omenti

a 'I really know better than to post this post...'

a minipost

About this time of year I get a request or two to talk to a high school junior or senior about colleges and majors.  I'll give reasons why I'm not the best the person to talk to, but if they persist I'll spend some time listening and talking.  Curiously there have been three so far this year and two suggested I post something.  Perhaps it can spark you into helping some students - many of you have much richer backgrounds.

 

A caveat is that I came from a position of privilege: white male, reasonably good at math, and from a period of time when great positive change seemed possible.  I didn't view college as training for work.  Somehow I knew what I was curious about from the age of twelve, so it was just following a calling.  I knew I could always get work with the friend of the family in back home who had a thriving HVAC and water softener company. This gave me the freedom to follow a somewhat different path than friends who were thinking about what happened after graduation.   This led to good and bad choices.  I double majored, but the fields were too close to each other and I ended up with a narrow undergrad education. Since then I study a few areas on my own, but I didn't take advantage of a broader education back then.  On a more positive note I got to know several professors as friends and mentors. That part was priceless.

 

° Ask yourself why you want to go to college?  What is your drive?  Many answers are correct, but you should know yours.

 

° A 'what color is your parachute-ish' question: are there any kinds of work you would do for nothing or even pay to do? 

 

° Where may or may not be important.  It's a plus in some fields to attend a famous college, but in many cases the quality of education can be as good at state schools - sometimes even better if you're good at making connections and really dive into the courses.  Famous professors often don't have the time to talk to undergrads. 

 

° Spend some time finding out which professors can teach.  

 

° Double major if you can, but in mostly unrelated areas.  Even if you're focused on employment afterwards - a good ROI on college - choose the second major in a field that you might find fascinating.  The humanities can give you great depth and are underrated for turning you into someone who can think differently down the road.  I've mentored students with a variety of double majors: CS-music, CS-art, physics-philosophy, math-paleontology for example. If you're doing a D-I sport, consider that a major by itself.  It can give a rich training that can serve you down the line too.  If not a double major, make sure your minor is very different from the major.

 

° A benefit of getting to know professors and show an interest is you might be able to get in on some of their projects.  This is often in the form of work-study, which can take a bite out of the debt down the road.  I was lucky enough to get in on a few great projects.  The most interesting seemed boring at first and didn't pay, but it was in an area I hadn't thought about and the professor was brilliant.  There was even an opportunity to have a tiny contribution to a bit of history and I still use some of the learnings. 

 

° Remind yourself that you learn best when it's play.  This won't happen all of the time - or even most of the time - but work on it. 

 

° Learn to witness the immediate world around you in some depth.  I recommend basic drawing and field drawing courses.  There are many other paths, but a bit of time focusing on understanding the natural world around you changes the way you think. 

 

That's pretty much it.  I mainly listen to them. Some of the items I've mentioned cause them to react and think about their own situation.  This year I recommended How to be Perfect by Michael Schur.  It's basically a Philosophy 101 short course done in a brilliantly entertaining manner - the way an engaged professor might go at it.  (If you're interested the audiobook is much better than the printed version as Schur has a stage background.) 

 

breadth and depth

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

Raducanu added this:

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

on good design for those who need it

Olympian Sarah said she is more impressed by the achievements of Paralympians than Olympians.  She loves events like running with a guide and is particularly taken with goalball.  Goalball was invented after WWII for the blind.  The ball has two bells and the athletes have to use their sense of hearing to sort out where the ball is along with the other players.  It's stunning to watch.  (The first match is the gold medal match between the US and Turkey.)

There's a lot of interesting design in the Paralympics.  Sometimes the type of game, sometimes mechanical devices like special wheelchairs, and perhaps most important is a classification system to keep competition fair,  The amount of thinking that has gone into this puts many conventional sports to shame.  If you haven't watched any of the events go back and marvel at a few.  

