omenti

reflecting on the moon in the pursuit of truth

It was the beginning of Spring in 2014 and there was electricity in the air. I've only seen scientific drama at that level a few times.  First the leaks and then a well-known team made a dramatic announcement.  These dramatic events can be confirmation of a radical hypothesis or sometimes it's Nature proclaiming how limited human imagination really is with something completely unexpected.  This time it appeared to be confirmation of a beautiful idea.  If it held up it would signal the potential of a new chapter in physics and cosmology.   A few people thought about shopping for suits that would be appropriate at a formal event in Stockholm.

 

For about fifty years we've known the Big Bang couldn't be the primordial event.  It was not the beginning of our Universe.   There were a conjectures ..  the most interesting came from Alan Guth who proposed an enormous mind-blowing-even-by-the-standards-of-cosmology inflation that took the Universe from something unimaginably small to something more the size of a baseball in a tiny sliver of time.  Over the years it was modified and tweaked and, although unconfirmed, many of us fell back on it to think about the pre-Big Bang because it nicely predicated what followed.  It had become a standard bias - one that people would abandon if proven wrong - but a bias nonetheless.

 

The conjecture was developed into a testable hypothesis by a few groups.¹  The first report came from an experiment at the South Pole called BICEP2 in 2014.  They saw a high quality signal that implied cosmic inflation. I noted my own excitement at the time. 

 

During the year that followed the serious skepticism of science took hold.  The team was known to be careful.  There are several things you do in any physics experiment to check your apparatus, how you handle information, biases and errors.  Ultimately you hope that someone else has a similar result with a different approach and apparatus.

 

There's a lot of preparatory work.  You need to understand what processes might mimic what you might be looking for.  Usually it's not a blind hunt..  you're guided by theory looking for something quite specific.  Discovery is finding it or finding the unexpected. It's fun to make theorists go back to the drawing board.  Most of them agree.

 

A good deal of thought and computer modeling goes into designing the experiment and understanding exactly what you should see - rediscovering well-known and agreed upon experiments.  If you can't get this foundational piece right, no one will believe you.  It turns out this step is where many of the data analysis paths are fleshed out.  This part, by the way, is where playfulness is essential.

 

You need to understand what are known as "backgrounds"  - events that mimic what you might be looking for.    There are null tests where you put a detector in a shielded box and understand the noise it produces.  These can get sophisticated.  Then there are calibrations where you see if you can measure known signals with all parts of your experiment.  Currently a hot topic in astrophysics is understanding what went on in the Universe when the first stars formed.  Unfortunately there wasn't any light - it was a dark age.  But there's a signal from hydrogen atoms that can be detected.  The process is well-known in radio astronomy and regularly used, but tuning into the dark age is leading edge work.  To sort out the background noise astronomers pointed a radio telescope at the Moon during the last lunar eclipse.  The noise component from the Sun would be missing and they'd be able to calibrate their apparatus and computational approach.  The signal was beautiful - the reflection of the rest of the Universe from the Moon.  Most of it turned out to be the Milky Way and the animated gif shows the result.

 

There are also jack-knife tests to remove regular occurring biases.   If you were studying car traffic flow you'd note rush hours are busy and weekends aren't.  So you break up the data into chunks and examine them separately to see how they compare.  The need for good enough random numbers often turns up here.

 

You constantly have to check the state of your apparatus and filters.  In an experiment of any size there's always something broken and something malfunction.  These have to be noted and accounted for.  It's not uncommon to spend a significant amount of time looking for problems.

 

Then there's the human problem.  How broad and deep is the team?  In the case of BICEP2 there wasn't any communication with people who did observational galactic astronomy.  When the results were published they noted there was a background that hadn't been accounted for.  It seemed obscure to the team and to most of us, but in the end it was nearly fatal.  The probability of discovery and confirmation dropped dramatically.  About a year later another experiment drove the nail home.  Inflation wasn't dead, but their experimental approach couldn't detect it.

 

And then there are dragons.  If someone asks you what's in your driveway and you tell them a car, both of you are generally satisfied.  But if you tell them it's a dragon ...  well then you have some explaining to do.  Reporting dragons can color fields.  A classic example came during the 60s.

 

Joe Webber was an outstanding experimental physicist who thought he had come up with a way to detect what Einstein predicted, but said would never be detected ... gravity waves.  He carefully eliminated many sources of noise and ended up seeing a signal.  He didn't have much in the way of theoretical guidance to know how big the signal was and he thought he was careful enough, so he published.

 

The problem was no one else was able to find a signal. For the next few decades no one saw anything and the field was nearly dead quiet for about thirty years.  There were theoretical hints that big advances in detector technology might find a signal and, through luck and enormous work, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory - LIGO - was born.  About twenty years later it bore fruit and an advance as important as Galileo's telescope was made.  But people had to be careful... very careful.  How do you deal with human sociology?  What if people expect something to be there - or not - and these biases get built into data taking, algorithms and the final results.  

 

They had a neat idea

 

The LIGO physicists, astrophysicists and engineers got the signal they were looking for.  About four hundred people went to work trying to prove or disprove it.  About six months later they knew they had something.  The team leaders gave their thumbs up,  champagne came out and several lengthy papers were written.   As they were getting ready to send the papers for peer review a senior researcher held a town meeting.   They had been working on a faked signal - a devilishly clever faked signal.  

