omenti

taping-out in a material world

I was sitting in a restaurant in New Hope on a bright Winter day chatting about some technologies that have evolved dramatically in the past several decades and was asked about the term tape-out.

 

New Hope, Pennsylvania is one of those places that has become something of a tourist trap on nice weekends.  Stores come and go with a few enduring to give the place a bit of flavor, but you get the impression this place is hiding something.  

 

Walk around the back streets for awhile.  A bit of poking around reveals more than a few surprises in architecture, art, crafts and fine instruments.

 

I've found glass blowers, sculptors, a variety of painters, a precision telescope builder, steam engine restoration experts, musicians, lyricists, dress designers, architects and an truly amazing workshop...

 

If you have the time, arrange to visit George Nakashima's workshop.  George was one of the leaders of 20th century furniture design and, although he died in 1990, his family keeps the workshop going and it continues to turn out furniture as fine art.  This is where Steve Jobs finally decided to buy his chairs and tables after years of contemplation.  

 

There are several artisan woodworkers at work and the setting is decidedly old world. But you are struck by the care and thoughtfulness that permeates the place.  Selection of the wood is a borderline religious experience for the people I met.  They will tell you about a specific piece of wood, where it came from and how they intend to honor it.  

 

Seriously elegant pieces.

 

I am often struck by the importance and complexity of material in design.  Function, form and beauty all strongly depend on the proper choice.  Dave and I "know" that carbon fiber is wrong for any bike we would ride - the "feel" of a proper lugged steel frame is entirely different and wonderful for the types of riding we do.  

 

 A fundamental principle of design is that it is the art of compromise and the choice of materials is an important part of that.  There are hundreds of materials that can a used for building a working bike ranging from cardboard, bamboo, and several different hardwoods.  More commonly steel, stainless steel, aluminum alloys, titanium, or any one of a large number of carbon/resin combinations are used.

 

So even if you choose a steel frame it turns out there are several dozen types of steel, each with its own distinctive characteristics.  The special frame that was built for Colleen required a very exotic stainless steel - Reynolds 953 - one that costs considerably more than carbon fiber and is difficult to fabricate, but just the ticket to solve some frame resonance problems that didn't show up in the CAD modeling tools.¹

 

Once material selections have been made construction techniques are important.  Some techniques, like those used a table from George Nakashima's workshop or a making a fine cello, are celebrated as serious art, but even common household objects represent complex choices and construction techniques.

 

Back to the lunch in New Hope...  The conversation had focused on 3D printing

 

My normal observation about 3D printing is that the material selection is terrible compared to those conventional builders have at their disposal - the situation is not unlike a chef being limited to white flour, water, and mustard. She can make lovely prototypes and create designs that would be impossible with normal techniques, but the final result isn't exactly appetizing.  I'm bullish on the technique for certain applications, but not for general use anytime in the near future.

 

But it struck me I had been ignoring a very important form of 3D printing - one that  has already changed the world.  Integrated circuit fabrication.

 

When thinking of the development of technology over the centuries I tend to consider major themes and drivers.  Things like transportation, improvements in power densities and energy conversion efficiencies, and the ability to write fine lines and spaces.

 

Lithography is an important subset of writing lines and spaces and I was lucky enough to have become deeply invovled some of the R&D associated with it when I joined Bell Laboratories.  While IC fabrication is a very technical process, it is conceptually simple.  You shine light at a silicon wafer through a patterned mask.  The silicon is coated with a material that exposes where light strikes it and a chemical process transfers the pattern to the silicon. While this is subtractive, a series of layers are built up forming a thin three dimensional structure.²  Although usually not considered 3D printing, it should qualify. 

 

Many layers are used with very specific material choices.  Up to thirty masks may be required for an advanced processing technique. Large sums are spent on material science, applied physics and several other areas with the progress is recognized as Moore's Law.  

 

This ability to write fine lines and spaces had progressed for centuries driving our capability to increase the precession of mechanical objects and dramatically improve the reproduction of text and images on paper and electronic screens.  Photolithography is merely one branch of a much larger trend.

 

My first involvement with photolithography came when 2.25 micron technologies were used in production chips and 1.5 in development.³  I was interested in the part of the process where information became physical - mask making.

 

The process has strict rules, as do most fabrication processes, but there is enormous flexibility in the capabilities of the circuits that can be produced.  The number of possible combinations of simple logic gates is, for all intents and purposes, practically infinite.⁴

 

And that brings us back to tape-out.

 

When I first heard the term I though it meant writing a digital representation of the design to digital tape which would be used to tell the mask making machines exactly what to write.  It turned out the term had been in use for some time.  At Bell Labs and other places it described the process of making a photomask.   A huge enlargement of each mask level would be from black line tape or cutting rubylith on a table or wall.  These were photographed and reduced in the form of a photomask. Somehow the term tape stuck and has found its way down to us over the years.

 

These early circuits only had a small number of gates.  Well before my time came the first really successful microprocessor - the Intel 4004 with its 2,300 transistors and 10 micron half pitches.  Now we call carry billions of transistors around in our pockets embedded in these rather serious networked computers we call smartphones.⁵

 

Some say tape-out came well before early ICs - that it was used to describe the photolithographic process to make printed circuit boards.  

 

This 3D printing technique based on photolithography has changed our world beyond what seemed possible in the 60s when it was first tried. What we call 3D printing simultaneously solves some hard prototyping problems, but falls short in many others.⁶ This tends to be the rule of many technologies - they find their niches and new ones that we hadn't envisioned while falling short of our original dreams.  We are selective creatures who tend to search for patterns.  The technologies we remember are those that open entirely new areas.  Making bets is a tricky matter.

 

One of the tasks I'm asked to do as part of my work is assist in making these bets.  Everyone has their own approaches.  I find having a deep grounding in some areas through experience creating the technologies or in the fundamentals behind them is important, but not enough.  Increasingly it is important to understand the social element.  

 

These developments seem obvious in retrospect, but are very difficult to create or predict.  They are fundamentally multi-disciplinary - something our education system seems to be moving away from and something that only a few companies have internalized.  I've seen it in the most peculiar places ranging from a workshop that builds tables to a storyteller that makes movies that take years to create.  From a curious consumer electronics company to a massive program that put a human on the moon.  It even exists in workgroups in and outside of companies as well as a few very rare individuals.  A commonality is it is often difficult to easily categorize these organizations as they connect many dots and, as a result,  find interesting new patterns. Much more to say, but this is the theme of this blog so more will be said...

 

Oh - and tape-out again.  I've heard the term applied to what is considered 3D printing in the past week.  Chalk it up to the inertia of language.

 

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¹ This is an important point.  Although computer aided design tools have become very sophisticated, they can't handle the variety of compromise in design that is given them.  In bicycles handling characteristics are important and current CAD tools can't perform the level of analysis to understand the dynamics of a bicycle with a specific rider and road.  There needs to be some grounding with reality and test "mules" - sometimes instrumented - are constructed, wind tunnel tests conducted, and so on.   This process can be expensive and time consuming, but it is sometimes essential to produce something that is great.

² The thickness is generally under a half micron at the silicon level and perhaps five to ten microns when the interconnect layers are added.

You can get a sense of the additive nature of the layers created by the successive masks by considering this simple device - a simple CMOS op-amp.  The layers are polysilicon (red), a metal layer (blue), N-doped silicon (green), P-doped silicon (brown) and the X's are connections that cross layers. (The design is from a public domain digital design course.)

³ Design technologies usually refer to the half pitch distance between two identical features in a repeating array.  The dominant production technologies are based on CMOS processing and a series of generations has been identified.  Current leading edge production is at about 0.22 microns (Intel's Ivy Bridge processor line for example) and the next generation will be about 0.14 microns.

The cost of fabrication lines has risen dramatically with each succeeding generation.  When I started in the early 80s a small fab line could be constructed for $10 to $15 million and a leading edge facility perhaps three times as much.  The "steppers" that expose the silicon (they step from chip to chip in a large array on a wafer) cost about $1 million then.  Steppers for 0.13 microns probably cost $100M each and the fab lines probably will cost more than $5B a pop.  The number of companies that can participate has dropped dramatically over the years and the scale of produced has increased even more dramatically to match an enormous demand.