 

Building proper access has been an uphill battle and people still fight against the Disabilities Act claiming it's "too expensive" or "just not worth it."  Getting the design right is a journey of its own.  A book that may change how you think about the built world is What Can a Body Do? by Sara Hendren. Solid recommendation!  This kind of design goes beyond physical affiances involving politics, law and sociology with the book addressing that and more.  The Paralympics are a shining example of it being done right in a limited area. 

 

This may seem a bit off topic, but I'd claim otherwise.  I've learned a lot from areas far from what I do.  Thinking about beach volleyball  led to a useful technique for studying neutron stars.   Get interested in something very different and you just might find interesting connections to something else.  Thinking about those with challenges is a rich area and probably useful for even non-designers to spend some time on.  It's a target-rich environment. 

 

 

low distortion rearview mirrors

 

History Does Not Repeat Itself, But It Rhymes

      -  Mark Twain

Except it wasn't him.  

His clever and prolific writing made people assume he said it even though he never did.  It turns out it first appears around 1970 in a poem by a Canadian artist named Robert Colombo.  When asked if he knew where it was from Colombo couldn't recall other than he might have seen it in a literary section of the New York Times a few years earlier.  In fact it appears with and without attribution several times around the time of Colombo's poem in the early 70s.   That said, a hundred years from now people will still think Twain said it.

 

The process of science is much messier than the simple order kids learn in school.   There are too many dependancies to list.  A few philosophers of science  - notably Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn - have tried to describe how scientific revolutions and change happens.  The how, where and why of scientific change.  Kuhn and Popper are somewhat at odds.  Kuhn's ideas were popularized and are still taught as how scientific revolutions happen.  It turns out that both of the frameworks are deeply flawed and have fallen from favor with serious students of the history and philosophy of science.  I came to it late, but I'm more a fan of an earlier step - trying to understand some of the history of science. 

 

Unfortunately the history of science is often neglected in scientific training.  Students are told a few selective stories from the great revolutionaries without much context.  Experiments, theories and techniques are described with little background.  The struggle and small steps forward and backward are  missing.  The world seems much too messy when you start doing real science on your own.  (this is probably true in many fields!)

 

One gets bits and pieces of local history from the last generation or two in their subfield.  This can be very powerful. I learned a lot about the development of the atomic bomb as some of the people I studied with were parts of the Manhattan Project.  You need to learn the importance of failure as well as hunches and the need to distrust your own work.  

 

The history of science, like the history of art or music,  is a story of the development of ideas that can be appreciated by non-specialists.   There are some wonderful books out there.  The trigger for this post was one of them:  Einstein's Fridge by Paul Sen.  I know the technical area well, but have big holes in my understanding of how all of this came about.  If you can follow articles in the New York Times science section, you'll learn a lot of what the physics is saying without the math and how it changed the world.  He gives a very simple, but accurate, description of entropy and has the best description of photosynthesis I've seen that doesn't get into biochemistry.  The historical motivations make it come alive.  I'm stealing some of his clear descriptions.

 

Most of this is probably true in many other fields.  About twenty years ago a friend invited me to dinner with Maurice Wilkes - his grand advisor.  Even though Maurice was in his late eighties the discussion went on late into the night and continued on two more occasions. I'm not a computer scientist or engineer, but Maurice is a physicist who happened to invent a good deal of the fundamentals of computing that's still in use.  Hearing him talk about the early history and the connections to our shared background made it all come alive.  The problems computers had to solve as well as the nuts and bolts of designing one - provided a wonderfully rich learning experience.  There was this hint of how the great mind of this humble person worked. A good history book can provide that kind of experience.

 

 

checking out your neighborhood

minipost and recommendation

The books you wore out when you were fourteen or fifteen are probably serious hints about your dreams and direction.  One of the two I wore out was a Norton's Star Atlas and Reference Handbook.   Beautiful, wonderful star charts to find your way around the night sky.  The graphical design was (and still is) stunning and it just works.  It cost a fortune in the day, but so wonderful.

 

Every now and again someone publishes a survey that claims only a small fraction of Americans under 30 or 35 have seen the Milky Way. That's a shame.  On a sufficiently clear dark night it's about as beautiful as anything I've seen in Nature.  Light pollution has largely taken it from us.

