepest forms of communication.  It is not replaced by video and newer media and in many areas is the best channel.  But unless you are enormously gifted it is difficult to reach others outside of your normal area and investigating other communication channels makes a lot of sense.

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¹ Perhaps too much detail, but supergravity is a supersymmetric variation of General Relativity.  Supersymmetry places some very tight constraints on what can create gravity - it has to come from peculiar fields that are combinations of boson and fermion fields.  The problem with current physics is making this fit in with inflation requires some cobbling to get things to work.  This paper comes up with a simple way to do that - a single superfield.  

² This is a very common problem with scientists and I suspect those in many other fields that are a bit too removed from normal educations.

 

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Recipe Corner

 

First a kickstarter on an immersion circulator and then a recipe:

 

I made an immersion circulator about five years ago.  A heating element, a control element that could regulate the temperature to about 1 °F and an insulated water container.  It was difficult to use, noisy and - in a word - frustrating, but I learned about sous vide cooking.  Commercial units were a lure, but good ones cost nearly $1,000.

In the past year or two some less expensive commercial units appeared along with some Kickstarter projects of varying quality.  One of the Kickstarters was the Nomiku.  I've played with a friend's unit and like it a lot.  A few days ago the Nomiku folks announced a Kickstarter for a second generation unit.  I thought about it for about 15 seconds and bit.  If you want to push your culinary education this may be just the ticket.  It may be more appropriate for meat eaters, but even as a vegetarian I see great utility and grounds for experimentation.  

 

and on to the recipe..

 

I had some rhubarb, but being allergic to strawberries the old standard - strawberry rhubarb pie - was out of the question.  There were red plums, so why not..  Normally baking is the stuff a carefully followed recipes - after all - the chemistry has to come out just right.  Pies are different and closer to art.  There are tricks getting the crusts right, but you make that up on the fly.  The same for the fillings and you usually can't go wrong unless you burn it.  I wanted something tart so I went about 40% plum and 60% rhubarb - if you like sweet go the other direction rather than add sugar.  I won't go into religion as everyone has their own pie crust methods - pick your own method.

 

Plum and Rhubarb Pie

 

Ingredients 

 

° 2 pie crusts 

° 3 cups rhubarb sliced into chunks you'd like to see in a pie

° 2 cups red plumbs diced - don't use the very soft ones... a bit firm

° 1-1/4 cup white cane sugar

° 2 tbl tapioca 

° 1/4 cup corn starch 

° small bit (1/8 tsp) sea salt

° milk and sugar for the top of the pie

 

Technique - easy as pie

 

° preheat oven to 425°F

° put the rhubarb and plums in a mixing bowl and gently mix in everything else with a spatula 

° line a 9" glass pie plate with a crust and pour in the mixture

° add the second crust, perform whatever art you like crimping edges and cut some vent slots

° brush the top with some milk and sprinkle a goodly amount of sugar on the pie top

° bake for 20 minutes and then reduce to 350°F (don't open the oven or the temp will fall too quickly) and bake until beautifully golden brown - 45-55 minutes - look at the pie bottom through the glass plate for brownness.  

° place on a pie rack and let cool enough.  Great with vanilla ice cream.

 

what is deep enough m and s and what about steam?

The American public is remarkably out of step with the findings of the science of global warming.  Generally less than half of the public agrees with the statement there is solid evidence for global warming caused by human activity in contrast with the very strong consensus among scientists.¹  Curiously  public opinion has been fairly static for the since 2000 while citizens in the much of the industrialized world show opinions that trend towards those of science.  Huge discrepancies raise interesting questions.

 

Dan Kahan of Yale notes most current measures of the dynamics that create conflict over risk are invalid.  He studies beliefs and clustered inferences and notes that it is possible to have people with some proficiency in a subject area reject predictions that conflict with a larger world view.  This illogical rejection appears across the political spectrum and can be stronger as education levels increase.   His paper is fascinating, but I think his analysis misses a few points.  Perhaps most important is what is scientific proficiency?

 

Many of the standard measures are little more than the ability to perform rote memorization.  Unfortunately this is how a lot of science is presented and tested.  There is a belief among many that science creates facts, but nothing is farther from the truth.  What is the core of an adequate education in science for non-scientists and how much does that differ with what is being taught in school?

 

I had a reasonably intense undergrad education in science and math.  Moving through grad school it became clear that the physics I had learned was not much deeper than becoming familiar with a few very important basic concepts and learning how to manipulate them mathematically.  There was a thread of the art of asking questions, but it was largely academic and  was often eclipsed by the need to gain a bit of literacy in the background.  In fairness an increasing amount of the real core of the game came through, but it would be a mistake to say most undergraduates were doing science.

 

I don't see any reason why questions can't be asked earlier.  The mentors I had as a teen often posed interesting questions - they weren't trying to teach me from a book, but wanted me to discover a few things for myself with a bit of guidance.  This was the intoxicating stuff.  I began to wonder if the scientific method that was taught in high school made sense.  What I was doing was much more disordered.  It wasn't real science, but it was closer to the real thing than some of my physics classes.²  I grad school I found myself wondering what science was and found myself coming down on the side of the English rather than the Germans.³

 

One of the regular readers of this blog is currently in a boreal forest learning some skills she'll need when she does serious research on her own.  She's learning how to live in the wild and not injure or kill herself and the others around her, but more importantly she's learning some observation techniques.  What does it mean to measure and what are your errors.  She'll make a lot of mistakes and learn that perfection never happens.  The statistics courses she's had will become more relevant.  She's getting a taste of science.  

 

There is no reason why this can't be done earlier. It is commonly said kids are born scientists.  It isn't true.  While they show the curiosity and ask questions there is little rigor and they form interesting models of the world.  They're guided and learn to trust other information sources.  The lucky ones retain their curiosity and are skeptical.  The rest can be great students by the metrics used by much of education, but sometime is broken.  I'm very interested in learning how to fix that.

 

When I taught undergrad physics many of the students would spend a few pages of blue book space doing step by step calculations.  The meat of the problem was stating the question clearly in physics and building something you could solve.  That was 90% of the grade, yet most people would get mired in the calculation - often using an inappropriate formula - and get the wrong answer to 10 significant digits. 