 

They needed to go back and understand what they were doing at a much deeper level. They had too many biases. Since then there have been several false alarms and about a half dozen real signals.  They have developed one of the most careful cultures on the planet using their blind injection technique.

 

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Carl Sagan wrote extensively on critical thinking. Perhaps his best non-technical piece on the subject is a chapter in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.  The specific chapter is The Fine Art of Baloney Detection.   The type of skepticism is useful far beyond science...  I'm thinking of advertising, social media, politics...

 

The kit is brought out as a matter of course whenever new ideas are offered for consideration. If the new idea survives examination by the tools in our kit, we grant it warm, although tentative, acceptance. If you’re so inclined, if you don’t want to buy baloney even when it’s reassuring to do so, there are precautions that can be taken; there’s a tried-and-true, consumer-tested method.

 

he offers nine tools - read the chapter for the detail

 

Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”

Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.

Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.

Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives. What survives, the hypothesis that resists disproof in this Darwinian selection among “multiple working hypotheses,” has a much better chance of being the right answer than if you had simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.

Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.
Quantify. If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations. Of course there are truths to be sought in the many qualitative issues we are obliged to confront, but finding them is more challenging.

If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.

Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler.

Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in it is just an elementary particle — an electron, say — in a much bigger Cosmos. But if we can never acquire information from outside our Universe, is not the idea incapable of disproof? You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result.

 

He goes on and notes we are vulnerable to common pitfalls of common sense and lists twenty common ones... the list is excellent and exceptionally appropriate these days.

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¹ In the physical science rough ideas are conjectures..  If you can test them they are elevated to hypothesis.  Theory usually refers to something that is well understood and tested by several approaches. It is a fairly high bar.  In particle physics it means being observed with an uncertainty lower than one part in three million - preferably by multiple approaches.  This is one of those differences in definitions that causes confusion when communicating with the public where 'theory' usually means someone's idea -no matter how good or bad.  I'll be a bit more specific as these ideas can be used to one degree or another outside of science.

I'll add that cosmology and astrophysics produce the most mind blowing graphs I've encountered.  Math can be more dramatic, but these are trying to find a visual vocabulary to describe Nature.  

 

the crystal palace's new expansion wing

 

What is a ruby and why is it red?  Why is the friction so low on a sled? On a plot of P versus T, plot out the the phases of helium-three....

 

A favorite professor loved to craft simply stated preliminary exam questions  that happened rhyme.  Parts were often difficult - here the second question is still not fully answered.  The ruby question is good as there are layers of depth to show how much you have thought about it.

 

 Sapphire, ruby and corundum are all very stable crystalline forms of Al₂O_{3 -} aluminum oxide.¹ In ruby and sapphire a percent or so of the aluminum atoms are replaced by something else - chromium in the case of ruby.  Chromium is a bit larger  and has a different shape than aluminum.  The result is a small distortion of the arrangement of oxygens around the chromiums.  The most obvious visual difference is how the  two crystals absorb light.  The distortions change how visual light is absorbed.  Pure corundum doesn't strongly absorb, ruby absorbs in the violet and yellow-green making it appear red.² 

 

Structure is one of the features used to categorize solids.  A crystal is a solid with a structure of atoms or molecules that repeat in three dimensions with a regular pattern called a lattice - single crystal snowflakes, table salt, diamonds... Groupings of smaller crystals form polycrystals - most metals, large snowflakes, ice and ceramics are polycrystals.   Amorphous solids lack such order .. glass and almost anything organic for example.

 

Impurities in crystals lead to changes in physical properties like the colors of gem stones. But there are many ways to disrupt a pure crystal lattice.  Some locations can be empty, filled with some impurity or dislocations to the pattern of the crystal can lead to strong steel. Impurities create different electrical properties that allow semiconductors to exist - without ongoing theoretical and experimental work from the 40s, the integrated circuit wouldn't exist.  

 

Steel is largely iron with a few other things thrown in. Carbon turned out to be a big winner, but you have to get the recipe right and there are tens of thousands of variations giving a wide range of properties.  Successful recipes were carefully guarded secrets .. the special steels used in Japanese swords, steels from Toledo and Damascus became legendary.  Sometimes there was a bit of odd baggage - one recipe involved adding the urine from red-haired boys.  Serious progress had to wait for real science.  

 

It is possible to have two dimensional structures with regular repeating patterns - graphene is a single layer of hexagonally packed carbon atoms. Amazing properties that lead in a recent Nobel prize in physics.  You can easily make some yourself with a pencil and a bit of scotch tape.³

 

But it gets stranger...

 

It is natural for a physicist to think in more than three dimensions.  Space-time, the structure of space and time  we live in, has four dimensions.  Other more abstract  hypotheses have eight, nine, eleven, twenty six. Calculations can have large numbers of dimensions. Sometimes this is practical in the real world - cryptology and cellphone modulation schemes both make use of higher dimensionalities.

 

So it is natural to think of a four dimensional crystal -- one in space and time.  And usually, for a variety of reasons, you quickly rule it out as non-physical.  Afew years ago Frank Wilczek didn't throw it away and presented the idea of a time crystal that exists in four dimensions.  The physical pattern is be stable, but a property of it repeats in time. Instead of regularly repeating atoms there would be a regularly repeating internal motion.

 

It was very controversial - it looked like a perpetual motion machine, but  loophole was spotted.  Properties like electron spin might  bunch up in direction at regular intervals in time ..  a repeating lattice in time.  As crazy as it sounds a few groups tried to make their own time crystals and two appear to have succeeded with papers passing peer review and due out in the near future.   Here's one of the early papers and a high level  description.  Much more is likely to emerge in the next few months.