⁴ In addition to the functionality of a fixed chip there are FPGAs - field programmable gate arrays - where chips can be customized by engineers after manufacture for specific applications.

⁵ I remember bringing the first transistor into our house.  I was seven years old and had used some Christmas money and my savings to buy a five transistor AM radio.  I stopped counting after I got my first calculator - a HP-35.  Now there are over a half trillion transistors under our roof.  The mind wobbles.

⁶ Sometimes it is important to consider the "job we have hired something to do" .. in the case of 3D printing it is usually assumed to be extreme customization and/or local fabrication.  These need to be very carefully considered in their own context and the context of the technology.  If the goal is mass customization there are other segments of the economy that will be impacted in large ways well before 3D printing becomes a mass market reality. Included in these are custom specification and fabrication of clothing.  Way too demanding for 3D printing, but addressable using other techniques.

 

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Recipe Corner

 

This used some "wheat berries" - whole grains of wheat.  We have a lot of Kamut berries (I recommend Bob's Red Mill as a source).  The instructions all tell you to soak them overnight, but I find you can get away with simmering them in water or stock for about 45 minutes.  It leaves you with a grain with a very nice texture.  Experiment and find what you like.

 

Kamut and Brussels Sprouts

 

Ingredients

 

° 180g Kamut or other wheat berries

° 700g vegetable broth

° 450g trimmed and quartered brussels sprouts

° 1 large shallot, chopped

° 2 tbl olive oil

° 50 g walnut pieces

° 1 tbl lemon juice from a fresh lemon

° zest from the lemon

° salt and pepper to taste

 

Technique 

 

° Add the both and wheat berries to a pan, bring to a boil and reduce heat to a simmer. Cover and cook for 50 minutes, drain and set aside

° Heat the over to 425°F

° Toss the brussels sprouts with the shallots and 1 tbl of olive oil in a big bowl.  Transfer to a baking sheet and bake about 20 or 25 minutes until browned.   Turn them over at about 15 minutes.

° Remove from the oven and add the walnut pieces  (you can throw them on a couple of minutes before you take out the sprouts if you like them toasty)

° Whisk the lemon juice, zest, 1 tbl olive oil, and salt and pepper in a big bowl.  Add the sprouts and wheat berries and toss them to combine.  

° yumm!

 

beyond 3d printing

4:37 AM - a minute past nautical dawn and a pleasant breeze of negative pions continues from the South Southwest at 17 GeV/c ...

 

We tried to make at least one log entry per shift entertaining for the next shift.

 

This was from a particle physics experiment.  We were colliding negative pions into a target that was mostly protons (liquid hydrogen).  There were millions of tiny collisions that had enough energy that allowed the creation of new particles.  I was specifically interested in finding a few that would say something about the fundamental nature of the charm quark.  The problem was such events were very rare - there was an enormous amount of uninteresting information to sort through.

 

You get rid of most of this - about 99.99%) very quickly by knowing something about what the physics of the interaction you were looking for predicted.  This had to be done quickly as information was constantly flooding in.   Back then we built event triggers out of fast logic elements - literally AND, NOT, OR, and NOR gates.  It looks like a rat's nest as all of this had to be precisely timed.  A one foot long wire provided about a billionth of a second of delay.¹  We also had a more complicated trigger...

 

At the heart of two of our charm triggers was a then huge two megabyte memory array that allowed us to store the geometry of likely charm events directly.  If an event fell within some predicted position and energy boundaries, it was saved to tape - if not we dropped it on the floor. This was a new revolution in physics at the time - programmable triggers.

 

What made it possible was the rapidly falling price of memory and the emergence of cheap microprocessors.  There was a revolution underway with hobbyist computers fueled by eight bit chips like the Intel 8080 and  Motorola 6800.  We took advantage of it and I programmed the 6800 in assembly language to make it run as fast as possible.  We were surfing the microcomputer tsunami.  

 

A few years later I found myself at Bell Labs doing physics and applied physics.  I found myself doing lithography - one of the fundamental technologies of the past few hundred years - how finely can you draw lines and something at the heart of making integrated circuits.  The process was automated with computer aided design tools and the bits became atoms in the photomask.  The process was a form of custom manufacturing.  There were a couple of chemical processes for positive and negative image masks, several sizes of quartz plates, design rules and so on - but it was rare for the writing tool to write the same design unless it was a replacement.²

 

Somewhere along the way I did some work with a computer vision group.  There was an interest in building a 3d copy machine.  What would it take to scan an 3d image and recreate it in atoms rather than bits?  A hot topic in the late 1980s and it continues to be interesting.  Somewhere about 1990 I printed a crude 3d part taken that replicated a scanned model of the Star Wars death star.

 

My little death star wasn't very impressive, but it was an exercise you learn from.  I went on to other things, but periodically tried state of the art printing just to see how it had evolved.  By 2000 it started to make a dent in the prototyping world and, maybe 5 years ago, the hobbyist market began to explode.

 

There have been many predictions on how 3d printing is the next PC revolution or, a bit more conservatively, the next printer revolution.  While it is fundamentally important to some types of design, I don't buy those predictions for a variety of reasons.  Materials, physical limitations of existing and laboratory tools,  and the difficulty of design drive my belief.  But it is a great hobby and it is making a big impact on industrial design.  And for a few like Iris Van Herpen,  those who understand design and art, it is given access to new materials and shapes that influence their creative process.  

 

There is a larger revolution underway that 3d printing is often connected with...

 

The revolution is inexpensive computer assisted manufacturing in low quantities.  Mass customization and even single unit manufacturing.  The barriers to manufacturing anything used to be enormous, but now hobbyists can find a niche. Perhaps a niche that would allow them to quit their day job.  The hard piece -- going from a few dozen examples to thousands is now relatively easy.³  

 

There are still many tools to build and write and people need to be trained in design (STEM k12 education is not sufficient - you need to add the arts - STEAM eduction!).  Good design is approximately hard - most of us have no idea how difficult it really is.  There is great design in physical objects and services, but the best way to appreciate it is simply to get your hands dirty - most of us are functionally illiterate when it comes to articulating design, let alone creating it.⁴  

 

One can go on and on, but a recent interview of Chris Anderson by Glenn Fleishman (52 minute mp3) on his The New Disruptors podcast is a great tour of the new bits to atoms world of mass customization and scaleable manufacture

 

Highly recommended!

 

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¹ Rear Admiral and computer pioneer Grace Hopper used to carry around foot long wires and handed them out as "nanoseconds"  In the old charm experiment all of the fast signals were timed to within about a half nanosecond.  Colleen, who is exactly two meters tall, sometimes tells people she's six and two thirds of a nanosecond tall when people ask...

² The lithography tools of choice were electron beam writing machines.  We had a homebrew system called EBES - the Electron Beam Exposure System.  It could write half micron features to about a twentieth of a micron accuracy.  There have been enormous improvements since then.

³ I still regularly build 3d objects.  They are still temperamental and very restricted to design and material.  My larger interest lies in other types of mass customization.  In particular clothing.

For those who are interested in this revolution - even those who just track the state of technology - I  strongly encourage you to get your hands dirty.  You can learn an enormous amount trying to design and 3d print something on your own for example.

⁴ This notion of the learning of design is something that has been fascinating Jheri and I for the past few months.  How is design learned and articulated in apparel and how is that impacted by different types of community? There is a good deal of change taking place.

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Recipe Corner

 

Two recipes this time.  The first is so quick, easy and good.  And many variations with topping them.

 

Roasted Brussels sprouts

 

Ingredients

 

° a kilo or so of brussels sprouts

° 3 to 4 tbl olive oil

° sea salt

° ground pepper

° maple syrup or honey

° white wine vinegar

 

Technique

 

° set oven to 450°F 

° cut the brussels sprouts in half, coat in oil salt and pepper 

° arrange face down on a tray and roast for 25 minutes or so until beginning to caramelize

° flip over with a spatula and continue roasting for about 10 minutes

° plate and drizzle a mixture of maple syrup or honey and white wine vinegar

 

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The second is hardly a recipe, but is way better than store bought peanut/cashew/almond butters.

 

Peanut/Cashew/Almond Butter

 

Find some honey-roasted cashews, almonds or peanuts and throw them in a blender for 5 to 6 minutes, scraping down the sides of the blender as necessary, until you have a peanut butter consistency.  