 

Math is a good example of where some refocus is appropriate.  Much of the teaching focuses on calculation - a narrow slice of the subject that is becoming increasingly less important.  The field is much richer and allows the development of skill sets relevant to many fields outside of  standard STEM world.  I see an applied math problem as having four components:

 

° posing the right question

° real world → math formulation

° computation

° math formulation → real world and verification 

 

A bit of effort required to understand how to formulate a question, move to an answer and see if it makes sense.  Once you've done it enough you have respect for the technique.  I may not know much chemistry or geology, but I know the people who are doing it are driven by the same process and, assuming their work passes peer review, I trust them.  There are exceptions, but this trust is almost always well-placed.  I have to wonder if otherwise educated people would trust results they currently dispute if they had a somewhat deeper understanding?    I suspect this may be true of many fields.

 

I've had some amazing experiences working with people with deep expertise far from science.  Musicians, artists, designers, film makers, athletes ...  I can only hope I could give them a fraction of what they gave me.  This is fundamental to my support of STEAM education (STEM + the arts).  Much needs to be done and it needs to be done with both sides contributing.  We have physics for poets and even poetry for physicists classes (I took one of the later), but they are often watered down versions of the core subjects and useless for cross field collaborations.  

 

This project impressed me .. 

 

How can we teach at a deeper level without getting lost in the weeds?  Unlike some of you I'm not at the coal face, but bit of experience and my gut tells me there is great promise in STEAM.  The approach, done right, can be seriously fun and that is enough to motive me.  It is not the silver bullet - working silver bullets don't exist outside of werewolf movies - but perhaps it can be a bit of silver buckshot.

 

This shouldn't stop at graduation.  Education needs to be life long experience.  I've been involved with a few organizations that use something of a STEAM approach as part of their business and they use it to great advantage.  We can do much better as a society.  

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¹ The Pew Center does good work - this is representative.  The figure for scientists is old and is higher now.  Over 99% among citied researchers last year.

² You all know the statement of the scientific method.  For me the question never comes at the beginning - it is much messier than that.  Science is much more adaptive.  There are procedures that everyone uses because they tend to be efficient at quickly getting to the bottom of the matter.  Mathematical rigor, peer review, criteria for statistical significance, double-blind studies and so on.  These can be field dependent and vary in significance.  There is even some non-empirical hypothesis assessment at some point - particularly in theoretical physics - but in the end Nature and solid measurements are trump.

³ Science is from the Latin scientia which is close to what we would call knowledge.  The German word for science is Wissenschaft, which is very close to the Latin.  In the day the Germans would include the social sciences, math, computer science and even the arts and humanities - the science of art is Kunstwissenschaft.  The Germans basically say that almost anything that can be studied at a university is science.  I can't buy that (and German scientists haven't bought it for some time).  The English established the domain of science as the natural sciences.  The description of Nature.  That works for me, so when you hear me say the social or computer sciences aren't, that's where I'm coming from.  

The growth of university science at a few English universities - particularly Cambridge, as the Industrial Revolution progressed created the distinction.  Science was the description what was underneath all of the marvelous engineering that was underway.

 

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Recipe corner

 

Really simple this time - I wanted an appropriate butter for some corn bread.  I've adjusted honey butter over the years and find this ratio works very well.  

 

Honey butter

 

Ingredients

 

° 450 g (2 cups) unsalted high quality butter - softened

° 175 g (1/2 cup) honey

° 4 g (3/4 tsp) fine kosher salt 

 

 

Technique

 

° for a fluffy consistency throw everything in a mixer or food processor. for coarser just mix by hand..

 

pete - a life that made a difference

The past half year has been a period of loss in my life.  These periods happen, of course, but it has been particularly concentrated and has forced a lot of thinking.  During one point last December a close friend called to see how I was doing and after listening for a few minutes she started to sing a familiar song that moved me from the shock I was experiencing to a point where I could finally cry:

 

To everything turn turn turn there is a season turn turn turn 
And a time to every purpose under heaven 
A time to be born a time to die, a time to plant, a time to reap 
A time to kill, a time to heal, a time to laugh, a time to weep 

To everything turn turn turn there is a season turn turn turn 
And a time for every purpose under heaven 
A time to build up a time to break down, a time to dance, a time to mourn 
A time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones together 

To everything turn turn turn there is a season turn turn turn 
And a time to every purpose under heaven 
A time of love, a time of hate, a time of war a time of peace 
A time you may embrace, a time to refrain from embracing 

To everything turn turn turn there is a season turn turn turn 
And a time for every purpose under heaven 
A time to gain, a time to lose, a time to rend, a time to sew 
A time of love, a time of hate, a time of peace, I swear it's not too late 

To everything turn turn turn there is a season turn turn turn
And a time to every purpose under heaven 
To everything turn turn turn there is a season turn turn turn
And a time for every purpose under heaven

                                                                 Pete's words adapted from Ecclesiastes

 

Pete Seeger was one of those remarkable people who saw injustice and through force of will managed to find a way to bring change.  He fought with words and music - words and music that inspired others.   Enough that a difference was made.

 

I never really met him.  I did see him at a few concerts and was able to shake his hand a few times, but that's it.  On the other hand he was one of the people who helped me find my moral compass.  He is one of the forces that helped make me as a person.

 

Rather than write a post today I'll link to something much better - a video biography that appeared on the American Masters series and was shown on Public Broadcasting.  

It is fascinating how important music and poetry were. Such a powerful form of participatory story telling.

 

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 Recipe Corner

 

Ben Cohen wrote a lovely remembrance and offered an image.  It reminded me of the first time I saw Pete live.  It was a small outdoor concert on a beach in Southern California with a few hundred people gathered around a large fire on a chilly January evening.  When I finally shook his hand, he made a comment on the excellent hot chocolate and offered it was good lubricant for conversation.  

 

Last night I made some hot chocolate and had it with stroopwafels.  The trick is to place the stroopwafel on top of the mug and let it steam for a minute or two.  There are so many ways to prepare hot chocolate, but this is one that works in the Winter.

 

Hot Chocolate

 

Ingredients

 

° 2 cups whole milk

° 1 tbl white cane sugar

° 1/2 cinnamon stick

° 1/4 vanilla bean scraped. This is roughly the equivalent of 1 tsp of a good vanilla extract if you don't have fresh vanilla beans

° 100g bar of 70% dark chocolate.  I usually use a Lindt 70% bar (3.5 oz)

° 1/8 tsp Ancho chili powder (a double pinch:-)

° pinch of salt

 

Technique

 

° Add everything but the chocolate, salt and chili powder to a medium sized sauce pan over low heat. Warm to a light simmer and remove from the heat for about ten minutes.  Remove the vanilla husk and the cinnamon stick.

° make a homemade double boiler and melt the chocolate over simmering water.  Better yet, use a bain-marie ...  recommended if you make hot chocolate on a regular basis.