 

Apart from being beautiful it has the potential to be incredibly useful.  Quantum computing has the fundamental challenge of maintaining entanglement over time in a macroscopic object.  It could be that time crystals are a mechanism to successfully address the problem and who knows what else... perhaps years, perhaps decades, perhaps never...

 

ah the frontier

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¹ In pure corundum three electrons from each aluminum join with six O^2- ions in an octahedral group.  The aluminums are left without unpaired electrons and their energy levels are filled.  This configuration is exceptionally stable and strong and is also colorless.

² There is also a fluorescent emission in the red making the crystals beautifully red.  This emission property is central to making lasers out of rubies.  

³ rather than tell you, just watch this:)

 

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Recipe Corner

 

Not a recipe, but a bit of technique.  It's Winter and that means reasoning with hard Winter squashes.  I find it's much easier if you par-cook (not boil) them for a few minutes.  Find a big enough pot and let it simmer for two or three minutes.  If the squash is larger than the pot, just turn it over.

That's it.  Now it should slice easily.  Something frustrating becomes easy.

aim down from the mind and go for the heart

 

There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three — storyteller, teacher, enchanter — but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.

To the storyteller we turn for entertainment, for mental excitement of the simplest kind, for emotional participation, for the pleasure of traveling in some remote region in space or time. A slightly different though not necessarily higher mind looks for the teacher in the writer. Propagandist, moralist, prophet — this is the rising sequence. We may go to the teacher not only for moral education but also for direct knowledge, for simple facts… Finally, and above all, a great writer is always a great enchanter, and it is here that we come to the really exciting part when we try to grasp the individual magic of his genius and to study the style, the imagery, the pattern of his novels or poems.

The three facets of the great writer — magic, story, lesson — are prone to blend in one impression of unified and unique radiance, since the magic of art may be present in the very bones of the story, in the very marrow of thought. There are masterpieces of dry, limpid, organized thought which provoke in us an artistic quiver quite as strongly as a novel like Mansfield Park does or as any rich flow of Dickensian sensual imagery. It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass.

- from Vladimir Nabokov's Lectures on Literature

 

Seven years ago I gave the first of what became a series of about fifteen public talks about energy.  I had been worrying about global warming since the mid 90s and was at the point where speaking in public felt necessary. I'm not a good public speaker, but  improved with time with the question and answer sessions often taking more than an hour.  Most of the questions centered on what could be done at the individual level.  It became clear that many people lacked the background to sort out the costs and rewards of their actions.    

 

I thought a short energy primer would make a difference.  People seemed interested and some good conclusions could be made with a bit of a toolkit.  The talk shifted more towards energy education, but still had global warming as the main draw. I thought I was making progress - there wasn't any rotten fruit and a few places even invited me back for a second talk.

 

It is probably true that you can get one or two concepts across in a one hour talk.  The idea of a book written for the intelligent non-STEM reader began to gel.   I partnered with a smart friend who could write, but had no background in science or engineering.  Between the two of us perhaps we could find the right level.  

 

Early on she made a very important observation about how people perceived energy. It struck her that no one thinks in terms of energy, but most of us have an intuitive understanding of power - the rate at which energy is being converted from one form to another.¹  It was a great observation and gave us a foundation. Ask much as possible we would frame energy use in terms of power - something people often have control over - and we would try to keep as close to the human scale as possible rather than trying to impress people with the enormous scale of the system.  After all, we were hoping to speak to individual actions.

 

I have the bad habit of tending towards fundamental explanations where a quick paragraph would probably do. It was difficult finding the right level and still be different from a hundred other good books.  Not only was it difficult to find the right level, but it was also becoming clear that energy education, at least what happens in a book, wasn't going to have much impact.  Another friend kept reminding us that anything aimed at a mass general audience probably had to be video - and probably short youtube pieces at that.

 

This was difficult for someone like me to grapple with.  Putting together videos is far beyond what I could do.  It was also a bit depressing seeing the growing pushback against science.  There was  overwhelming evidence.  But that isn't important in a climate of unscientific doubt.  Asking people to recognize the risk and make a change requires much more than understanding what has been learned. We dropped work on the book.   A new journey was necessary.  She proceeded down her path of working with people at the individual level and I continued to speak, but now I was spending a lot of time talking to social scientists, science educators and film makers.  There was much to understand, but a few issues stood out:

 

Why do people ignore solid scientific evidence? 

How do you communicate something this important that is also technical?  

How does change happen?

How badly will we fail?²

 

The rejection of climate science appears to be cultural.  Concern is  high in sea level countries like Bangladesh and island nations that are impoverished and poorly shielded from disaster. Change is happening now.  A few bad crops or a bad storm and that's it.  But the abundance in wealthy nations allows us to distance ourselves from the immediate impact of Nature. A bad hurricane may kill a few people and destroy a billion dollars worth of property and raise prices by a tiny amount, but for the average citizen its something forgotten in a week or two.  People living in a wealthy climate change conflicted nation like the US have several issues to deal with:

 

distance in time, space and psychology Many of the predictions are distilled to a sound-bite:  sea level will rise by one or two meters by 2100.  Even 2050 seems a huge step into the far future.   Most new parents aren't thinking about their children's college education, let alone their retirement - events on a much shorter scale.  Change is taking place in the Antarctica and Arctic, but they're physically far away and we don't see dramatic changes happening locally.  We think of the others who are responsible as groups and ourselves as individuals.  The distance between us and the problem has several dimensions and each component seems too large to be important in our lifetimes.