That's it!

If you like you can roast the raw nuts yourself (7 - 10 minutes in a 350°F oven), but the honey-roasted nuts (or legumes in the case of peanuts) have a little sugar and sweet and work out very well without all of the stabilizer nasties you get in most commercial spreads.  If you roast your own you probably want to add a bit of salt and possibly some honey or maple syrup.

 

 

probing your "failures" a bit more deeply

It is wonderful watching a little kid play with a magnet for the first time.  They have become so used to pushing or pulling something directly to get it to move that this motion at a distance breaks the model they have of the world and brings delight.

 

When people started to ask questions about what was happening, the answers brought fundamental changes to society.

 

You've probably done the experiment in grade school where you can change the direction a compass indicates by placing a current carrying wire next to it.  The other part of the experiment is equally beautiful.  You move a magnet next to a wire and cause a current to flow in the wire.  What is going on?

 

Before going a bit into that, take a look at Richard Feynman's high level comments on electricity.  He has a beautiful and delightful way of expressing himself

 

 

He mentioned Maxwell's equations as one of the most impactful discoveries anyone has made.  About the time the American Civil War started, Scottsman James Clerk Maxwell published a four part work called On Physical Lines of Force.¹ A few additional works were published and the summary of the work did not arrive right away, but we are left with four beautiful equations that are part of the foundation of our society....   If you did any technical work in college you are intimately familiar with them, but even if you didn't you may have seen them on a T-shirt.²

 

For those who aren't familiar with what they're saying, here is a summary in English²

 

° a magnet always has north and south poles

° the strength of an electric field depends on how much charge is in the vicinity

° an electric field is created by a changing magnetic field

° a magnetic field is created by either a current or a changing electric field

 

These are terrifically powerful and much of modern technology rests on electricity and magnetism.  The calculations for real world problems can be non-trivial, but it is all there - all that is required is a bit of curiosity and tenacity.

 

Consider the last two equations.  If you remove any charge you get an electric field is created by a changing magnetic field and a magnetic field is created by a changing electric field.  You can solve these together with a bit of math and the result is astonishing - you get a mutually sustaining electromagnetic field.  The changing electric field gives rise to an electric field which, in turn creates an electric field.  The energy oscillates between these two forms, which turn out to be at right angles to each other, as the wave merrily propagates through space perpendicular to both the electric and magnetic fields.  What is special is the speed of this wave is constant and just happens to be the speed of light.

About 25 years after the papers were published Heinrich Hertz showed that a spark could create such a wave.  Hertz didn't realize it at the time, but others showed that what he created was really a form of electromagnetic radiation - a certain frequency band of which we sense as visible light.  A major revolution in physics was underway, but none of the original people thought it would have practical value - little things like electric generators, motors, radio, television, computing and so on...

 

With this fundamental change came a major problem.  How was this electromagnetic wave propagating?  Waves traditionally required some medium to propagate though.  A material called the luminiferous aether was proposed.  A bizarre substance that filled the universe and had the property of being hugely stiffer than any known substance and very ephemeral - any normal substance could easily pass through it unimpeded.³

 

The whole notion of the aether seems silly today, but a fundamental change in how we thought about physics was required.  Somehow this bizarre substance was not as bizarre as what followed.  It turns out one of the puzzles it seemed to solve was how could light always travel at a fixed velocity.  It allowed the light to travel at a fixed velocity in it rather than worrying about the relative velocities of bodies that were moving at different rates.

 

One of Feynman's better observations was

First you guess. Don't laugh, this is the most important step. Then you compute the consequences. Compare the consequences to experience. If it disagrees with experience, the guess is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't matter how beautiful your guess is or how smart you are or what your name is. If it disagrees with experience, it's wrong. That's all there is to it.

 

Albert Michelson and Edward Morley did the experiment with something called an interferometer - a device that is very sensitive to movement as well as changes in the speed of light in different directions.   They showed that the speed of light was constant in any direction relative to the moving Earth.⁴  

 

This was such a startling result they spent years working on improvements to the experiment to find any error on their part.  The results got better and better and with it the case for the luminiferous aether vanished and it became clear that electromagnetic waves could propagate though a vacuum^.5  It also gave a certain Swiss patent clerk who was doing amazing physics on the side reason for coming up with something he coined Special Relativity.

 

The Michelson-Morley experiment is one of the fundamental experiments in all of physics.  Its results were so unexpected that it was assumed to have been a failure, but careful probing of it by them and others as well as careful thought about what it really meant changed our concept of the universe on the scale that Galileo or Copernicus did.

 

Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.

 

This is the time of the year when I think of a few things I've done - some of them are predictions.  In retrospect our memory tends to paint a pretty picture of how we predicted the future.  I have been very lucky and have been in on some discoveries as well as inventions.  We had what appears to be a good track record, but a more careful examination reveals more than a few failures.

 

In the past decade I try to spend some serious time thinking about failed - or what appear to be failed - predictions mean.  I've come to place a huge value on my "failures" -what is really going on and what additional information did I need to discover there was a flaw.  

 

This process of learning has given me tools and methods to work on unexpected areas.  This generates serendipity and it exposes ignorance in a way that I can learn from many people and results including the failures of myself and others.

 

Aa observation - this process is similar to weather and climate.  Weather is a short term projection and is extremely difficult to get right.  The particulars are incurably difficult to understand.  Climate is a longer term feature  It is often much easier to predict the climate a decade out than the weather in two weeks.  The same is true for projecting technologies.  Rough directions are much easier than exact particulars.

 

Over the years I've been learning huge amounts from my failures.  The amount seems to increase with time, which seems like the proper direction.  

 

My New Year's wish to you is may you be as lucky with failure!

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¹ It is interesting to note that Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published in late 1859.  It is difficult to think of any other discoveries in the last few hundred years that have brought more profound change to civilization than these two...

² Not as precise as it should be, but close enough.  It also turns out there are several equivalent ways to write down Maxwell's equations, so the T-shirts may look a bit different.

³ Upper limits to its mass were calculated - the density was smaller than a hundred trillion times lower than that of air.

⁴ More precisely they sent a limit - the Earth's velocity relative to the aether had to be less than a sixth the Earth's measured orbital velocity.

⁵ luminiferous aether would make a great song title or band name

__________

before the recipe, an image to fire your imagination

Allegory of Winter

Ambrogio Lorenzetti  c.1338-1340

 

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Recipe Corner 

 

A lassi as delicious as it is inauthentic

 

A Rich Seasonal Mango "Lassi"

 

Ingredients 

 

° a drinking cup 70% filled with a high quality eggnog at just above freezing (I like Ronnybrook Farms eggnog)

° a canned mango pulp at just a bit above freezing (I like Rellure Kesar Mango Pulp)

 

Technique

 

° lightly stir the mango pulp into the eggnog. Finally add a blob and artistically swirl it.

° top with toasted pistachios or sliced almonds (optional)

 

 

happy holidays!

OK - here is the 18th year of the card I first put up around now in 1994 ...  the last host went out of business and my free hosting doesn't support auto streaming, so you'll have to click on the player to listen..

The drawing came together in about a minute. The music was done in midi editing with a keyboard looking at a score and happened to take considerably longer.  I put it on a server I was running on a computer under my desk and sent the link to readers of The Crandall Surf Report - an early pre-blog I wrote in the Mosaic era.

I didn't think much of it until the second year when people started bothering me to re-post it.  Dozens of people.  One thing led after another and now it is celebrating its  18^th year.  The current server no longer supports midi and I was forced to convert it to mp3 - so much for authenticity.

anyway ... whatever your holiday, have a good one!

 

 

 

 

don't even bother trying to comb a hairy banana and a gathering of themes

Or a hairy ball for that matter.. at least not if you want to perfectly comb them so their hair lies perfectly flat everywhere on their surface.

 

Imagine you have an unruly donut hair covered donut and want to comb it flat (I can't imagine eating a hair covered donut).  It turns out to be an easy task.  Now think about the problem of combing a hair covered ball.  It turns out you can't do it perfectly - the best you can do is to make the fur like flat (locally tangent to it's surface) at every point but one where you are left with a cowlick. 