° put the milk mixture over low heat and whisk in the melted chocolate

° add the salt and chili powder and serve in two mugs.

 

carpetland and west africa

Carpetland..

 

The other day I drove by Verizon's headquarters in Basking Ridge, NJ.  Before AT&T was sold to SBC, it was the palatial AT&T headquarters complex.  Several of us spent time there working with upper management in the business units as well as a few above that level.  In theory we were helping them understand the Internet and what it might mean, but we saw how that turned out.

 

One of the members of my human computer interface department was an anthropologist. I was a bit puzzled by the Basking Ridge dress standard, so she offered a bit of fashion guidance to sort out the power structure.  AT&T had 15 management salary grades and eight effective levels.  Dress standards were enforced by a common convention.  If someone was wearing a fitted Brooks Brothers suit you knew he (and it was almost always a he) was a E band executive or perhaps someone aspiring to that level.  It would be presumptuous for a D band to dress that well.  The BU chiefs and top corporate people were usually dressed a level above that - it was my introduction to noticing bespoke tailoring.  

 

Bonnie, our anthropologiest, noted all of this was "tribal".  The high level people were physically separate.  These were the people who used the helicopters and corporate jets.   Their lair was carpetland - the carpeting was so thick it was borderline difficult to walk across.

 

Subject matter experts from the Labs could get away with more casual clothing. Directors usually wore suits, but not particularly impressive cuts.  Department heads and below could be very casual and many of us dressed that way to differentiate ourselves.¹  

 

Over time I've come to see fashion as expression a person makes about themselves.  It can be personal, creative and even artistic, but it also is an interaction with the culture we are embedded in.  As culture is dynamic, fashion can be ephemeral.  As a personal statement it can be timeless.

 

Fashion has traditionally been created by designers, selected by buyers and promoted through advertising.  My Danish friend Jheri notes how boring most American fashion is.  Many of us, particularly the young, feel a necessity to be part of a current trend and are very susceptible to advertising and store displays.  We want to be individuals, but there seems to be a need to be part of a group.

 

Fast fashion is a direction the low end of the industry is taking.   Mostly a change to distribution that relies on very cheap third world labor and a hyped up promotion channel.  Clothing is no longer designed to be durable, but rather close to the moment.  It tends to follow a very uniform pattern.  It is still boring, but the clock cycle has been increased.

 

Signs of change are emerging.  Designers often relied on the muse of the street, but now street fashion is being communicated to everyone directly through blogs, Pinterest and a few other social mechanisms.  The quality of design varies, but the number of people participating is growing and it is having an impact on design.  Importantly a curious artifact of American copyright law is that most fashion is immune ..  we may have to think of a world where high end designers collaborate with people from the street.  

 

Johanna Blakley's (she is with the Norman Lear Center) TEDx talk is worth watching

 

Jheri and I have spent some time investigating possible trajectories for made to measure clothing - she has an interesting guest post here.  The bottom line is, at least for women, most off the shelf clothing has fit issues.  This can be addressed with money and/or technology and changes in technology combined with new distribution mechanisms may be very disruptive to a rather enormous industry.  Things get even more interesting when you consider customization and shared intellectual property from the street.  

 

When you are studying something this complex it helps to look into something similar but different...  I like to say that studying the weather on Jupiter and Saturn is a great way to gain insights into the Earth's weather.

 

Last Summer I because aware of some amazing looking wax print fabric displayed in the Fashion Institute of Technology's collection.  These are associated with West Africa with the best examples being from one of the more important companies in the area - Vlisco.  

 

I had no idea what a wax print was so it was time to investigate.  It turns out the Dutchman Pieter Fentener van Vlissingen sorted out how to product Indonesian batik fabric in the mid 1800s.  Batik is a cloth that is patterned with a dye resistant wax technique and it had a reputation for beauty and price at the time. Batik, modifying the technique for something much like a printing press, figured out he could manufacture it in Holland and export it to Indonesia at a profit.  Unfortunately the quality wasn't up to snuff and Vlissingen found himself with a ship full of surplus cloth and more coming from his factory.² He tried selling it in West Africa and it took hold.  Over the years it became popular, improving in quality adopting traditional African patterns.  Over time the catalog of patterns became huge.  They were the story of the people and, with revolution and independence, Vlisco wax print fabrics had become a central part of West and Central African culture.

 

Now it gets very interesting.  

 

West African women treasure Vlicso fabric.  Good clothing for the rich and emerging middle class is frequently made with using it. Labor is inexpensive and often has high quality - higher quality than most Western pieces.  Even small villages have a woman or two doing tailoring work.  Everything is made to measure.  Vlisco doesn't make finished pieces - they sponsor fashion shows and regularly put out pattens, but this is promotion. A woman buys the fabric, finds a tailor and uses an existing pattern, an of her's or the tailor's, or some combination.  The pieces fit perfectly and have the style the owner wants telling her story.³  

 

We may find ourselves going down a similar path, but there is an important cultural issue.  It turns out most people in West Africa identify with a tribe.  The identification has a big impact on their lives and one does not have to signal through clothing what they belong to.  It gives a great deal of freedom compared to what we see in the West.  A woman can show much more creativity that what is our social norm.  I'm wondering if the growing importance of street fashion and its global nature (a good deal of The Sartorialist blog is external to NYC) with trigger a greater degree of expression in the West as made to measure and its customization  - a mass customization becomes possible.

 

Culture - from the tribally reinforced conformity of carpetland to the freedom of West Africa - perhaps there are lessons that help us puzzle out some of the emerging threads in this story.

__________

¹ I used to take my slide rule for quick calculations.  These were back of the envelope estimates used in sessions that investigated ideas quickly.  My director told me to stop bringing it as it was intimidating the executives.

² There are several variations to the story - this is the most frequently quoted.  The companies production was in Holland for about a hundred years and then some shifted to Africa.  The finest cloth was, and is still, produced in Holland and is highly prized.  About ten years ago a British company bought Vlisco and is currently expanding.

³ I note that Western conventions are rapidly mixing with the culture and poorly fitting and cheap clothing from South Asia is becoming much more common among young women.  Some of this is tailored, but the quality is often the effort isn't justified.  Africa may be drifting to where were are now.  Their terrible transportation infrastructure is acting as a moderator.

 

__________

 Recipe Corner

 

This is not authentic, but is in the spirit of a Cameroonian peanut and sweet potato soup.  As with all soups the measurements aren't terribly important, but be sure to do the seasoning to your own taste.  