 

gloom and doom Most global warming communication aimed at the citizen is gloom and doom.  The last polar bear standing on a shrinking piece of ice in the Arctic Ocean...  It is well known that fear inducing communication instills makes people more passive.  If you're feeling guilty you often compartmentalize and ignore problems.  

 

cognitive dissonance  Most of us are aware that that the use of fossil fuel is at the root of the problem, but we go about our lives flying, driving, cooking, eating meat and so on.  When we try to think of solutions we have to deal with this cognitive dissonance and the default is often weakening the link ....  It's mostly the Chinese who use so much coal. I don't drive much, but my neighbor has two SUVs,  I know someone who flies 50,000 miles a year...  Fox News tells me there is doubt among scientists that CO₂ even causes global warming...  It is so cold this Winter...  We can ignore the problem because science will solve the problem without any effort from us...

 

If people intellectually partner with the doubters and minimizers, they have created a way to ignore their cognitive dissonance.  Some political and corporate forces are skilled at exploiting this bit of human psychology. 

 

denial It is convenient for some to outright deny the problem.  In some ways this is a deepening of our psychological mechanism for dealing with cognitive dissonance.  We are defining ares that we've chosen not to deal with.   Curiously those who are well educated are often more skilled when it comes to denying something outside of their expertise than less educated people.  

 

Another interesting bit of psychology is at work.  If you try to get people to change by criticizing them, they often build a stronger resistance as part of their denial.  I admire them. but I've come to believe a good deal of the messaging from self described greens has been extremely counterproductive^.3  

  

At one point I was speaking to a group of several hundred animators.  I was expecting a lot of good questions and had some good examples on changing a lifestyle at the personal level and politics above.  I thought I was communicating.  Halfway through the talk it struck me I was in one of storytelling's sacred places.  The entrance of the building had a three story soccer's hat.  This was the place that produced Bambi.  I didn't have anything important to say to these storytellers. I stopped with words and emotion took over.  I hadn't thought about that film for years.   Suddenly it was back.  I had seen at a special time and, against all odds, my heart told me I could no longer eat meat.  It wasn't logic, it wasn't science, it was just a flight my mind had taken while I was part of the story.  It took about two minutes to regain my composure and I thanked them for changing my life and wondered out loud if they could do it again - this time on a more pressing problem.

 

 If there is to be change we need great stories. Positive messages that go directly to the heart.  I'm not a good storyteller, so I try and partner with those who are.  Not everything we tried worked - making a film is expensive and can fail at many steps.  But it is clear to me now that you must speak to someone's heart than their head.  

 

Nabokov continues...

 

Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him. That the poor little fellow because he lied too often was finally eaten up by a real beast is quite incidental. But here is what is important. Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives. From the simple deception of propagation to the prodigiously sophisticated illusion of protective colors in butterflies or birds, there is in Nature a marvelous system of spells and wiles. The writer of fiction only follows Nature’s lead.

Going back for a moment to our wolf-crying woodland little woolly fellow, we may put it this way: the magic of art was in the shadow of the wolf that he deliberately invented, his dream of the wolf; then the story of his tricks made a good story. When he perished at last, the story told about him acquired a good lesson in the dark around the camp fire. But he was the little magician. He was the inventor.

 

I can encourage and partner with the storytellers, but there is another path.  What if impactful change can be had by encouraging new behaviors that don't address global warming directly?  Consider meat eating.  

 

Making meat is enormously inefficient - corn to cow, under ideal conditions, is about ten percent efficient and that doesn't count the energy inefficiency and environmental impact of intense corn cultivation.  A few people have meatless Mondays and a vanishingly small percent are vegan or vegetarian, but these are non-trivial behavioral shift.  What if less impactful food was more appealing?

 

Worldwide it we rely on about 150 plants for food with about 70% of food energy coming from three crops - rice, corn and wheat.  Nature offers much more - about 50,000 crops are edible.  It would take time, but moving further into the space of the 150 known and beginning to experiment with what may be amazing flavor combinations in the great unknown may shift a non-trivial percentage of meat based meals back to something with a smaller impact on global warming.  Maybe it makes sense to encourage outstanding chefs to experiment and create a desire...

 

There are so many other ways.  In California a program of subsidized low income housing incorporates solar arrays.  The power is not quite enough to cover internal use, but conservation is encouraged by a box with a few colors of light.  If you are close to being a net exporter of power, your utility bill is $5 a month - otherwise you pay the full rate.  People quickly become expert at conservation.  It may not be cost effective now and there are questions about home solar arrays, but it is an example...  You can say the same about automatic thermostats and those with utility overrides.

 

There is active transportation ... and so many other possibilities.  You can probably sit down and make a different list on your own.  It may be that serious opportunity for the environment as well as business lurk in such lists and some of it may not be technical.  I remain very hopeful that change will occur, but have come to believe much of it will be done for reasons other than 'being green'...

 

In the meantime I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to talk about power and energy.  Education isn't the direct path to change in the short term, but it is still useful.  Every once and awhile I'll probably write a bit here.  Who knows.  Perhaps there should be a podcast or a series of videos.  Maybe it is worth trying...