 

\ A banana is really the same thing as a sphere topologically.  Imagine the banana was incredibly pliable - really really ripe - and the skin just as flexible.  You could push in bits here and pull out others there and change its shape into a sphere.¹

 

The hairy ball theorem has been proven.² Math, unlike science,  is an areas where solid black and white proofs are possible.

 

It turns out there is always at least one point on the planet where there is no wind.  This point is the eye of a cyclone or anticyclone (wind spirals around it - air can't flow into or out of it as it is static).  So there is, and has been, at least one cyclone everywhere on Earth ever since there was an atmosphere.  You can say the same about any body in the Universe with an atmosphere.

 

so if you want to take bets ...

 

And if you wonder what brought this on, the banana I had for breakfast this morning was on the verge of being too ripe and looked like it might be growing hair one of these days.  I also have an unruly cowlick today - put this together and some math has to come out.  Math is neat stuff!

 

While I'm far from being fashionable, some of you play it well.  It is really fascinating to think about as there is an ephemeral nature and personal style can be very artistic.  In the US personal style for many has been replaced by inexpensive, ephemeral uniforms.  Getting something cheap that looks like something that a vetted style setter wears has become more important than finding a personal style.  In theory there is much more choice in stores, but in reality this translates into a very narrow "look".  

 

Jheri and I have been re-thinking our views on mass customization.  The genesis of this was marrying some work I did for the Defense Department with the need of Jheri and some others to find clothing that fits.  The notion was that mass customization was becoming easier and fit was the most important component.  While fit still is the most important component there are clearly other drivers as well as roadblocks.  Recently Jheri pointed to a new book on overly-cheap apparel (halfway into this post).  The book is mostly about the over consumption of very low quality fashion and the dramatic change that has swept the industry.  We are now wondering if some changes we're seeing among the 20 to 30 year old demographic may be important sources of kindling for the ignition of real mass customization - forget things like fancy printing technologies which are still a long way off from large scale viability ...

 

Apparel is still largely handmade at this point and the cost structure is going to keep it that way for at least another decade or two.  A pair of jeans may have a few hours of hand labor in them, but if you can do that for two dimes an hour, why change? Major designers are now working for the high volume firms, but the quality of material and construction is poor.  The middle tier of quality and manufacture has mostly disappeared.  A few speciality makes have appeared that exploit this need - Lululemon is a good example.³  Their quality matches their pricing, but this is fairly rare - to first order even $300 dresses are very poorly made.  Many consumers no longer have the ability to judge construction and material quality.

 

The signal we are seeing among at the edge - mostly in places like San Francisco, NYC (especially Brooklyn and lower Manhattan!), Seattle, Minneapolis and San Diego may be the rejection of overconsumption and more value placed on owning a smaller number of higher quality items that can last.  These are also areas that tend to support the notion of a strong sense of personal fashion.  There is more of the diversity you see in some European cities and mall uniforms are distinctly clueless.

 

New small business is emerging to fill these needs and some people are becoming craftsmen and artisans.  Clothing repair and re-tailoring shops are exist in greater number and I even saw a few new cobbler shops in Brooklyn last week.   While it isn't clear that this is a trend that will spread, it should be pointed out that the traditional apparel industry control on media is much weaker with forces like Pinterest exploding in popularity and Etsy creating a new channel for accessories.  

 

It is very curious to note that those who ply vintage stores note that items at least thirty years old are worthy of salvage and modification - newer items become progressively more poorly made to the point where anything made in the past decade is so poorly made that it isn't worth bothering with.

 

There are some great opportunities for design tools and even manufacture automation that may come to the small scale shops before the large manufacturers.  The big guys (like Levis) have tried what they thought was mass customization a decade ago and have mostly abandoned it.  I think this is like Microsoft's decade old notion of the tablet - they simply lacked the chops to dive in deep and re-imagine that was really needed. TRVL is another example of a publication more properly reimagined for the iPad world - and a need to break beyond conventional tools (like InDesign and pdfs used by the publishing industry) and thinking.  They were trying to hammer their square peg into a round hole and, guess what... it didn't work very well.  

 

It is likely this won't be very large at first - a ten percent shift in the market within this age segment would be big in my mind, but very indicative of a major trend.  We may see the re-emergence of the middle tier of apparel quality and manufacturing along with people taking a more focused interest in what fashion is - they may become their own artists rather than mere consumers.⁴  Remember - these are the guys who see iPads and creative tools.  My generation tends to see them (and very improperly!) as consumption devices.

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¹ Try a little experiment:  The famous example would be to change a donut into a coffee mug - cookie dough will show the way and had a big advantage over modeling clay in that it is edible. This can make for a sweet introduction to topology:-)

² There are many proofs. Most are pretty complex requiring some deep math - usually homology theory is involved.  I could follow some in the day, but now I'm more rusty - you have to keep at this to be in good form.  I did see an elegant and simple proof by John Milnor when I was a student and have it in my notes.  Since at least one of you is a mathematician and several are physicists and serious computer scientists it is reasonable to show it.  Normally it would take at least an hour to typeset it in LaTeX and arrange images to embed in html, but here is a nice reproduction in a math blog. The warning is this is probably greek if you haven't done an college level math - so please ignore it and accept this a proven result, but if you had an advanced calculus course, you have the tools you need and it is a sweet little proof.

³ I've visited their shops a few times.  Once with Jheri trying to learn a bit and then out of curiosity when I was in Manhattan.  Several of the customers told me construction and material quality is much more important than the very careful marketing - it represents good value and is what makes them repeat customers.  The chain has established itself as one of the few mid-quality outlets in existance.  Sort of a sad thing when mid quality is the highest level most of us have access to - and many of us can't even get that.  A real opportunity space...

⁴ Distributed design and IP ownership needs tools that are probably closely linked with social media.  Improved mathematical models to convolve design and fit patterns need to be made along with improvements in user/designer feedback.  Automated and semi-automatic manufacturing tools.  More uniform measurement tools, improvements in user and designer feedback, user and designer education tools ...  the list goes on and on and the surface has only been scratched.  But it is important to note that this is an enormous industry - something like a half trillion a year in the US.  Even niches can be non-trivially large.

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Before getting on with the recipe, I'd like to make a recommendation.  I'm afraid my education is very narrow.  High school was ok, but in college I focused and spend most of my time in the physical sciences and math - placing out of other subjects where possible.  A really big mistake in retrospect.  Then on to grad school with a much more intense specialization.    

 

I do read a lot and am reasonably curious, but there isn't a lot of structure to this approach.  Recently I've been taking a few courses on iTunes U (there are other flavors of this sort of online learning). I'm not diving in deeply and doing the homeworks and all of the readings at this point, but am enjoying those with great lectures.  It is an excellent way to pass time on long boring trips and during exercise sessions.  Over a three week period, for example, I listened to all of the lectures in David Blight's excellent History 119 course at Yale: The Civil War and Reconstruction Era. Since then I've read a few of the books on his reading list.  Great stuff and highly recommended!

 

All of the iTunes U online material is free and some of the classes are extremely interesting.  It isn't a substitute for deeply focusing and doing all of the coursework and interacting with the professor, but it is so much better than TV or movies.

 

Here is a guide I use to hunt courses.  I'm sure there are others - if you know of good ones, let me know.  And a recommendation for me - an excellent short introduction to Quantum Mechanics from Oxford by James Binney.  He does an excellent job.  The warning is you really need to work out the problems to gain any understanding of the subject.  The class notes, recommended books and problem sets are here.

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Recipe section

 

Yesterday saw 97°F here and the urge for a homemade milkshake was strong as recently I had a rather poor excuse from what had been described as the best ice cream parlor in the area.

 

Homemade tahitian vanilla bean ice cream, homemade chocolate sauce + broken bits of Lindt 72% (added after the blending).  I used my antique Hamilton Beach milkshake maker from the mid 1960s - a very high speed spindle and careful attention is the trick for velvety textured, very thick shakes.  This one was - well - perfect (sigh)……

 

I won't go through this one exactly, but rather give a cheater's version that may be just as good for you.

 

 

Chocolate-Chocolate Chip Milkshake

Ingredients (for one or two servings depending on how much you like milkshakes)

° a pint of super premium vanilla ice cream - I like Häagen-Dazs Five Vanilla Bean as it is reasonably well crafted, widely available and is very simple with only five ingredients. Depending on where you are you may be able to find better and a really excellent homemade can be far better.