 

But even in suburban areas you can still see some stars and planets and the Fall in much of Europe and North America offers crisp clear skies.  Checking out our stellar neighborhood is much more inspiring than watching TV, but you need a guide to make any progress. Although I still love my Norton's (I've been through several editions), the better entryway is to use an app.  At least a dozen exist.  My clear favorite on iOS is Sky Safari at about three dollars on the App Store.  (they also have an Android version, but I haven't used it).  Go for the low-end version - currently Sky Safari 6 AR - the more expensive versions are used to drive computerized telescopes.

 

The beauty of apps like this is they know location and the time of day.  Then, using the phone or pad's compass and gyroscope, they calculate and display the section of sky you're pointed at.   Change the display magnification to roughly match the sky and it's sort of augmented reality. You can identify stars and planets as well as search for them and learn the constellations. Playing around with the settings is useful (particularly turning off the background music), but the defaults for star brightnesses displayed roughly matches the human eye in a semi-dark area.  You can also turn off the compass and gyros and explore the sky indoors.

 

If you get hooked the next thing would be a good pair of binoculars .. stay away from telescopes for awhile. 

 

 

 

normal?

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

your local replicator

minipost

I thought we were past the hype stage.  3d printing has been around for about three decades and has undergone a couple of "gee-whiz - this is the next PC .. the next Internet" hype stages.  Recently a friend mentioned a futurist was pushing it and a few other technologies as a way out of many of our problems.  It has it's place, but in the grand scheme of things it's still very much a niche player.  Once you get past prototyping or technically difficult shapes you run into the fact that it offers a limited palate of materials, is usually much more expensive than other techniques in volume and often comes with environmental and health issues. 

 

I've been playing with it as a hobbyist for about fifteen years.  I like making things and some shapes are too complex to use conventional tools.  It's fun to play with so give it a whirl if you like making.  Rather than buy a printer go with a service bureau.  Good printers are probably too expensive to justify and you don't want the noise and sometimes toxic fumes in your home. If you have some money to burn spend it on a computer controlled laser cutter or CNC milling machine...

 

The reasons why it's unlikely you'll be printing things at home rather than buying them in the next decade or three would fill a book.  Instead here's a book recommendation that will give you background and is one of those fun references almost no one has heard about.  Making It, Third Edition by Chris Lefteri.  It's aimed at designers who want to learn about manufacturing processes, but is highly readable detailed over 100 production processes at a high level.  It gives a sense of the importance of materials and dealing with scale and budget constraints.  

 

The practical openings hanging automated making are equally interesting.  Clothing is an area that could be huge.  I've written about it a few times and good progress is being made.  It also turns out to be interesting as it has great socio-economic issues.

 

Real innovation is rare.  A fun way to spend a day over the holidays is go to your library and go through Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines from the 50s and 60s.  These are excellent illustrations of technologies being hyped. You'll see a couple of things that worked out and hundreds that didn't.  At the same time they give a sense of how popular, and perhaps necessary, building skills were around the home then.

 

a candidate for urban and suburban mobility

I have a serious interest in how we get around.  Currently the tech press seems entirely focused on car sharing and self-driving cars as THE FUTURE™, but those approaches are problematic.  I've spent a fair amount of time highlighting those issues, but rather than drone on for pages and pages I'll recommend a new book from a friend - Elements of Access by David Levinson .. essential reading for anyone trying to make sense of cities and suburban areas.  It's non-technically, fascinating and humorous.  From the about:

 

Transport cannot be understood without reference to the location of activities (land use), and vice versa. To understand one requires understanding the other. However, for a variety of historical reasons, transport and land use are quite divorced in practice. Typical transport engineers only touch land use planning courses once at most, and only then if they attend graduate school. Land use planners understand transport the way everyone does, from the perspective of the traveler, not of the system, and are seldom exposed to transport aside from, at best, a lone course in graduate school. This text aims to bridge the chasm, helping engineers understand the elements of access that are associated not only with traffic, but also with human behavior and activity location, and helping planners understand the technology underlying transport engineering, the processes, equations, and logic that make up the transport half of the accessibility measure. It aims to help both communicate accessibility to the public.