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¹ Her analogy is energy is the gas in your car, power is what happens when you push down on the accelerator.  A more technical explanation is power is the rate at which energy is converted from one form to another.  In any event her point was we physically sense power by how we use our muscles.  How much we need to eat is less immediate and more abstract.

² Given the amount of carbon that has been burned and the fact it stays in the atmosphere for so long guarantees a temperature rise, and more importantly a swift rise, that we are guaranteed some pain.  How much depends on mitigation.   At the same time we need to sort out how to adapt.  Wealthy nations will be able to afford some adaptation - think of it as a tax on our children based on our non-action.  It will be much more expensive than a successful mitigation effort, but we're not paying.  There will also be a lot of companies that get rich from the work.   At the same time there will be hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of people who will lose.  As we've learned in the past 20 years that may have consequences far beyond their local hardship.

³ It would be hypocritical for me to claim to be green.  My personal rate of energy use is 6.5 to 7.0 kW.  While this is low for an American, it is far from what is needed given the current energy mix I use.  It was as far as I could easily go given my financial resources and resolve.  I have a young friend in Cameroon who is probably under 0.5 kW.  That would be green in my book, although she'd never call herself that.  It is also an unfortunate way to be green.

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Recipe Corner

 

There are many ways to go on this potato salad.  It goes for olive oil rather than mayo and picks up much of its salt from olives.  

 

Potato Salad

 

Ingredients

 

° about a pound of waxy potatoes cut into inch-ish cubes - I like the skin, but peel them if you don't

° 1/2 pound of trimmed green beans cut into inch long pieces

° 1/2 cup of olive oil

° 2 tbl red wine vinegar

° 1 mined shallot

° 1 tsp minced garlic

° 1 tsp Dijon mustard

° 1/2 cup pitted olives, chopped.  I used cheap black olives, but fancy olives would be better

° 1 pt of cherry tomatoes, halved

° salt

° freshly ground pepper

 

Technique 

 

° Bring the potatoes to boil in a large pot with enough water to cover them by about an inch.  Throw in a pinch of salt (1/4 tsp?) Lower the heat to just below boiling and cook for about 6 or 7 minutes until just tender.  

° Add the green beans and cook until potatoes are somewhat tender and the beans are brightly colored - another 4 or 5 minutes.  Drain and rinse in cold water in a colander for about a minute

° Combine the oil, vinegar, garlic, shallot and mustard in a large bowl with some ground pepper and a bit of salt.  Mix in the potatoes and beans along with the tomatoes and olives.  Adjust the seasoning as necessary

 

one of the four great chinese innovations

As I paged through the old book, a paper slid out and fell to the floor...

 

The book was a bound collection of magazine articles on the development of television and may have been from a personal library as there were several volumes from the late 1920s to the beginning of WWII.  The text was underlined and the margins were full of notes, drawings, schematics, simple equations, and a few ripped pieces of paper as page markers.  Hardly pristine, but much more interesting.  Unfortunately I wasn't able to find any indication of who the author was.

 

The piece of paper was more interesting.  A  folded letter without envelope, it was in a different hand from the book's annotations and was signed V. Zworykin. The salutation didn't ring a bell, but maybe it was the book's owner.   It was dated 1931 and mostly devoted to a hand-drawn schematic  of what appeared to be the electronics to drive the coils of a cathode ray tube for a television camera.  There was also an artifact that appeared to be a coffee stain.

 

So much and so little.  

 

About that time Vladimir Zworykin, one of the two principal inventors of a practical television system, was doing fundamental work for David Sarnoff at RCA.  There was a good deal of industrial intrigue as the other inventor - Philo Farnsworth - was on a better track, but ultimately was ripped off by Sarnoff - the techno robber baron of the day.  It was a tiny window into a period of white hot technology development and competition from a period where standards and a winner had not yet emerged.  

 

The book struck me as too expensive so I tucked the paper back into the book and returned it to its shelf.  A month later I changed my mind and drove back to Princeton.  The book was still there, but the paper was missing.

 

Paper is a remarkable technology.  Writing on high quality low acid paper stored in a low humidity environment should last for thousands of years.  There are thousands of varieties ranging from extremely inexpensive disposable paper to the finest stationery and photographic stock.  When used with a pen or pencil the user experience can be a delight for both writer and reader.  There is a certain magic in the lost note from the hand and age of someone who is no longer around and a handwritten letter from a friend can amplify its written message.

 

My sister is an artist with a taste for fine inks and fountain pens.  I like pen and ink but she has been trying to get me to come over to a proper writing instrument. I'd do it but I have a poor hand posture that causes problems with the nib.  I do appreciate good paper for letters, back of the envelop calculations and sketching.  Nothing in the digital world comes close.

 

We tend to think of plants as machines for converting light from the Sun into energy locked in the chemical bonds of a sugar.  In fact they go way beyond that making very specialized materials like the cellulose that are important structural elements that give them shape  Cellulose is a polysaccharide - a long chain of linked sugars.¹   Molecular chains attach to form thin microfibrils which, in turn, bundle to form thicker microfibrils that are a few microns long - end to end a few dozen would be about as long as the diameter of an average human hair.  These, glued together with other engineered materials, are stitched together to give the plant its strength and shape. Fantastic self assembling nano-engineering.

 

The trick to making paper is to form a wet mass of cellulose and dry it to form a fiber mat.  This isn't terribly difficult if you extract the cellulose from cotton, but wood is much less expensive so most of our paper starts out as a tree.