° about 120g whole milk (a half cup)

° a good chocolate topping - I've been making my own and can't make a recommendation.  I've seen many in stores.

° 20-40g dark chocolate chopped into small bits - I used Lindt 72% 

 

Technique 

° For a thick and velvety shake you really need a high speed spindle.  I use an ancient Hamilton Beach single spindle unit from the 1960s.  It's shaft runs at 17,000 rpm and should be treated with care.  For a consistency like many current ice cream parlors use a blender, and for a very thick shake find a study container for the mixture and use a table knife and large, heavy spoon and a LOT of elbow grease.

° cool the milk to near freezing and let the ice cream sit on your countertop for about 3 or 4 minutes before starting to soften it.

° Mix the milk, ice cream and chocolate syrup and blend using one of the techniques above.  I start with eight parts of ice cream for every part of milk - if you like them to be drinkable use a four to one mixture.  If you are using a pint of ice cream, try about 2 table spoons of chocolate syrup for a very light chocolate and increase as desired.  I like the lighter version.

° After blending mix in the chocolate chunks with a table knife.

° Pour into a chilled glass and, if you like, top with a bit of whipped cream and/or shaved chocolate.  I couldn't take it anymore and just had it as is.

 

 

the intersection of tech, art and the social - and the beginnings of change

People are often perplexed when they learn I have an interest in fashion. No one has successfully accused me of being a snappy dresser or understanding trends, but it does happen to be one of those areas with rich and dynamic intersections of other fields - specifically the arts, social sciences, and technology.  It also happens to be an enormous worldwide industry and one that is likely to undergo enormous change in the next decade or two.  Observing and trying to understand a developing revolution is, for me, time well spent.  If Apple has Apple TV as a hobby, this is sort of my hobby at this point..

 

About two weeks ago I visited Fashion Week in New York mostly to observe and listen.  I set up a few interview sessions, spent a bit on snacks and coffee and went into learning mode.  After thinking about the experience for awhile, I wrote a brief note to capture what seemed significant.  The note went out to a few people and two encouraged me to expand it in a blog.  To save time I’ll do the next best thing.  Here is the letter followed by some other comments that may be of greater interest to this group. (for those who have read it, I changed a few bits)

 

I have an interest in the social mechanisms of fashion, the changes being driven by a shift in communication modalities and emerging changes in manufacturing and distribution.  Fashion Week in NY is a good place to observe and ask questions.  I have a close friend who happens to be a well known model - this is her fifth year,  She has her own perspective and helps getting contact with interesting people.  This year talking to some small designers as well as the street fashion people and some fashion bloggers.

 

I went in on three days and the two of us talked to about 20 young women, a few other models and some people associated with one name and three small labels.  It turns out that a top model is attracts a lot of attention among the young street fashion types.  There were four discussions in a cafe with five or six of them at a time running an hour or so each.  I bought the coffee and a few pastries (the beer and pizza technique and the cheapest way I know to conduct this sort of interview).   The labels were by separate introduction.  It is good to know fashion royalty.

 

The industry has a very convoluted structure that defines a series of "looks" for a season and has rather strictly defined roles and information sources (last year I sat down and came up with a diagram showing the flow of information, material and money at a high level - ugh).  This traditionally comes out of an interplay between the designer and influential magazine editors. Prototypes are show to buyers who must sort out what will work in their stores about six months down the road.  Orders are placed and a rather clunky mass production web starts into action. Recently the time from prototype buy decision to delivery to the shelf has been dramatically tightened - down to a few weeks.  A few retailers (Zara, H&M,etc) have achieved a more or less constant flow of new fashion that is less coupled to the traditional model.

 

Fashion distinguishes itself from apparel by being all about an out of band communication - one that tends to be more important for women than men (and nearly non-existent in people like me). Its social nature means someone usually goes to a store and puts together the basis for combinations of pieces using what is available as a their pallet.   There is a lot of reference to what other people are doing and this is shifting away from the magazines -- quickly in fact. Fashion sites and blogs, at this point, have probably replaced physical magazines as a core sources of ideas.  The magazines all seem to have their sites, but the street fashion people and their followers aren't paying much attention.  There seems to be an explosion of interest in street fashion over the past few years.

 

Bringing up the subject of Pinterest brought a lot of conversation and debate.  It is clear there is a love/hate relation with it …  mostly love from the sample I spoke with.  It seems to be a natural extension of the pinboarding activities common among teenage girls - only it is now distributed to a larger group.  It involves this same out of band communication - or at least part of its vocabulary and I suspect it can be considered basic.  It certainly isn't optimized and one suspects more specialized versions will either emerge organically and/or be supported by Pinterest.  It is not the sort of thing I can imagine Google or Facebook - or Apple or Amazon for that matter - pulling off well.  I can imagine some of them getting involved as partners.

 

In the twenty and early thirty year old group Facebook is still a necessity - but something that can be frustrating and isn't the sort of thing people find cool anymore.  Time is still being spent there, but some of the apparel makers I spoke to suggested FB has almost no value to their business. They all have presences, but none of them can show the time and money they have put into it has been rewarded. Pinterest, on the other hand, is already making a change and driving business.  It is much more closely linked to the model of how some people communicate what "the look" will be - at least among their group.

 

"The look" is something very important that needs a lot of consideration.  It used to be dictated, but now there is a lot of communication from people who wear clothing.  There are still constraints as the pallet of available clothing is limited, but that is changing as mass customization emerges.  The industry has always been plagued by misjudging what the look and in recent years there have been more mistakes than the sour economy might suggest among the major players.  It is probably part of the growing disconnect between magazines and the consumer as the later group patches into different sources of active and passive communication. 

 

The structure of the industry is cumbersome and reminds me of the talent/production/distribution mechanism of the music industry fifteen years ago.  To the labels the end customer is really the store buyer - not the consumer.  Similar to the cellphone manufacturers - where most see the mobile service providers as their primary customer, and the four ecosystems - where Google and Facebook have different primary customers than the end user. In the examples of the music and fashion industries this creates opportunity.

 

There was an awareness of mass customization.  Most see the real benefit as better sizing, but freedom of personalization is also a benefit.  This is interesting as the size variation of the groups I was with is much less than the general female population (they were all young and mostly thin) where the need for better sizing is much stronger.   I brought up Threadless vs a few others as examples of image customization and a few of the shoe companies.  In general the Threadless model was preferred - very interesting as it is also constrained.

 

Many other questions come to mind, but time was limited and I was mostly injecting questions along with my model friend (who is absolutely great at this) and observing.    

 

I'd hate to be in the fashion magazine business

 

Separately my friend notes, and I saw a few examples, of how the catwalk itself is changing.  Tech is mixing in as part of the art, but also video is important.  All of the important shows were streamed and most had expert commentary and/or community commentary - almost like a sporting event. Some of the labels produced separate video spots that allowed a much closer look at the piece and there was experimentation with letting the model have a personality.  Probably due to the economy there were more beginning B-list models being used …  the sort who will probably not walk next season.  The whole notion of what a model does seems to be changing a bit, although high fashion runway models are still pretty much unchanged from those 10 years ago.  I'm told catalog modeling has seen a much larger shift as online catalogs become more important - things to say on the modeling piece, but I'll stop here…

 

A few additional observations:

 

° iPads, iPhones and MacBook Airs were everywhere.  The great majority of those I spoke to had Apple kit and 100% had smartphones. I asked a few questions and the fact this group has bought into the Apple platform is key.  Their music is from iTunes, apps are *extremely* important, and the Air is the only laptop they consider.  Granted this group is obsessed with style and fashion, but there is certainly no movement to Android.  I was frankly amazed by the acceptance of the Apple platform. 

 

° Most of them owned iPads.  It is seen as being hired for a different task than the iPhone or the Air, but the fact that these products link up and synchronize through the cloud mostly seamlessly was important.  The cafes I used had net and there were people, mostly women, watching the walks in being streamed live from the runways across the street.  There was a lot of social commentary going on face to face (ear to ear?) as well as in chat windows and text messages.  Twitter seemed to be an important space for commentary. Facebook seemed absent.