 

Bike sharing is currently experiencing explosive growth in urban areas around the world.  Bikes are very efficient in terms of density - you can put a large number of cyclists on bikes on the street - and energy use.  About eight years ago I measured the cycling energy expenditure of a friend at a little better than 1,000 mpg_e at a shade over a constant 13 miles per hour.¹  An added benefit of cycling is it is good for your health (assuming your path is safe enough) - good enough the both the Netherlands and Denmark factor cycling into their healthcare cost structure as a benefit.   In Northern Europe they've been integrated as an import element of transportation.  Infrastructure, laws and the public accommodate and encourage cycling and it's dovetailed into other elements of transport - bike to the commuter train and then to your office.  But there are issues.

 

First is most people don't ride long distances.  Even the Netherlands, with the highest bicycle use in the world, reports about 76% of commuting trips are less than five kilometers (figure about three miles) and fewer than one percent are longer than 15 km (about 10 miles).  There are many reasons: bikes are too slow/ trips take too long, hills and winds, the weather, long trips and long term use are hard on the wrists, back, shoulder and crotch. 

 

The electrically assisted bike or ebike solves many of these problems..  The speed can be up to twice as fast and hills and wind are much less problematic.  You feel like superman (or woman) on one. They're quite addictive and set to be hugely important in areas that have the right infrastructure - safe path, clueful motorists, parking and charging locations, traffic calming and so on..  not difficult technically or expensive, but change is often difficult. So ebikes are great, but they still have problems for many parts of the world.

 

There are niches where electrically assisted velomobiles could come into play.  Currently the only places you're likely to spot one is the Netherlands, Belgium or  Germany.  They usually have three wheels and a recumbent riding position and have an aerodynamic fairing.  I've seen four in the US - three were made by amateurs and one was a Dutch import.  I tired one and that proved to be an eye-opener. 

 

It was homemade, human power only and very heavy at a bit over forty kilograms. The body rattled and it configuration really needed a suspension.  But wow was it fast!  A human delivers about a hundred watts to the pedals to a bike during light commuting - about the same as what it takes to keep you alive (your brain takes about 20 to 25 watts).  Up to about six miles per hour most of the drag on a bike (or velomobile) is rolling resistance - tires against the ground.  Above that and air resistance becomes more important dominating around 15 miles per hour.  If it takes 100 watts to go about 13 mph, it takes about five to six  times as much power to go twice as fast (eight times as much power to overcome the wind).

 

Now here's something critically important -- the power needed to overcome air resistance goes up as the cube of your airspeed.  A bicycle or ebike has a drag factor nearly fifty times as great as a velomobile.² The homemade design I rode was "dirty" compared to modern velomobiles, but was still probably thirty times better than a bike or ebike.  That made an astonishing difference.  Once rolling, cruising at twenty five miles per hour was easier than fifteen on a bicycle.  

 

Velomobiles are difficult to get up to speed.  Stop and go driving is far from fun.  But the problem vanishes with electric assist plus,  in stop and go  riding you can recover much of that energy using regenerative braking.³

 

Properly executed they offer some protection from the elements and storage space for a few grocery bags.  In cold weather you don't need a heater because you're pedaling away at with about 300 watts of waste heat (a human pedaling a bike is about 75% efficient) - more than enough to heat a small enclosed volume.  In the Summer you can use the motor more and open the lid.  And you can run on the order of a hundred of them with the same amount of energy your family car needs.  It would place a very small load on the grid... so low that no changes would be required.

 

There are issues with infrastructure as they're larger than bikes. You're not going to sling one over your shoulder and carry it up to the office.  It may be they're more useful for longer commutes and suburban use.  You can fit about six of them in the parking space necessary for a car.  Currently non-electricxs are handmade and go from $5,000 to $12,000 - about the price of a high end road bike.  In moderate production that could quickly drop below $4,000 even with electric assist.  