 

Cameroon Inspired Sweet Potato and Peanut Soup

 

Ingredients

 

° 2/3 cup of roasted peanuts (not dry roasted)

° 2 tsp oil

° 2 large onion chopped (about 2 cups?)

° about 800g vegetable broth (most in west africa would use a chicken broth) 

° 2 large sweet potatoes cut in inchish cubes (maybe 6 cups total)

° 1 tbl cumin

° 1/2 tsp ground black pepper

° salt to taste (not much if your peanuts were salty)

° 2 large cans (mine were about a pound) cans of garbanzo beans drained 

 

Technique

 

° process peanuts in a food processor for a few minutes until smooth

° heat the oil over medium-high heat and sauté the onions until lightly browned.  

° add all other ingredients and bring to a boil

° reduce heat and simmer uncovered for about 30 minutes until the sweet potato is tender.

 

 

lunartics, steam and beyond

About ten months ago the night sky was impressively dark for this part of New Jersey.  On the first night after Sandy's clouds parted and the Milky Way was visible - even with a nearly full moon.  It was the first time I've seen our galaxy from this place.  The moon gave just enough light so you could make your way around without a flashlight.  I remember walking that night and thinking about what it must have been like before electric and gas lights.  A full moon would make a traveler's life a bit easier.

 

Your mind wanders and you think about history.¹

 

In about 1765 a group of industrialists and natural philosophy types began to meet once a month by the light of the full moon at Soho House.  For fifty years these lunarticks formed a learned society know as the Lunar Society of Birmingham.  Its membership included Josiah Wedgwood, Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Joseph Priestly, James Kier and Erasmus Darwin and at least a dozen others who made a dent in the universe.   They were there to talk about the intersection of industry, science, engineering and math.  Some were intellectuals, some had no formal education, most were at the core of the revolution.  The food was good and the ideas even better

 

Information was shared, new ideas ignited and relationships and partnerships developed.  James Watt may have been an impressive inventor, but happened to be someone who didn't cross the t's and dot the i's when it came to turning invention into innovation.  He was full of ideas and always on to the next curious thing.  There was a period when he focused on the steam engine, but his interests turned out to be much wider.  Without Boulton, a driven industrialist,  it is likely we wouldn't know him for the steam engine and power wouldn't be measured in watts.²

 

James Kier was one of the central figures of the society. A chemist when chemistry was becoming central to the notion of manufacture at an industrial scale;  perhaps it is only natural he would be the glue of the group.  Information sharing was critical and he concerned with translating French publications for himself and others in the society. Josiah Wedgwood swore by Kier's translation of a chemical dictionary as he did his experiments methodically sorting out how to make fine china on an industrial scale for the emerging middle class.  

 

Kier was concerned with alkalis - important for many products, but he was concerned with soap.  He managed to perfect the large scale manufacture of soap using some of the process control techniques pioneered by Wedgwood.  Regular use of soap led to improved hygiene and some of the greatest gains in average human lifespan we've seen.

 

Wedgwood was a methodical soul inventing and perfecting many of the concepts used in process control leading to more efficient mass production.  He also invented and promoted numerous marketing techniques in use today - "buy one, get one free", illustrated catalogs, direct mail, traveling salesmen, self-service and free delivery.

 

About the time the Lunar Society faded from view - also roughly the time of Davy's death - the word "scientist" came into regular use.  A new field that had been in the works for a few hundred years became recognized.

 

It began to fade as London became more of a center of innovation, but there were connections with people from the Royal Society.  Humphrey Davy was one of the connections.  A cross between a world class experimental scientist and a showman, he and others would fill a lecture hall with paying customers to learn about the latest discoveries.  He and a few others were the Carl Sagans and Neil deGrasse Tysons of the day.  But I mention Davy for another connection that is relevant today.  

 

People in the arts were important to the science.  You had to be someone of an artist to illustrate observations and there was a notion that scientific and artistic thinking were one and the same.  Samuel Coleridge was a friend of Davy and both had something of a romantic sensibility.  It was felt that poetry, art and chemistry all required imaginative analogy and that progress in science would be impossible without an artistic sensibility. Art and science were the same thing to these people and had not separated.  With time the symmetry would break, but it is impossible to ignore the creative connection.  Coleridge and Wordsworth planned to have Davy come with them when they set up creative shop in the Lake District.  

 

Perhaps this was STEAM 1.0 - science, technology, engineering, art and math.  STEM education is seen as critical these days and many of us believe STEM+the arts - STEAM (as popularized by RISD) is even more important.  At the dawn of revolutions you need many types of minds to make sure the field of dots you are connecting is large.  It happened at the dawn of the industrial revolution and once again we are witness to its hopeful flashes.  

 

the connections led to unexpected revolutions

 

Wedgwood and Erasmus Darwin were friends and the families of friends often link. His daughter married Darwin's son and he became the grandfather of the Darwin you have heard about...³

 

__________

¹ It is likely most of you know more about history than me.  One of the holes in many technical education paths is an avoidance of the historical development.  Since science builds on itself this may seem natural and it is certainly best to learn current science, but there is also great meaning in the story of where we've been.  Some schools have excellent history of math, science and technology courses which should be taken with the core work.  The historical context makes the current results - as well as those that will come - even more beautiful.

² Or horsepower for that matter.  Horsepower was a marketing concept Watt and Bolton used to give people a feeling for what their product  was capable of...

³ There have been a few revolutionary minds in science.  Their discoveries would ultimately be made because Nature is the reference, but the timing could be very different.  Perhaps the discoveries would be made much later and perhaps the timing would have been inappropriate to ignite fields - or not.  Our lifespans might be much shorter now if the discovery of evolution had been delayed fifty years.  

The arts are different as something fundamental is not being uncovered.  Without Bach we would have never had the Six Suites ....

__________

Recipe Corner

 

I was in Arizona last week staying with my sister Corinne and her husband Jeff.  Breakfast involved some of the best muesli I've had.  This is a good starting point for a superior homemade blend.

 

 

Jeff's Muesli Recipe 

 

Ingredients

° 5 scoops rolled oats

° 5 scoops any type granola

° half scoop raw unsalted sunflower seeds

° half scoop sesame seeds

° half scoop raisins (obviously you could go with any dried fruit)

° half scoop hazelnuts (I toast them for 12 minutes at 325)

 

Technique

° I sprinkle on golden flaxseed

° serve with milk, almond milk, greek yogurt (I like Fage 2% plain) or plain skyr 

° if necessary sweeten with a bit of maple syrup 

° top with sliced banana, fresh or frozen raspberries, blueberries or blackberries.  Some crushed pecans are also great

 

 

 

some recommendations

A few recent conversations led to some recommendations that may interest some of you so rather than a normal post here are a few books and a talk.