 

° People couldn’t stream to their phones or iPads.   An iPad linked to WiFi might seem to be the ideal viewing platform, but it was impossible as Flash was used.  They complained about the failure, but didn’t blame Apple.  The blame goes to whoever was doing the streaming.  There were also complaints about poor cellular service in the area - again it was not seen as Apple’s responsibility.  Flash on tablets and phones really is a non-starter at this point.

 

° Space doesn’t permit me to write the pages I learned about street fashion, which may be a central piece of the developing future as magazines lose influence and the process of fashion becomes even more social.  Material, money, and information flows are all in the process of changing.

 

° The backstage use of iPads surprised me.  I don’t think I’ve seen that density outside an Apple Store.  There appear to be several important custom apps as well as regular commercial apps.  One young designer joked that they are moving to the paperless atelier...  Steve Jobs would not approve that I saw a few people frantically sketching with a conductive stylus for last second visual notes to be communicated to others.  There was also a great deal of photographic annotation.  

 

__________

And a recipe or two!

 

After a few people saw this post, two wrote and asked where are the recipes?  OK - here is a fun one with a bit of science.  But first a word on measurements.

 

Most of my recipes have approximate measurements.  When cooking with fresh ingredients it is often necessary to adjust for the freshness and taste of the ingredients as well as your own tastes.  I'll try to supply weight and volume measurements, but encourage you to move to just weight for anything that isn't a liquid at the very least when amounts are important - some types of cooking and most types of baking.  Get an electronic kitchen scale that can tare - it will change your life in the kitchen.  Good enough ones aren't expensive.  I use the  EatSmart Precision Pro- about $25.

 

Now on to the food!

 

Maillard Reaction Squash in a Pressure Cooker

 

The Maillard reaction is this wonderful event that takes place between an amino acid, a reducing sugar and some heat.  Without going into details a complex mixture of molecules forms that are involve in the flavors and smells of many foods.  The browning of meats, the browning on toast, french fries, fried onions, roasted coffee, the browned sections of cakes and cookies.  In short it has a fundamental importance in baking and cooking.

 

Most of these reactions begin at around 300°F, although some start much lower - perhaps 250°F.  It would be nice to cook with the reaction, but in a boiling or immersed environment.  The trick is to use a pressure cooker.  Most will go to 15psi - pushing the interior boiling temperature to something past the threashold for some of the reaction.  Physics just works - increase the pressure of the gas over water and the boiling point increases.

 

It would be wonderful to get that great taste on something like squash in a pressure cooker.  It turns out a bit of experimentation shows the way.  Some of the experiments didn't work, but were edible none the less.  Adding a bit of baking soda increased the reaction just enough to make everything work (alkali environments generally encourage the reaction - we're sitting on the fence at 15psi and need to be pushed just a bit)

 

This one works:-)  

ingredients

° 55g (4 tbl) unsalted butter

° 0.75kg (1 1/2 lb) delicata squash, peeled, seeded, and cut into half inchish cubes

° 1/2 lemon grass stalk 

° 1 tsp kosher salt

° 1/2 tsp baking soda

° honey to taste

method

1. Melt butter in a pressure cooker. Stir in squash, lemon grass, salt and baking soda. Cover tightly with pressure cooker lid and cook at a gauge pressure of 1 bar (15 p.s.i.) for 20 minutes. Begin the timing after the pressure has been reached.

2. Depressurize the cooker according to the pressure cooker's manual.

3. Remove lemon grass. Blend the squash to a smooth purée.  Add honey to taste.

 

mmmm

 

Pressure cookers, if you haven't tried one, rule.  I use a Kuhn Rikon¹ and love it - spendy, but you probably won't find a better pressure cooker.  A core component of the kitchen and safe. 

_____

 

And a somewhat unhealthy, but delicious bonus.  This is especially good on a chilly night and guests love it.

 

Baked Hot Chocolate

 

ingredients

° 250g (9 oz) very very good quality semisweet chocolate (Lindt, Scvharffen berger, Guitard, etc) - maybe 60% to 70% - finely chopped
° 85g (6 tbl) unsalted butter cut up.  excellent grade butter only
° 4 large eggs
° 50g white sugar (1/4cup)
° whipped cream to taste

method

1. Preheat an oven to 350° F


2. find four oven proof coffee mugs or similar sized ramekins and put them on a pan


3. melt butter and chocolate in a double boiler and whisk until smoothly melted and mixed. Remove from heat and set aside


4. Stir eggs and sugar in a mixing bowl over simmering water until warm to the touch.


5. Beat egg mixture with a beater until light and fluffy - 3 to 5 minutes. Gently fold the egg mixture into the chocolate


6. Spoon batter into cups and add enough hot water in the pan to come up halfway on the cups


7. Bake until top of mixture looses its glossy look. About 15 or 20 minutes.


8. Remove and let cool to a bit above room temperature on the outside.  Put on whipped cream and serve

wicked fine

 

_________

¹ A review of the pressure cooker I use.  It was about $200 and worth every penny.

 

 

 

 

the delight of playful creativity

At five thirty this morning I made my way to the basement for the morning rowing.  I sat on the machine, cued up the WBUR OnPoint podcast (I usually listen to whatever is current on Thursdays) on the iPod, pushed play and pulled backwards.  Little did I know...

 

Forty seven minutes flew by and I was ready for the next podcast to begin.  I knew I had something to blog about, that was different from what I was thinking about at five twenty five as I started to the basement, and I knew an apology would be necessary.  I rowed on in silence lost in thought and stopped about forty minutes later.  My ergometer said I had delivered 202.4 watt-hours to the flywheel.  Better than 150 watts on average - not bad for me.  

 

Before getting into what I was thinking and why I saw the need for an apology you need to listen to the show. (mp3)

 

Trust me - it is worth the time.

 

An interview and some samples from beatbox cellist Kevin Olusola.  While he's not technically a great cellist, he did get Yo-Yo Ma's attention.  Kevin's playfulness and experimentation and curiosity inform his creativity.  In creativity and playfulness he reminds me of musicians cellist Zöe Keating, Björk, and Reggie Watts and more than a few scientists.¹

 

When you are exposed to something like this you want to find more and let your friends know.  That made me think of one of you - Jheri.  

 

Jheri is this amazing person - creatitive, funny and kind.  The sort of person who amazes you by being a friend.   She knows exactly what I mean when I say play is a fundamental component of creativity and she is off-scale playful.  She also happens to have a hearing impairment.  I want to share this with you Jheri, but I know it won't work so I must apologize... 

 

or maybe not...

 

This is an opportunity.  Jheri is amazingly perceptive visually.  She is aware of the nuances of out-of-band communications that take place in face to face communications that most of us tend to miss.  She sees much more deeply than the rest of us and is a natural empath.  So while people like Niki, Lorraine, Linda and a few others will probably love listening to Kevin, I began to wonder about the part of the world Jheri sees that I am visually deaf to...

 

This is a chance for serendipty. Jheri - perhaps we can  investigate the parts of the world that are beautiful to you that are mostly invisible to people who hear well...   I know they exist - would you like to collaborate and sort a bit of this out?  Thinking about that excites me much more than listening to Kevin's wonderful music.  It is much more fun playing and learning than sitting back - even if what you are witnessing is as wonderful. 

 

Kevin is having wonderful fun and is bringing pleasure.  He started with a simple set of questions.  There is no reason why you can't have the fun in your domains.

 

Let's play Jheri

 

In the meantime I strongly recommend listening to the interview!

________

¹ Reggie performed just before my TED^x talk and his performance completely captivated me.  Look him up - he's amazing.  We were talking immediately after TED and it turned out he is from Great Falls, Montana - he lived about 500 feet from our house.

on the fantastic flying books of mr. lessismore

The first release from Moonbot Studios, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Lessismore, has been out for awhile, but I tend to discover things at a slower pace.  The illustration is quite wonderful and there is a distinct style that has a fine antique feel to it.  There is much to recommend as you will see with the video, but you should know that you shouldn't watch it.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

(sigh - they have made this link private...)

 

You see the real experience is to be had in the iPad version and its interactivity.  Every page has a bit of something and the viewer becomes engaged leaving passive viewing behind.  And this interactivity is artistic and engaging.  It points in the general direction of the future.

 

Play with something like this and $10 seems like way to much to spend for a movie.  Perhaps $2 seems like too much ...