 

The most interesting e-velomobile I've seen is the eWAW from a small company in Belgium. It has a carbon fiber roll cage/frame, very light weight (33 kg with motor and battery) and a very low center of gravity for cornering and stability.  It has a tiny 250 watt motor and a lithium ion battery about three times as big as what's in your laptop.   It will go nearly 100 miles on just battery power.   All of these numbers could be improved, but it's quite impressive as is..  Improving the breed would be a great project for a mechanical engineering class.  Back of the envelopes suggest it could be very safe under 30 mph assuming calmed traffic - potentially safer than a conventional bike.

 

It wouldn't be the best first for all areas .. nothing is.  The US is particularly unfriendly to cycling, but I wonder how this would work in the many cities with populations under 100,000 that often have large areas with 25 or 30 mph speed limits? 

 

Cities are beginning to realize curbspace is some of their most important real estate and I think part of the mix to deal with traffic in the future is to take into account the area a vehicle takes up when figuring out how to charge for road and parking use.  Bicycles are set to capitalize on this. I'd had discussions with two cities in the EU that are thinking in terms of banning cars from city centers and relying on bikes, and in one case, velomobiles, as important elements of access.   It is likely the future will not play out as tech writers suggest it will.

 __________

¹ She isn't an ideal case.. she's very tall and the bicycle had upright handlebars giving her a lot of projected surface area.  Here's an earlier bit on bike efficiency.

² The coefficient of drag or C_d multiplied by the area facing the oncoming air.   On a bike the C_d is 0.8 to 1.0 and the area is about a square meter.  On a velomobile the C_d is generally under 0.15 and the projected area is about a third of a square meter.  You can push much lower.. the human powered land speed record car - the Canadian Eta - has a C_d of 0.03 and an non athlete could easily power it to normal legal highway speeds in the US.  I wrote about it earlier. 

³ Turn the motor into a generator slowing you down and charging your battery.

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

I'm in

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

tick tick tick tick tick

 

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

 

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

 

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

 __________

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

__________

Recipe corner

 

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

 

Gooey Tomato Sandwich

 

Ingredients

 

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

° 2 garlic finely mined cloves

° 1 tsp capers

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

° 2 tsp red wine vinegar

° some red pepper flakes'

° a dozen or so fresh basil leaves 

° a few fresh parsley leaves  (or substitute whatever)

° a really nice fresh baguette or similar fine white bread

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

 

Technique

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

making things and change

Twenty years ago an anthropologist in my department was studying the relationship between teenagers and technologies - specifically how they adapted to new technologies quickly sometimes developing novel uses not seen by the inventors.  She observed that although adults assumed the kids had some natural deep knowledge, in fact the teen models of how the technologies worked was paper thin and often wrong.   The skill was a facility to use the technology.  They were effectively technology idiot savants.  

 

In a way we are all idiot savants with technology.  On the desert island none of us could build even the simplest integrated circuit from sand, let alone something as simple as a steel knife.  Civilization is built on accumulated knowledge with deep knowledge necessary for making being mostly narrow and isolated.  Understanding how and where production methods can be used is essential in any kind of manufacturing. How would you go about making Saran Warp?  How about a glass bottle? Where would hydrodynamic machining be useful?  What are the variations of forming sheet metal?  How do production techniques scale? When do you invest in an entirely new technique?   Making It: Manufacturing Techniques for Product Design by Chris Lefteri is a terrific book.  It isn't very deep - a page or two for a few hundred techniques, but Lefteri's explanations and illustrations are very clear and give a sense of what might be appropriate for a wide variety of products and scales.  As a bonus you'll probably be the only person in your circle who knows about jiggering and jollying.  Go for the 2^nd edition physical book.  The ebook is a disappointment.

 

Which brings us to Tesla.  It was suggested I say something about the 'revolutionary' Model 3 given the fact that about 350 thousand people gave Tesla a thousand dollar interest free loan in exchange for a place in line for a car that hasn't been publicly tested and probably won't be produced in any volume until well into 2018.