 

 Sound is something our brain generates - an interpretation of a periodic mechanical compression wave that travels through some medium.  Depending on your definition, it is possible to describe sound as something that only exists in the brain.   

 

An anthropologist told me that music is one of those human activities that is seen in all known societies.  Singing exists in all but a handful and a minimum of percussive music is universal.  Music and speech are processed in different parts of the brain and that makes them interesting.   Over the millennia people have become experts at conveying rich meaning acoustically and in the past few decades we've been putting together how it all works, although the neurology of music is still in its very early stages.

 

A few good books on the subject exist.  Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks, like his other books, is a delightful read and highly recommended.  Somewhat deeper and more interesting I think is This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin.  It is a bit dated now, but is a fascinating look into the subject offering a lot for contemplation.  Levitin has a companion website that should be used as you read.  Unfortunately it is not directly linked in the ebook version of the book.

 

A few months ago Aniruddah Patel of Tufts gave a fine talk on current research- Exploring the Impact of Music on Brain Function  While it is not a broad overview of the field it is at a high level and accessible to non-specialists.  From the introduction to his talk:

 

 Music reaches into our deepest self, or so Plato declared some 2,300 years ago. We’ve been wondering about music’s effect on us ever since. In the last decade in particular, a growing number of scientists have taken up the quest to chart music’s course in the body, starting at the top—the brain. According to Dr. Aniruddh Patel, associate professor of psychology at Tufts University, there’s no better time for music cognition research.

“What measurable impacts do musical listening and musical training have on brain function?” he asked May 13 in his talk for the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine’s Integrative Medicine Research Lecture Series. “People have been speculating about music in the mind for millennia. Plato remarked that rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul back in three or four hundred B.C.”

 

Highly recommended!

 

Feynman, by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick is a fine little biography in the form of a graphic novel.  Even though it is mostly pictures, there is a bit of physics that is clearly explained by him.  If you get the ebook version and have an iPad, the iPad version is better rendered than the Kindle version.

 

It is difficult to recommend an introductory physics book.  There are any number of popularizations that will give an introduction to current and past thinking.    Learning a bit more takes a lot of work on the part of the student.  It is funny - as an undergrad you learn a bit about the subject, but very little about physics. Of course you think you're learning physics.  What you are doing is learning some mathematical technique and a bit of physics that has been learned over the centuries.  You learn to solve a few problems.  The first few years of grad school exist to refine technique, but you also start learning how to ask questions and hunt.  It is only then that you start doing physics and by the time you get your Ph.D. you are only starting.  Somewhere along the path you realize how little you know.  Getting out with the title means the training wheels are off, but you have a proper adult curiosity and are beginning to learn how to ask proper questions and are learning how to interpret the results.  This is probably the path for many other fields - there is a false sense that you know what you are doing early on, but then a wonderful realization that you knew so little that you thought you knew a lot.  

 

My favorite first year physics book is one that I would only recommend to those who have had a year of college physics already.  Although it is dated, the three volume Feynman Lectures on Physics is a real delight and was re-released in a set a few years ago.

 

A big hole in my education has been an understanding of the history of science.  I think it is important to understand the flow of the development of understand, something that has been very uneven and often dramatic. A few universities have great courses, but I never had any of it until after my formal education was over and I started reading books on the history of science.  I can make recommendations for bits and pieces as I've only scratched the surface.  I'll continue to make recommendations when I stumble across something notable.  Of course I'm always interested in interesting things you've uncovered as most of you are probaby much better read.

 

Finally a book on making things.  Making It by Chris Lefteri is not a how to book, but rather the best introductory guide to manufacturing techniques I've seen.  Be sure and get the recently released second edition.

 

Huge volumes are being written about 3D printing, but presently it only covers a very narrow range of what is possible and practical.  It is one of a large number of tools and techniques - even for single example custom work.   I find it exciting that there is a renewed interest in making things and this should be on the shelf of anyone starting down the path as well as anyone who is curious how the stuff around us was made and the different processes used for making one, a hundred, ten thousand or millions of an item.

 

With Summer here I note something fun you can do on your vacation.  Find out what is made in the places you'll be visiting and try to arrange a tour.  A lot of this went away after 9/11, but many companies are delighted to show what they do and often you run into boffins with deep knowledge who are just bursting at the seams to share bits of it. It is a world that touches all of us that is mostly invisible.

 

And for the last recommendation a fantastic book on flavor.  Neurogastronomy by Gordon Shepherd sorts out the current understanding of our perception of flavors.  One of those books I just couldn't put down.

 

those da*n glassholes are on my lawn! and cum hoc non propter hoc

As the year 2000 approached human computer interface labs all over the world were hot onto studying what comes after the desktop and handheld computer.  Some were doing tablets, but others were wondering what happens if you combine a phone that happens to talk to the Internet with a camera, what happens if you have a radio equipped watch with a display on it, what if a fairly powerful computer can be shoehorned into something handheld with a wireless Internet connection, what if that little powerful wireless computer knows where it is ....  My lab was involved in several of these as well as what happens as computing becomes more invisible and ubiquitous. 

 

A few like Steve Mann were doing leading edge work to sort out how a person may integrate with sensors and networks.  The stuff that excites technologists and science fiction writers.

 

You could make reasonable predictions based on Moore's Law and some educated guesses on mobile phone technology.  Designing interfaces was extremely difficult, but just as important was how acceptable to the public would it be.  Some of these devices would be worn.  What had good design and was fashionable?  Could the design be so good so as to be aspirational?

 

The social dimensions of the problem were, and still are, enormous.  We were making all kinds of observations and performing simple tests.  It wasn't science by any means even though some called it that.  People were learning bits and pieces of a larger problems.  We were learning more about the problems so as not to appear totally stupid.¹

 

Some of the trials produced location dependent results.  A lab in Cambridge using a located ID badge found its employees building any number of useful applications for themselves.  A sister lab in Palo Alto had a near revolt with the same devices even though they had similar backgrounds.  The culture of the two different labs rendered the badges aspirational in one location and a pox in the other.  Sorting out why was non-trivial.

 

There were a lot of crazy leaps being made based on small amounts of work.  It was a real disease in labs that did not have a diverse range of skills.