 

It will take decades for Hollywood - or whatever that becomes - to discover how to use the power of an interactive digital network connected sheet of paper that goes to someone's lap, but there will be illuminations along the way.  This is the first I would consider worthy of the new medium.  There have been a lot of experiments, but this one also mixes in real storytelling and art.

 

I'm guessing a lot of lightbulbs have been fired over the heads of the artistic set.   If you worry about this sort of change you really need to explore with an iPad.  But if you don't have one yet, I would wait a few months ...

 

(a short post as I spent most of the time with the "book")

 

 

 

tools for the mind

Much of the playing around with ideas that I do relies on visual thinking and drawing diagrams and just sketching an extremely important tool for me.  So important that I wish I had taken formal art classes.  Paper and pencil are great, but for standing or collaborating with others in a room I can think at a whiteboard, but a quality slate blackboard and good chalk “feels” better to me.

 

In the mid 90s AT&T split into AT&T and Lucent.  I had been working at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ but my move to AT&T Research meant a move to Florham Park, NJ.  The new location was a nice building in a very nice setting and a lot of attention was given to making us comfortable.  We had a lot of choice when it came to our office furnishings and - to me - the most important choice was slate vs whiteboard.¹

 

My first office had a great view and an even better piece of slate on the wall.  Bliss.  All was well with the world, but  and all was well with the world but a year later I moved to a different office with - shudder - a white board.  A bit of after-hours reconnaissance turned up a few slightly damaged slate boards in the basement and a Ben Franklin slipped to the head maintenance guy with my help at 6 am caused the white board to disappear and be replaced by the slate.  The chalk wasn’t great, but I knew where to buy the good stuff.

 

Sadly I’m no longer there - a loss of several fine minds and that big piece of slate.  As it happens one of the readers of this blog is now occupies that room enjoying “my” old slate.  Tom, I hope it is as good for you as it was for me. 

 

I use computers for sketching ideas, but the interface is not just as nice as the physical world   I use a Wacom tablet and SketchBook Pro on my Mac - good enough, but not great.  Better yet is Procreate on an iPad.  A third party pressure sensitive pen will be out in a few months and, if the iPad 3 appears, I may cave and make the purchase.

 

But for working something out nothing comes close to pencil and paper.  I constantly doodle and sketch as part of thinking and manipulate a lot of equations by hand. Pencils and paper are a wonderful technology for this purpose.²   But they begin to fall apart when you start to worry about authoring and making work, probably more polished work, available to others.

 

In many settings - particularly education - books still rule although many of them are appearing on ebook readers of one form or another.  I’m of the opinion that technology can be used as a supporting tool that can be used to help revolutionize education. It should not be central and arguably a revolution can take place without technology - my path was reasonably computer-free until I was in college and might be considered revolutionary by today’s standards.  But I think it is important to rethink the interaction between teacher and student as well as among students and rethink what a book is.  Augmented books show a lot of promise and may fit into some rethinking of education, although it will take decades to really sort out what works and what doesn’t - but for the time being there is a large authoring problem.

 

 

ebook authoring tools basically suck and there are a variety of standards.  Without waking up that dragon I note that Apple’s iBook Author and iTunes U announcement represents the first easy to use authoring tool for next generation ebooks.  There are any number of issues and the program is in its infancy.  Hopefully others will compete and hopefully they’ll create human usable tools.  I do worry that it may take a for profit company to play this game as the open source community has a poor track record when usability is involved. 

 

________ 

 

I spent the morning playing with Apple’s program and sent this note to some folks who are interested in education.  Any comments about this class of learning are appreciated - if anyone wants to talk about such things.  This was a quickly written email that was just capturing my immediate thoughts.  They’ve advanced a bit since then, but this captures what struck me at the time

 

I like playing with tools and product rather than reading reports, so when I found myself with three spare hours this morning I decided to spend it with iBooks Author - the free iBook authoring tool Apple announced yesterday along with the expansion of iTunes U and iBooks 2.  It gave a few answers and opened many more questions.

 

To first order Author is a mixture of Pages and Keynote - since I don't use MS Office I'm reasonably skilled in both of these and my learning curve was small. For test content I tried a few chapters of the energy book I had been writing with my volleyball friend Colleen as well as a couple of chapters I had contributed to a technical book (astrophysics) a few years ago.

 

There is a huge need for a good ePub3 authoring tool and I was hoping for just that.  It is not a generic tool for any sort of publication.  The EULA restricts you to selling through Apple if you want money - you can put it up for free and (presumably) publish in other places.  Of course Amazon (unlike everyone else) doesn't support ePub3, so that is another issue.

 

Author can't handle technical formatting.  Equations are mostly laid out in LaTeX these days and it just doesn't work with that.  In theory you can use a third party app that allows you to render and put LaTeX into Pages and then import, but those tools are not very good and the one that sort of works costs about $60 for an academic license. This is a big hole for any middle school or beyond science text or any math book.  I tried to import a Pages document that had embedded LaTeX, but there were issues with the rendering and it was not possible to make changes in Author.  A big lose for me…

 

If you are adding multimedia, photos, slide presentations - etc - the process borders on being trivial.  The tool seems to be set up for fairly complex books - textbooks - with chapters, sections, subsections, appendices, glossaries and so on.  You could, in principle, create simpler books using it, but there is way too much stuff getting in your way.  I was hoping for something that I could just important a Pages document and use it for adding bits and pieces rather than getting involved in a major project.  This isn't it.  This is so much easier to use than Adobe or other standard authoring tools that there just isn't any comparison.  It is also $0 vs $a lot.  Of course you don't have many options if you want to make money.

 

It seems very well suited for largish projects that a textbook maker might do.  It also seems excellent for the sort of publications that some teachers might produce as their Summer projects  - it is almost tailor made for that.  

 

Well - almost well suited I should add.  There are no provisions for collaboration and none for automation - both seriously important if you have more than one person involved and if you plan on regular updates or perhaps a serialization.  Of course this is 1.0 and *every* 1.0 Apple product has been an outline of what eventually rolls out.  Perhaps Apple wants to get people used to the simple tool rather than overwhelming them (how un-MS and un-Adobe!)

 

The iBooks 2 app, and I didn't get to play with it much as Sukie owns the family iPad, in conjunction with iTunes U strikes me more as a course syllabus tool rather than a simple book reader.  You can, in theory, do a lot with it and it is much cheaper (free) than Blackboard which is a somewhat ugly and expensive, but nearly ubiquitous tool at many Universities.  Apple may have something here for HSs and Universities - but I would wait for comments from the edu crowd before commenting more than I have.

 

Apple tends to start small and then grow products.  There is a huge need for a simpler tool (yes - Pages can output ePub, but it isn't a real authoring tool for a book).  It would probably be too much for Apple to just announce something like that now - plus the people who would benefit are those who are motivated to sell on Amazon.  I suspect something will happen - perhaps it will be Pages '12 when that is finally announced.  It isn't a great leap to see Apple doing this.

 

They need to add bits and pieces that would make this a better technical tool. That means LaTeX or similar support.  They might also do something with Wolfram (a trusted source told me they have recently looked at buying Wolfram, but I have no idea what the status of that is - it certainly makes sense as it links in with Siri)

 

In the end Apple wants to sell hardware.  I can't see many k12 schools jumping with the current book selection and shoes have to drop for that to improve.  Maybe a year from now. I can imagine a boatload of teachers creating content for it this Summer though and that may be important. If I was making ebook textbook content I would certainly consider a branch and the basic port would be easy … making it dance much more difficult.

 

The iTunes U part is potentially big and college students would be the ones buying the iPads rather than school districts.  There is a chance for some disruption here and the price of college texts is high enough that an iPad would pay for itself if you could get half of your books this way.    The openness of iTunes U and the universities offering free courseware is such that it would be very attractive for lifelong learners - I will certainly be using this part of it.

 

The K12 piece requires a cheaper iPad.  It appears that the iPad2 will continue to be sold - and that would be Apples standard pattern - iPods and iOS devices traditionally see version 2 models sold at a lower price point when version 3 is announced. If history is a guide I would expect a $349 price..  Apple may also add a stripper with limited memory (the additional memory isn't expensive, but it is an easy way to create a bump) or possible not having the camera - for $249 or $299.   If it was featureless enough - say 8 GB RAM and no camera, the $349 regular iPad 2 would still sell well along with the $499 iPad 3 (picking arbitrary numbers).  Of course pure speculation - but Apple needs to announce a cheap edu model and the announcement has to fit the k12 procurement cycle.