 

I don't consider any of the Teslas to be revolutionary.  I don't mean to take anything away from them - their cars are among the best in the world and they've managed to built an incredibly strong aspirational brand.  If you want to make a car in low volume and don't worry too much about cost or making a profit, you can take a route similar to that of the Roadster ..  buy a roller from an established company (Lotus), bolt on an electric power train assembled from off-the-shelf components, bolt on a body and focus the engineering on something that would surprise people.  None of this is easy, but it can be done a few dozen engineers, a few years of hard work, good timing and the right financial backers.  In fact a similar approach is used by many of the few dozen boutique supercar and hypercar makes.  

 

The Model S was an exercise in understanding limited conventional production.  Again there is no innovation (other than perhaps the sales model, but that exists outside of the US).  There were teething problems, but they managed to keep their well-healed customers delighted and focused on performance that is desirable to that nice.  It gives you the ability to build a nearly five thousand pound car that can accelerate nearly any Ferrari or Porsche - although it can only keep up this power level for a very short time before blowing through the battery's charge.  The choice to follow a conservative path was prudent - mixing in innovation would probably have killed the company.

 

Musk has stated his goal is to get other car makers to go electric for the environment.  A noble goal and the other makers will go electric by themselves, but I doubt many people buy Teslas for being green.¹  They're buying the brand.  With the Model 3 the company has to figure out volume production and profitability.  Somehow the plant tour managed to impress the reporters, but it appears to be a rather conventional, albeit new, metal stamping facility.  It can be done - there are several existence proofs, but there are also more than a few failures.  

 

Transportation is enormously complex and has defined the layout and nature of our cities and suburbs.  Commuting takes an average of about an hour out of our day.  Some people are excited by the changes coming with self-driving cars, but general use is quite a way down the road.²  The size and energy use of a car is current fairly rigid and inefficient.  To innovate transportation you need to do something besides the powertrain as that just leaves you with a functionally equivalent vehicle.  Real change is most likely to take place in how cars are made.  After all, the last major innovation in the US came from Toyota in the 70s with high quality vehicles made using just-in-time production and enabled and educated production workers. 

 

Most cars are built using unit-body (monocoque) construction.  Metal is bent and welded together to form a structure that replaces the older technique of bolting a body to a rigid frame.  With proper design both techniques can produce safe vehicles, but unit-body is cost effective only with very large production runs.  A set of dies to make a model goes for about $450 million and has a lead time of over two years.  A maker tries to stretch out a design's life to recover the initial die cost. And this is just for one type of metal. Ford spent something north of two billion on their aluminum F-150.  They'll probably be under a half billion on the next design change, but the material change was a big one.

 

Small production runs still use welded steel frames and increasingly some form of composite construction like carbon fiber.³  There are many ways to do this, but they've been slow and expensive.  The best car production lines have a dwell time of about a minute - no production step can take longer. Carbon fiber has one step that, cure time, that is often measured in days.  Until now that is.  BMW has it down to about five minutes with the i3.  Five minutes corresponds to about 250 cars per day or something around 80,000 per year.  I'd wager five minutes will drop over the next decade.

 

The video (a tip of the hat to Horace Dediu for pointing it out) interviews Sandy Munro, principal at the legendary automobile fabrication cost analysis firm of Munro & Associates on their tear-down of the BMW i3.   They're famous for aircraft and automobile costing analysis - completely tearing down something not only to understand what went into it, but how it was made.  Sandy calls the i3 the today's Model T.  They've torn apart several hundred vehicles and this is the one that blew their minds.

 

BMW's composite tooling for the i3 is costs a third to a quarter as much as conventional unit-body tooling.  It should be quicker to bring a new model on line and you don't need to build a million units to recover your cost.  On the other hand it doesn't scale past 80,000 units per year, but perhaps the design flexibility offered by an electric vehicle offers to make a much wider range of vehicles better targeted to user needs and regions.   BMW mentioned that Apple visited for talks.  It isn't clear where the discussions went, but almost certainly i3 production technique was the central topic.