 

Oh yeah - the post's title?  That's Latin for "with this, not because of this" and is found in statistics to emphasize that correlation does not imply causation.  It is one of the first things taught in any statistics class to warn about jumping to conclusions.  You run into nearly everywhere these days - except in science.  It turns out to be a phrase that almost guarantees the speaker isn't a scientist.

 

An explanation is one of degree.  People without a statistical background jump to conclusions - we're pattern recognition machines and historically have come to some very wrong conclusions.  Not only that, we're still doing it.  A good statistical background gives you some tools to calculate correlations, but caution is advised.  A scientist subjects their work to very elaborate testing measuring and taking into account errors along the way and producing a result in terms of how likely it is.  If they don't their competitors will do it for them and there is little tolerance for mistakes.

 

But back to the phrase ...

 

To a scientist correlation suggests causation.  It is an early clue that there is something worth pursuing.  You might quickly rule the linkage out or perhaps there is something wonderful to be learned that generates a shower of new questions.  You don't want to eliminate possibilities early out of hand..  Much of science is playing with any number of ideas seeing if they are worth going deeper.  As in many other fields you develop a talent for it.  

 

Too frequently it is invoked to dismiss something out of hand even though the person who uses it often has no sense of the depth of the statement they are dismissing.

 

All of that the device and interface/interaction exploration in the late 90s was probably good as it was creating a space of interesting questions.  Except for a few technologies like camera-phones, smartphones and high capacity mp3 players it wasn't essential that anyone understand them deeply right away.  Some of those who worked on the near horizon problems were richly rewarded. But now it is time to begin to understand issues associated with wearables. 

 

It seems daunting as we haven't yet worked out social conventions for the use of smartphones.  Technology often outruns the understanding of its consequences.

 

In the past few weeks at least a half dozen have been in touch to ask for my opinion on Google Glass.  A fascinating area, but they're well over their heads.  Not only does the user interaction model need considerable work, but the design and social issues are daunting.²  They aren't going to pull it off by having a designer put together a frame for them.

 

People may develop appropriate interaction and social conventions - that seems to be what Google is counting on - but the company that introduces a new social technology rarely has a change to ride the wave very long. Deeper thinking is required and it will be  more demanding than ever before as we're going well beyond conventional engineering and technology.  I suspect something approaching real science will need to be done and people from a wide range of fields will need to be involved.

 

A few years ago I tried to put together some one line descriptions for each component of STEM ..  it is far from perfect, but here's what I said:

 

° Science is the study of nature.  Some useful insight becomes available as a result, but that is not the driver

° Math is language of science and also of engineering.  It is beautiful by itself.  

° Engineering is the art of building tools and 

° Technology is the tools and their use

 

These four fields are now insufficient.  Social clue is necessary..

 

We need to understand fashion, design and aspirational design, human nature, local and global cultures, and several other areas. I've been trying to become a student of design and fashion and have been reaching out to people in these and several other areas, but am only getting to the point where my questions aren't completely foolish.  Hopefully one can get to the point where they can have useful connections with enough diverse people to make a dent in the problem.  I'll probably be writing much more on the subject as time goes on.   In the meantime I wish Google luck, but this is a really deep people and the Silicon Valley engineering notion of solving everything with technologies is insufficient and broken.

__________

¹ I look at my own record and find it mixed after 15 years.  There were some solid hits - particularly with location aware services and a large number of misses.  One tends to remember the hits and forget the misses. 

² from an email I sent last week

Google has a habit of asking designers to come in at the end of the process …  they have a reputation for driving HCI types and designers crazy ..  they like to just bolt it on at the end.  So this isn't surprising.  It will be essential to make the things look presentable.

Their approach appears to be taking a vocal command with a specific interrupt, but such approaches have failed in the research world (not for technical reasons). What is needed is a nice set of orthogonal out of channel communication commands - what linguists call phatic interactions (the communications we all use not to carry core information, but rather are meta commands that kept the channel open. If I say "you're breaking up" on a cellphone call, I'm giving a phatic vocalization. There are any number of phatic signalings that are non-verbal - your phone vibrating to let you know there is a text message for example)

They use verbal phatics like "ok glass", but that can be socially awkward and is fairly unnatural.They really need to crack that one - or find some work that has.They may be interested in having the public solve it for them. Just like hashtags on twitter.

__________

 

Recipe Corner 

 

Waldorf salads are delicious, but hardly healthy.  I threw together this one that was delicious and healthy.  I like to add some dried fruit like cranberries or cherrys

 

Heart Friendly Waldorf Salad

Ingredients

 

° 1 tbl white-wine vinegar

° 1 tbl walnut oil 

° sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

° 1 Granny Smith apple, cored, quartered, and thinly sliced

° 1 cup seedless red grapes, halved

° 2 celery stalks, thinly sliced, leaves for garnish if you like

° 50 grams coarsely chopped toasted pecans and or toasted walnuts 

 

Technique

 

° whisk together the vinegar, oil, some salt and pepper to taste

° add celery, grapes, apple, and nut to the bowl, and toss to coat with dressing.

 

partial stories and the color purple

Purple is a strange color - one that you won't see in the rainbow - it doesn't have a wavelength associated with it.

 

I was trying to explain that color is something manufactured in the brain.  There are a variety of ways you can do this, but the best is to project different colored lights on a white surface and let them overlap.  Someone must have done this as a video ... indeed they have ..  many of them in fact.  This one shows the effect rather nicely and I sent it along.

 

 

The problem is the presenter makes an error about a half minute in in...  He states that you can't mix photons.  It turns out you can - in fact if you have ever seen a green or violet laser pointer you're seeing it.¹ But explaining to a seventh grader who is curious about where purple comes from becomes extremely difficult and possibly impossible if I try to explain the what goes on with real physics.   

 

What works is to ignore the rare case.  It may be very interesting, but it isn't going to help the student.  Mostly photons can't combine - it is a good approximation to assume that and use the result to explain color synthesis.  This works throughout physics.  To calculate the path of a baseball I can ignore relativity even though using just Newtonian physics is good enough.  In fact I can ignore air resistance for some problems and get a good enough answer.

 

There is an art to knowing what to ignore and what to keep.  You have to understand the size of the contribution, how good your measurements are and what sort of precision is required.  The problem often arises in teaching.  How much depth is appropriate and how much background can be assumed?  There is a movement to remove jargon from  the description of science hoping that the result will be interesting.  Unfortunately you can only simply so much and that takes real skill - it is like writing poetry and I'm not terribly good at it.