 

It strikes me this could be a powerful tool for eMagazines.  Not what currently exists, but the basic bits and pieces are there.  

 

There is a lot of promise, but there are some big holes that need filling before it is a real offering.  My guess is the holes are not there out of cluelessness….

 

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I welcome what Apple has done.  They are doing it primarily to make money, but it may ignite a competition to come up with something - one of the basic cogs of education - that better.  That is exciting.

 

And if you want to make a difference in your own visual thinking as well as that of your kids or students I strongly recommend learning a bit of art - just basic sketching.  Mine is self taught and crude, but has proven to be enormously powerful.  I frequently use it as a repeatable entry point for achieving “flow”.  It is a shame that art and music (also very important for thinking - more on that in a post to come) are not taught much these days. These are important tools for learning how to “connect the dots”.

 

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¹ I talked to the guy who runs the company that made the slate boards.  The last of the breed in the US and most of their business came from math and physics departments.  I assume if I hadn’t discovered the feel of a good piece of slate as an undergrad I would have come to love white boards and the smell of magic markers.

² Paper and pencils are a very personal thing.  Mostly I use art sketchpads, but I also love bound notebooks from Field Notes.  They have fine pencils too, but you need some sharpening technique.  pencilrevolution is  good resource for all things pencil.

 

occident flies!

When we first moved to New Jersey I was taking a walk in an area known as The Great Swamp - a place where it is possible to get a mile or so away from other people if you pick a quiet time and a very beautiful and peaceful place.  About two miles in I found a guy intently studying a flower from behind the view glass of a beautiful wooden frame four by five inch view camera.  He had lugged in an enormous tripod, the camera and quite a bit of kit. Very impressive as he was not a very large person.   Normally I would stop and ask questions, but he was intensely into the moment and I was enjoying my walk too much.

 

I continued for a few hours and turned around finally coming back to the meadow and the photographer.  He was still at it, now working on an old fallen piece of tree.  This time he was hunting for something in a gear bag, so I stopped and chatted for awhile.  It turned out he had taken three photos and his goal was five or six for the day.  For someone who was used to a much smaller camera that lacked the control of a view camera I was amazed as he showed me what he could do.

 

Recently Om started me thinking about images again in one of his blog posts.  I’m strongly taken with motion as well as still photography - but for very different reasons.  

 

I have tried some video, but it generally is very much youtube friends waving at the camera work.  My still photography is better and I’m more comfortable thinking about an image and setting it up than shooting and editing segments of video.  Both can be the basis for good stories and I’m in awe of people who can do both.

 

For recreation I love to draw.  Some of you - Nancy, Jessica and my sister Corinne - are much better artistically than I will ever be, but I enjoy losing myself in an image.  A moment of time can stretch into hours and I frequently achieve flow.  When I do physics I tend to be visual and much of the early stages of work are playful with me drawing or imagining drawing images in my mind’s eye.¹  

 

When flow occurs time seems to move at a different rate.

 

Time

 

I’ve been thinking a lot about it in the past two weeks as it is the subject of my mini-sabbatical.  How do relate to time and how has that changed over time?  How important is it to change itself?  My suspicion is that we are living in a period of change where our current notions of time are outmoded and we’re inventing new conventions and relationships even now.  

 

We think we have a good view of our natural world through our senses, but in reality they are very limited.  We only hear a fraction of the sounds around us - much of it is too quiet and much of it has wavelengths too long or too short for us to perceive and much of what we might see is far too dim.  Our sense of smell is limited compared to other animals.  Our vision only covers a very narrow fraction of the electro-magnetic spectrum.  What we do have is still very impressive as animals go, even though some overtake us in one or more of them, and have served us well.  But science exploded when we started to build tools that allowed us to extend our senses.  We found a much larger and richer Universe and improvements on these sensory extensions continue to drive the sport.

 

We also live in a world defined by time.  A mountain range may take millions of years to push up, a flower takes hours to bloom, a bullet striking a balloon leaves a rich record of the collision.  We see the results of these processes, but the details are lost to us unless we build tools to somehow live in their time.

 

Leland Stanford was into race horses in a big way and was particularly proud of his trotter Occident.  Stanford had a real interest in studying the motion of horses so as to improve breeding and training techniques but a better, albeit manufactured, story is that he bet John Isaac $25,000 that Occident always had at least one foot on the ground at all times.

 

In other words - there may be horseflies, but horses do not fly...

 

Stanford was approximately richer than god and hired Eadweard Muybridge (a most unusual name and not a spelling error) to create a photographic record of the behavior of the horse.  He used a dozen cameras spaced 21 inches apart.  Each camera had a shutter speed of a 1/1000^th of a second and the shutter was connected to a trip wire.  The horse effectively had a series of closely spaced slices of time created at different portions of its stride.

 

As you can easily see, horses do fly...

 

If you arranged the photos in a pack and flipped through them at the right speed - the lag between images being about the time it takes the horse to travel 21 inches from camera to camera - your mind stitches the still images into a reasonably smooth motion and we perceive the flow of time.  One of the earliest forms of the movie...³

 

There is a lot to talk about the perception of time and I will, but I want to keep this post short.  Movies and video are all about the illusion of combining still slices of time.  

 

Oddly we all live a tiny bit in the past -  our perception of now is inaccurate, but it works for our biology and most of the interactions with our world that helped chart our evolutionary path. 

 

We worked very hard to synchronize time over the years.  First for relating to nature and agriculture, then for studying the stars and prayer.  Time was critical to sorting out the sky and navigation and later we found ourselves synchronizing ourself to its flow for work and travel.  

 

Time is everywhere and as we find our way through the fabric of space and time we have a sense that there must be a master clock of sorts - that time must be universal.

 

Except it isn’t.  With high school geometry and algebra and the knowledge that light has a fixed speed you can convince yourself that time is relative.   Walk down the street and the clocks in the buildings along the way tick at a slightly different rate than your watch - an act that gives me great pleasure at times when I am on a long walk in Manhattan.

 

It turns out athletes - the really good ones - are expert at shutting off much of the thought in their minds that is extraneous to the task at hand,  They can quickly put together solutions to the kinetic problems they face a few tenths of a second earlier than the rest of us as a result.  An artifact is that they become immersed in a state of psychological flow - that Csíkszentmihályian flow that is so addictive that I find sketching and doing physics and a few other things.²  Athletes also seem to create mental movies of the likely future - “forward models.”  A volleyball player notices the position of the other players and gets a sense of how the ball will be returned so she can position and launch herself with timing good to the hundredth of a second.  There are midcourse corrections to these movies that take into account the spin on the ball and local wind conditions.  These predictions are consistent with Bayesian decision theory that combines previous experience with a stream of new information.  The brain gets to focus on sorting out what is likely and telling the muscles to act on it appropriate.  It is not a simple lookup mechanism and the magic in sport often arrises when the mind comes to a novel solution and gives the ok to try it.  Elite athletes are sometimes good at finding these novel solutions for interacting with a complex situation as time flows.

 

And my encounter with the photographer in the Great Swamp years ago?  It turns out he worked for Bell Labs too and we became friends fifteen years later.  A few years ago we worked on a project that required us to watch for a motion that we knew was happening, but was too fleeting to observe.  We rented time on a camera that took video at 8000 frames per second - sort of faster than the roughly 30 frames per second our vision uses.

 

Here is some popcorn popping at 6200 frames per second - the motion  is "slowed" down a bit over 200 times ...

 

What fun! 

 

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¹ Well - sort of visual.  I have synesthesia and vision for me is a mixture of images and sounds - or sound is a mixture of vision and sound. I can’t cleanly separate them and would love to feel what it must be like to have cleanly orthogonal senses.  You begin to understand why it isn't terribly common as many synesthetes are uncoördinated.

² ok - I know what you're thinking.  It is mee-hy cheek-sent-mə-hy-ee-an

³ At least the photographic form of movie. Earlier experiments and toys played with the persistance of vision too.  Roget published the first paper on the subject in the mid 1820s and neat machines like this appeared shortly afterwards.  Yup - that's the same Roget who did the Thesarus.