 

In a decade imagine a smaller electric car (the i1?) that has a top speed of under 35 mph and is only used in an urban environment as part of their transportation infrastructure.  Some European cities are talking about excluding gasoline cars from downtown regions.  Paris' Sunday without cars was wildly popular.   Highly constrained driverless cars will be possible in five to ten years depending on city and how strong new traffic flows can be enforced (think China and a few European cities).  They'd use much less energy to get around and pollution released in the city is little or nothing.  A city like Paris might buy a large number as an extension of their transit system - or perhaps companies would compete.    With maintenance and a modular electronic and battery design they might have a service life exceeding 30 years.  Something like this might be a plausible early major step towards autonomous vehicles. 

__________
¹ An electric car is a rather poor use of resources if your goal is reducing carbon emissions in the short term.  Given the current mix of electric power generation and localized distribution some parts of the county an electric vehicle is currently counterproductive.  But the advantages, other than limited range, are huge and it makes sense to support early production as the generation mix will hopefully become cleaner with time.  It will take awhile as fewer than ten percent of the fleet is replaced every year.  When unsubsidized prices cars with a 200 mile rang appear there will be an issue with battery production and charging facilities.  All of that will sort out, but production ramps rarely align in complex technologies.

Would I buy a Model 3 or a GM Bolt?  Perhaps.  I've driven several electrics and although I'm impressed none of them currently meet my needs and budget.  We tend to buy cars thinking about the three standard deviation uses.  The sort of thing that makes people who rarely haul things buy a large pickup.  We only have one car, but a 200 mile range certainly covers 99% of our driving.  We could rent for the outliers.  But we'll see...  

If you really want to be green that is a different conversation...  Some of the most cost effective strategies aren't obvious.  

² There will be limited use on clear and low density freeways fairly soon which will probably be followed by restricted very low speed urban use - probably beginning in China in five to ten years. What most of us will see is an increasingly smart car that helps us with the task of driving.

³ Composite covers an enormous range.  As a teenager I made composite model airplane wings with styrofoam/balsa structures.  Carbon fiber usually refers to a carbon fiber reinforced plastic. Lots of flavors, but CFRP - carbon fiber reinforced plastic - is a common variation.

Bicycles point to some of the most interesting CF construction techniques and CF bikes are now the norm in the over $2k class of road bike.   I don't like the ride quality compared with some of the more exotic steel and titanium frames, but that's just personal taste.  There is no arguing with the fact that carbon frames are lighter weight.

___________

no recipe today, but a comment on energy

 

If you divide the energy used by the country by population you find that the average American uses about 14,000 watts of power around the clock.  An electric range element on high takes about 1,500 watts - so think about almost 10 of them running constantly - that's what the average American uses.   Multiply that by the hours in a day, week or year and you get the energy used for the period.  I've attempted the calculation from the bottom up.  It turns out to be impossible to do accurately - you have to account for the embedded energy in stuff you buy the food you eat and even that used by government - but  with a few assumptions you get in the ball park.  I can account for a rough average of 14 kilowatts and Sukie and I have reduced our individual consumption to about 6,500 watts each.  Europeans tend to be in the 5 to 7 kilowatt range, so our household is sort of European.  It hasn't been easy and it would be very difficult to go lower.

 

Going vegan saves about 500 watts.  Adding 10,000 air miles adds about 1,000 watts.  (think of 15,000 miles of flying as turning on an extra electric element on a range and leaving it on constantly). Using Uber adds as the average Uber car only has a passenger for a bit more than half of the miles driven, plus urban Uber users are statistically shifting from more efficient mass transit.   Upper middle class people tend to go well over 14kW each.  Note I've avoiding talking about how that energy is produced.

 

Now think about the 14 kilowatt level. The back of the envelope way of looking at it is ~ 125,000 kWh of energy a year (a year is a bit under 9,000 hours).  If your electricity is 10 cents a kWh that's $12,500 a year.  Of course electricity is more expensive at the residential level and a bit cheaper at the industrial level.  Plus much of the energy is in the form of hydrocarbons which are less expensive (coal is a couple of cents per kWh).  In any case energy costs are often hidden, but are non-trivial.