 

Wood is another remarkable substance - a composite material composed of cellulose fibers bound together by a glue called lignin.  It can be rigid and stable for centuries.  All we have to do to go from wood to paper is somehow disentangle the cellulose from the lignin - a process sometimes described as similar to getting chewing gum out of your hair.

 

There are variations but general recipe is to grind the wood into small bits and boil them with some chemicals to break the lignin bonds to free the cellulose fibers.  Separate the cellulose and you get a pulp that can be poured onto a flat surface and allowed to dry.  The result is paper and a few millennia of effort have given a large variety with very different characteristics.  You can feel a bit of texture, but at human scale it seems very flat.  Zoom in with a microscope and even at 100 times magnification its microstructure is apparent.  

 

Much can be done engineering the tangled mess to create specific papers.  Bleach it and add from chalk dust and you  get a white paper.  Coatings and process can control how deeply ink soaking into the paper - if at all.  A good stationery paper allows the ink to soak in just enough to become part of the paper forming a bit of a composite material that is very robust over time.  If the paper is too glossy the ink pools on the surface and smears, and if it is too absorbent the ink smears in the paper.  The surface roughness is engineered to give a nice interface to a pen's nib or the tip of a pencil.  People develop preferences that depend on the task.

 

Many papers have the ability to hold a crease - something lacking in most other materials.  Cellulose fibers partly break at the crease - the fibers to either side are unaffected and the amount of breakage is determined by the paper type.  Kids use of this without realizing the nanoscale realignments that are taking place under their finger tips.  Most of us are happy idiot savants when paper airplanes are being made.

 

There is far too much detail to talk about - after all, this is the result of some very clever invention and craftsmanship over a few thousand years - but I'll end with two things.

 

The 'weight' of a paper bothered me for a long time.  I usually buy a 20 pound weight, but a ream of 500 sheets weighs about five pounds on my scale.  It turns out the 8.5 x 11 inch sheets are cut from a larger sheet and 500 sheets of that weighs 20 pounds.  The ISO standard used in the rest of the world is more sensible - the weight of the paper in grams per square meter.

 

A friend realized his thesis - the work about about four years -  was going to be uninteresting to almost everyone.  He put a five dollar bill halfway through it and checked a year later to see if anyone had taken the bait.  Nothing.  After ten years he thought it would be right to sweeten the pot. For over a decade a crisp Ben Franklin has been waiting for someone along with a stamped addressed envelop and a request asking why the finder bothered to look...   Write only memory...

 

Perhaps some day I'll end up with a fountain pen. For now the act of creating personal letters is important to me and lesser tools are just fine.  I'm not terribly good at expressing myself in words, but personal letters are rare these days and the act of writing is special.

 

“GOOSE, n. A bird that supplies quills for writing. These, by some occult process of nature, are penetrated and suffused with various degrees of the bird's intellectual energies and emotional character, so that when inked and drawn mechanically across paper by a person called an "author," there results a very fair and accurate transcript of the fowl's thought and feeling. The difference in geese, as discovered by this ingenious method, is considerable: many are found to have only trivial and insignificant powers, but some are seen to be very great geese indeed.” - Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

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¹ (C₆H₁₀O₅)_n, where n can ranges from a few hundred to several thousand. It stores energy - it burns well, but our bodies can't metabolize it.

 

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Recipe corner

 

I was in Mesa recently and visited the Cornish Pasty Company with my niece.  They had several vegetarian and a few vegan pasties on the menu and my vegan 'southwestern' was delicious.  I've never made them before, but a reasonable way to start experimenting is to use puff pastries and fill them with savory fillings.  Traditionally these are meat and potatoes fare, but I'm having luck with mixtures of carrots, broccoli, corn, sweet potato some coconut milk and spices.  Lots of ways to go. and the pre-made wrappers make them look professional.  Sort of 400°F to get the Maillard reaction going and 20 to 30 minutes depending on how thick they are.  

Experiment away!

from the big bang theory to how to teach understanding

I’m afraid I don’t follow television very much and only saw “The Big Bang Theory” recently at the insistence of a friend.  For those who are as unaware as I was it is largely about issues of social interaction with a mostly geekish and socially maladroit cast of characters who mostly work at Caltech.¹

 

The reason I was asked to watch was to comment on the jokes and equations on the whiteboards.   They are real - although there are some pretty funny parodies on the boards at times.  The jargon is pretty good - they must have a physicist as a consultant. You can pretty much tell the subfield of physics or astronomy by looking at someone’s blackboard (note - slate blackboards are still common in physics departments) - it is sort of like a Rorschach test.

 

There are certainly people like that, but it isn’t common among the scientists I know.  You can find characters like that among the undergrads at a place like Caltech, but undergrads everywhere tend to be immature.  This isn’t what you would find among professors.

 

So even though the show is supposedly about an older crowd, it got me thinking about physics undergrads and that lead to thinking about education again.

 

The lecture as a mechanism for teaching is broken.  It goes back to the days when books were scarce and often is little more than a mechanical transcription from the lecturer’s notes to the student’s notebook.  But it can be seductive for the lecturer and I’ve fallen into that trap.  The students often seem to be paying attention and very few complain - after all - you are grading them. 

 

But lecturing isn’t very good at teaching deep concepts.

 

A few years ago I gave a large public lecture on global warming to a few mixed audiences.  Although not as polished, most of it was similar to Al Gore’s style - a superficial deluge of facts and figures.  There were some great Q&A sessions afterwards, but they were mostly unconnected with the talk.  They did seem to center on a short two minute section where I managed to engage people’s minds - in my mind almost a throwaway piece of filler that was self obvious.