 

As you learn more about a subject you develop a certain amount of experience to know what is easy, what is not and what is just silly.  A friend happens to be one of the most famous computer scientists on the planet and his fame is quite justified.  His email is easily available and he gets a lot from people who have "solved" fundamental problems that elude everyone else to those who have decided to do the next big thing and want something from him.  He recently sent one that may be the best yet.²  It turns out he gets really wacky bits from people who lack experience.  You may see this in your own field - I see it all the time in mine.  One of the best experiences for me was being asked to look over a set of patents that managed to clear the USPTO despite describing a perpetual motion machine:-)

 

One thing I try to convince students of technology who are attempting to predict the future is to get their hands dirty and learn a bit about the fundamentals.  Technologies don't spring onto the scene, but rather have an often lengthy development period.  Their commercial use may combine bits and threads of other technologies or even art into something that strikes us as novel, but there are important early hints.³

 

I talked a client into trying to learn how to use a 3d printer and design and use one.  This sort of exercise gives a much deeper view into what can be done as well as the necessary background for a user/designer.  You are only getting a partial story if you aren't using the tech in question.   She followed my advice and now has a much more realistic sense and timeline for the set of technologies.⁴  

 

It is exciting that people are starting to learn how to design and build "stuff" these days.  The notion of shop class 2.0 is on us.  Building a personal shop and, more importantly, learning how to use the tools, is beyond most people.  In a few cities Maker spaces have appeared - a concentration of tools, instructors, mentors, and other makers.  You generally pay a monthly rental for tool use.  This morning I caught a New Disruptors podcast where Glenn Fleishman interviewed a couple who have started MakerHaus in Seattle -  Ellie and Mike Kemery.  Recommended for anyone interested in one of the major "what next..." speculations - listen here (44 minute mp3)

 

I'm running low on time - there are dozens of ways this note could develop.  I almost want to say something about the relative use of STEM and STEAM in organizations, but for another time.

 

In the meantime go out and get your hands dirty doing something.

__________

¹ The stuff of non-linear optics.  This is way too complex to explain well here, but there is a really important safety issue involved and you have to be extremely careful with cheap non-red laser pointer.   Green laser pointers are the most common as our eyes are very sensitive to green and we perceive the light as very bright.  They are usually  "diode pumped solid state frequency-doubled" and are sometimes called DPSS or DPSSFD lasers.  A very powerful infrared diode laser is used to pump a crystal that lases at a somewhat longer wavelength.  The light from the pumped laser is passed through a KTP crystal which acts as a frequency doubler - the wavelength goes from 1064nm to 532nm ..  a very "green" light.  The KTP crystal is a nice piece of non-linear optics where photons are effectively combined to produce one of a higher energy.  

I don't know how to explain the lasing process and the non-linear optics without using some quantum mechanics.  The problem is the pumping laser is very powerful and very dangerous - 100 to 300 mW!  Looking at one of these would cause serious eye damage.  To make matters worse the light is invisible to us.  There is a secondary weaker, but still dangerous infrared beam ..  either can cause damage!  The cheap laser pointers are poorly designed and this light often leaks out.  This is really bad - particularly in the hands of a kid.

There are lasers that emit in the green and blue and other colors directly that are generally much safer, but they are usually much more expensive.  If you see a green or blue laser pointer in a meeting, I would ask if it has a safety certification and, specifically, a good infrared blocking filter.  If not ask the presenter not to use it.  I was handed one to use at a talk recently and it was clear it was a $40 special.  I had to tell them to throw it away.

² I've removed all names and other identifying information

hello,dear
first i want you to be friend because you  my idol

can help me I'm <name removed>  from  UK i want source code for <removed> for development this language to new language programming 

i student  in college in UK in computer science  and i want you to help me 

with best wishes

<name removed>

student and developer in first road 

³ This works very well in retrospect, but looking forward there is an issue with both imagination, timing and the shear complexity of combinations.  Fifteen we did a lot of work on what became modern smartphones and mp3 players.  What we made was not commercially viable, but it gave us a sense on how it worked and how it might work with other systems.  We were spending a lot of time looking at the social uses of geolocated smartphones and starting to look at the Internet of things and the wearable Internet.

 

⁴ I've been making things since I was a teenager and have about fifteen years, on and off, with 3d printing, CNC milling and routing, laser cutters and so on.  Some of these are much more mature than others and they tend to have very different niches.  3d printing is important and growing, but its relative importance is way overhyped by the tech press - most of whom have probably never designed anything and taken it to a physical object.

__________

 

Recipe Corner

I'm hot on the trail of trying to sort out an Afghani lentil soup.  It would be nice if Gabe or Colleen was around - both of them are honest-to-gosh chefs with strong skills doing recipe reconstruction.  I'm on my forth try and am getting close.  It turns out sweet dried plums were a major clue and now I'm trying to sort out the rest.  So nothing new

In place of a real recipe here is a quick vegan burger of sorts that is very good and approximately healthy.

Rather than make a bean and quinoa based veggie burger, I often cheat and use a California Burger (A&P's Greenway label).  The other fake burgers from them as well as those from Morningstar and several others just don't do it for me, but this one has lots of produce in it and can be the base of something good.

A great bread can make a sandwich and for the bun I use a couple of pieces of a very dense Danish rugbrød or, in a pinch, a commercial dense rye or pumpernickel. The German brand Mestemacher is widely available and very good.  

Microwave two of the burgers, lightly toast two pieces of bread.  Pour on a bit of olive oil on the bread (I prefer it to butter -much more healthy).  Now go for the condiments you like.  I add layers of sliced raw red onion, roasted red peppers (do 'em yourself - much better and very cheap and easy), sliced pepperoncini or pepper rings, homemade catsup (Jeri mentioned a homemade catsup at one point and that got me started - so much better than what you get in the store!!), a bit of Maldon salt, ground pepper, sometimes a bit of mustard and some crushed walnuts (Tree nuts are very healthy - the right sort of fat and lots of nutrients.  Just don't overdo them as they happen to be little calorie bombs.)

Very messy and very good.  Quick and easy doesn't hurt either:-)

 

 

triggers

Let's do a bit of dot connecting...

 

About 35 to 40 million years ago something rather cool happened.  The branch of primates we're from, now the apes and old world monkeys (Catarrhini) went from two to three cones in our eyes.  

 

Cones are the specialized cells that allow us to discriminate differences in something we call color.¹  We're pretty good at sorting out color - at least women are as many women know when they see men attempt to match colors when they dress.²  The extra type of cone that was added gives us the ability to tell the difference between red and green - an impossible task for your dog or cat - or most mammals for that matter.  But why?