 

What I realize in retrospect is that piece was self-obvious -- to a physicist who has been thinking about the subject for much of his life.  It caused me to wonder how much non-majors had learned about math or physics - even at the good Ivy League schools.  Worse - it made me wonder how much I had learned in courses outside my major and passion.

 

I tried a little experiment.  As past of my consulting I found myself talking with many CTOs.  Most of them had backgrounds in computer science, although there were some from biology and the physical sciences.  In talking with them I would subtly check to see if they knew the difference between energy and power.  Out of nine CTOs only two seemed to and both had science Ph.D.s.

 

At the time I was trying to learn a bit about the physics of volleyball to better appreciate the passion of a friend who was a professional beach volleyball player at the time.  In the process I found a nice metaphor to talk about energy and power and she quickly mastered enough of it that she understood more than most of the CTOs.  

 

By then I recognized the problem of knowing too much physics to engage an audience of more than one person who was interesting in learning about energy.  To really learn something you have to play around with and even struggle with ideas.  You test them, throw out some, modify others and - well - understand it.  I talked my athlete friend into co-authoring a book on how we use energy.

 

The project produced a few drafts in our copious spare time, but I’m not a writer and it is now on hold.  She did manage to come up with some great insight in how people think about some of these things and, in turn, that led me to bits of insight.  

 

Physics is a lovely area to consider this question of rote and shallow learning vs understanding and most of us have a view of the how the world works that we have acquired by simply living.  Many of these mental models are good enough to get by with, but turn out to be incorrect under close examination.  You can sort out what is understood and what isn’t. 

 

Others have realized this and have done great work.  My favorite is Eric Mazur of Harvard.  He discovered that his classes were getting good grades and enjoying his lectures, but they were failing to understand the concept.  He experimented and introduced some remarkable changes.  

 

A few days ago I sent a link to a video of Eric talking about his learnings to a few friends who are interesting in the process of education.  Kelly noted her favorite part was when he said “You can forget facts, but you cannot forget understanding”

 

This is great stuff and, even though it isn’t short anyone who is interested in education should watch it. 

 

I'm still puzzled,worried and curious about this at several levels and am very interested in discussions.

 

Hopefully my talks are a bit better now and perhaps there will be enough inspiration to finish the energy book at some point - at the moment I lack the understanding of how to make it good enough that people will actually understand what is being said.  That is a very difficult challenge.  

 

I'm left with a huge hole in my education - areas where my understanding is very shallow.   But I've learned how to learn and understand, so I have the tools to tackle these areas as I have the time, need and curiosity to do so.  

 

At the moment I'm taking a break from such an attack.  I give myself the gift of two weeks of time at the beginning of the year to look into something without interruptions. These tend to be new areas for me and it is great fun.  You can't do much in a hundred hours or so, but at least you get to the point where you can form some intelligent questions and that is a proper beginning.

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¹ Caltech is a reasonably intense place.  MIT is sometimes referred to as "that place where they do humanities..."

 

 

 

a non recommendation

The right tool for the job - perhaps I can save you a bit of money...

 

Earlier in the week I attended a two day event in Manhattan that brings investors and tech industry types together.   I somewhat belong to the later group and the mixing is interesting - particularly the one-on-one conversations you find yourself in that would probably not occur outside this venue. Mixing people up is often brilliant.

 

As four people asked what I thought about Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs it seems reason to write a bit about it.  Usually I stay away from making negative comments about books as I’m not a good writer and it seems wrong to judge someone who is a successful author.  But the book has serious flaws, so here goes...

 

I bought the book with a some misgivings as his book on Einstein biography left me cold.  It was an interesting read, full of details about his life, but Isaacson struck me as an incurious author.  There were technical mistakes (I’m a physicist) and, worse, directions that should have been explored.  It may be just his style and the fact I know the field and had read several biographies (if you have a scientific bent go for Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais)¹, but it left me with enough of a distaste that I wish I would have waited a bit before making the a decision about buying it.

 

I won’t give a review, but there are numerous technical and historical mistakes.  Some quotes are incorrect (for example he has Bill Gates noting a certain type of optical media didn’t make sense because it had too short a latency) - something I don’t like to see from a “name” biographer.  Some of these indicate it was a rush job, and I’m sure it was so it could be on the market at the optimal time, but deeper problems lurk.

 

Jobs told Isaacson he wanted him as the biographer as he could get people to talk.  Fair enough.  A remarkable range of people were interviewed and Isaacson appeared to have great freedom.  The problem is that Isaacson wasn’t curious.  He was getting bits and pieces of a larger story and failed to pursue several interesting paths.  The whole book felt like a series of Time magazine articles stapled together.  If he had been curious and followed these leads the book may have given real insight into how Jobs thought and how Apple, under Jobs, functioned.  As it is there is little new information on those subjects.

 

The personal side of Jobs is something that is of interest and perhaps he got more of this right.  Jobs does come over as the nasty self-important jerk many have reported, but I didn’t get any insight on how this was important to Apple and Pixar.  It didn’t seem to go deep enough.  There are aspects of his personality that I have been exposed to in a few meetings as well as one-on-one conversations that were simply missing.  I saw a bit of the nasty side, but not much.  What struck me was how intellectually curious he could be and how he took delight in playing with concepts.  I was struck by his sense of humor and think that may have been part of how he interacted with people. 