 

Curiously there may be a trigger.  It turns out trees that produce fruit started to take off about the same time 40 million years ago.  Specifically trees that produced a fruit that changed in color from green to red when it was ripe.  And there appears to have been a trigger that produced the colored fruit.   

 

Around 40 million years ago the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere dramatically decreased.  Our planet depends on having some carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to act as a greenhouse gas.  As atmospheric CO₂ levels dropped the planet chilled.  The fruit bearing trees may have been a response to the changing climate.  

 

It may be that a drop in greenhouse gases let triggers for two evolutionary paths -  trees that produced fruit that turned red when it ripened and our ancestors who got a third cone to quickly detect "redness" in ripe fruit.  Something that could be rather useful.

 

40 to 55 million years ago the Tibetan Plateau rose dramatically.  It altered wind flows as well creating a lot of weathering of the rock - a process that absorbed enormous amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and lowered the Earth's temperature as a result.³

 

A curious hypothesis with individual steps - triggering events - that are reasonably certain can be assembled connecting the dots from several fields.  It is not proven science, but gives an interesting chain of events that spin off other significant questions.  Who would have guessed that our ability to tell green from red may have roots in the rise of the Tibetan Plateau?

 

I used this as an example of connecting the dots and finding some interesting places to ask some interesting questions along the way at a talk to some computer artists six months ago.  The talk was about forty minutes and the question and answer portion was great going about an hour and a half until we needed to leave the auditorium as someone else needed it.  These folks were very tuned to ways they could play tricks with our vision to aid their storytelling and I probably learned at least as much as they did.

 

To pass the time rowing this morning I listened to an OnPoint podcast (WBUR) on education in Finland and South Korea.  (The program is archived here with the audio at the top of the page.  There is a linked video on the Finnish system that is worth watching at least a bit.)


I am concerned about the direction of education here - or at least what I've observed in the local schools - with the focus on STEM and testing, seemingly at the expense of nearly everything else.  Ours is a wealthy district and the kids are pushed fairly hard to make certain SAT and various other scores and this is reflected in relative property values.

If I had been in such as system I don't think I would survive - at least I wouldn't thrive.  It was very important for me to get the basics as a kid, but I had the luxury of a lot of free time  - sort of necessary as everyone was from an agricultural community.  There wasn't a lot of homework and it was possible to focus on that and use the spare time for other things - in my case being curious about nature.

I learned to ask questions and have them rewarded with new questions rather than answers and I learned subjects like math were thinly disguised tools that would allow me to sharpen the questions.  Even though I didn't have a lot of art I learned that it was very useful in visualizing more abstract concepts. Eighth grade art class turned out to be very important in the scheme of things.

In grad school we had several Korean students with perfect GRE scores but none made it past the master's degree level.⁴  The problem was that the first five or so years of a physical science is spent learning technique.  You are just barely to the point where you can go out on the two wheeler with training wheels and then you can start doing real science.  That required a very different skill than just memorizing factoids and manipulating some simple formula.  At this point you sound like a scientist, but you don't really know what you are doing.  The next three or four years after that is required to get to the point where the training wheels can come off.  The Korean guys never managed that leap.  They simply had no background in creative thinking. I "cheated" by starting when I was 12 and many of my successful classmates had similar stories.  At the time about a third of the new Ph.D.s in physics and astrophysics came from a rural community and half lived within a 50 miles of a good natural history museum.

I don't know what is optimal, but I suspect the Finish system is much closer than the South Korean.  But in any case I'd love to see a professionalization of teaching along with a wide range of offered subjects and a focus on connecting the dots among them. Becoming a nation of good test takers is probably close to being optimally wrong.

 

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¹  We take in some photons - the particles of electromagnetic radiation - through these two little dots in the front of our heads called pupils.  These are focused on a photoreceptor called the retina that, with the help of a chemical reaction, creates signals that are processed in the brain to give is a color movie in three dimensions that gives us a pretty good "visual" sense of the world around us.

"Color" is a an abstraction created in our mind.  It loosely corresponds to the wavelength of light, but not strictly

Way to simplistic, but I've written a bit more in earlier posts - particularly this one.

² In the "green-blue" region we're sensitivity to wavelength differences of about a billionth of a meter. In the "red" range about ten billionths of a meter - at least for women.  Men are much worse.  Color discrimination is one of the more interesting sexual dimorphisms.

³ A small article here.  Evidence has become stronger since then.

⁴ The Graduate Record Exam - at least the physics test - was multiple choice and covered a wide range of topics.  Some foreign schools focused on the test as a measure and taught lots of factoids and manipulation.  Measuring how much real science a person could do at this point would be much trickier and not something a test could manage, but an advisor would have a good sense.  Something much closer to the Finnish system.

 

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Recipe Corner

 

Sukie is allergic to chocolate.  While this might be seen as a tragedy, it does me that I get all of the chocolate that comes into the house.  But for special treats I've had to learn how to work with carob and certain types of white "chocolate" (like almond bark).  Here is a cookie that works for Valentine's Day.

 

White and Red "Chocolate" Chip Cookies

 

Ingredients

 

° 1 stick (about 115g) unsalted butter softened

° 125g white cane sugar

° 100g light brown sugar

° 1 large egg (pasteurized if you sample the dough:-)

° 1 tbl whole milk (I've used cream too)

° 1-1/2 tsp vanilla extract

° 125g bread flour (you can use all purpose flower, but the cookies won't be as chewy)

° 95g all purpose flour (add a bit if you are only using AP flour to get to a 250g total for flour. You can also add some if you like fluffier cookies or if you live in high humidity)

° 1 tsp baking soda 

° a bit of salt to taste (1/4 tsp for me)

° 15 to 20 maraschino cherries diced and patted dry with a paper towel

° a small bag (6oz) white chocolate chips (the cheap ones are almond bark)

° 100g broken walnuts or pecans

 

 

Technique

 

° Beat the butter on low speed for a minute or two at a low speed  until smooth and creamy and add the sugars and beat at a medium speed until combined and smooth - another two minutes or so.  Add the egg, milk and vanilla  and beat on medium high for a couple of minutes until light and fluffy.

° Slowly add the flours, baking soda and salt and mix at a lower speed until they are just combined - maybe a minute.  Don't over-mix!  Now stir in the chips, cherries and nuts by hand.

° Divide into about 16 bits of dough and refrigerate for at least 6 hours (very important!)

° Bake for about 8 to 10 minutes at 350°F on the middle oven rack.  The goal is a bit undercooked in the center as cooking will continue as they cool.  Add a minute or two if you like them crunchy.  Cool on a rack