 

I wish someone who understood the industry and happened to be very curious had been anointed as the chief biographer.  To do a reasonable job would probably require quite a bit of time after Jobs’ death.  It seems like a lost opportunity.  Hopefully people close to him will write.  I’d love to hear what Jony Ive would say.  In the meantime we'll probably see more tone-deaf pieces like Gladwell's New Yorker essay on the "tweaker" ...

 

The book did serve the purpose of making it as a best-seller and perhaps that was the primary intention.   

 

I can’t recommend it if you are trying to understand Jobs more deeply and particularly if you want to understand the history of Apple, NeXT and Pixar.

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The flaws of the book  did make me think about what Amazon’s Kindle Fire is. 

 

Apple is very good at discovering the core of something and moving towards simplicity.

 

I have a tendency to disregard consumer electronic reviews from industry pundits.  The lens they view the world from is often that of the engineer, which is one of the reasons Apple has been so successful.  Most of Apple’s competitors are primarily engineering companies making it easy for Apple.  Apple moves towards simplicity and the competition doesn't.  Apple has done a lot of things right, but probably not as much as it seems.  Some of their luster comes from the fact their competition is ill-equipped to make great products.  It is good to have incompetent competition.

 

If someone who understands the space comments, I listen.  Marco Arment does understand tech and user experience. His review, combined with notes from a few user experience people, tell me the Fire is an incompetent tablet measured by the bar set by the iPad.  You would do much better spending your $200 on a used first generation iPad.  You probably don't want to gift one.

 

Perhaps the real question is: "what is the Fire?"  It may look like a tablet, but perhaps it isn’t. 

 

The iPad wasn’t really a tablet as envisioned by Microsoft and many who believed Microsoft’s vision dismissed it initially.  It was a collection of functionality that would be useful to someone who is moving around a house and holding something as they would hold a magazine.  It was also initially seen as a consumption device, but it has much more flexibility and is finding new uses.  The iPad is evolving and creating new niches even now.

 

My gut tells me the Kindle is a pure consumption device that strongly ties you to Amazon.  It is a key piece of their evolving platform and, as such, can be somewhat orthogonal to the iPad class of tablet.  Think of it as an Amazon vending machine that you can carry around.  A machine that Amazon gets you to buy.  Pretty neat for them if they can make it work.  At this point it appears there are issues that may render it frustrating as a vending machine.  Amazon will have to address them if they want to grow their platform.  It probably makes sense for them to support iPads and Android devices too - after all, those are just customers coming in through different doors.

 

It will be interesting to revisit this in six months. 

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¹ If you want to get a sense of how revolutionary Einstein's ideas are I would recommend learning a bit of special relativity if you haven't tackled it.  It only requires high school level math and is is exceptionally clear and logical.  You get a much deeper insight by playing with it rather than just reading about it.

Similarly trying to design a simple interface to something can be an incredible learning experience.  I've done a few and have found it humbling, but I've learned a lot with each try.  

Passive interaction does not lead to depth in a subject. You need to go out and engage in a bit of play.

 

 

change comes to cookbooks

This past week I found myself struggling with a technology that people have predicted is “just around the corner” for the past fifteen years.¹  While it has some limited usefulness, it will probably remain out of reach despite the wishes of its enthusiasts.  

 

At the same time it struck me that the cookbook is something that is undergoing enormous change.  A few widely available technologies - iPads and apps - have created a platform for a very inexpensive and useful sort of amateur education.

 

We probably have several hundred cookbooks. In the past year I’ve been buying some cooking applications for my iPhone and Sukie’s iPad.  The genre is still developing.  Mark Bittman has three applications that are not much more than conversions of his excellent existing books into searchable format that fits well on the iPhone’s screen.  They are extremely useful when I’m walking through the market and see some outstanding produce that is in need of inspiration.  I can quickly find recipes and pick up other ingredients while I’m at the store.  They are also cheap at about a quarter the price of his physical books.  More useful and less expensive is a good combination. Others have discovered this and his apps are in the million sales range.  Not bad for repurposing existing content.  It is a shame he doesn’t own the rights to his excellent The Minimalist series.  He created dozens of excellent videos that would be fantastic in the kitchen on an iPad.  The New York Times is missing an opportunity by not creating an app that would put this series where it is useful.  I'm hoping Mark is creating new video content on his own as he is a great teacher.

 

Mario Batali's app goes a bit further ...  He has a few recipes and the scope is much more limited than Mark Bittman's apps, but he has some polished videos showing technique.  It is aimed at the beginning cook, but is better than any television cooking show I’ve seen as it is usable in the kitchen and searchable - plus, like Bittman’s, you can use it for inspiration.

 

Other celebrity chefs have jumped on the bandwagon.  Jamie Oliver has an app for quick meals and Dorie Greenspan has a great baking techniques app.

 

The genre is still developing and cooking schools are filling a need - The Culinary Institute of America has a fine $50 app called the Professional Chef  that teaches some series technique with well produced videos.  It and an iPad may teach you much more than cooking lessons for the same price. You can also buy it in smaller bits - something useful to me as I don't eat meat.  

 

I’m aware of several very interesting app projects underway - connections to other cooks and authors are being investigated and applications along with applications that learn your interests and abilities.  Some have built in timers and recipe conversion calculators.  You can dream up a lot of other possibilities and many experiments are underway.  I expect dramatic change in the next year.

 

This is a type of book that just works better on a tablet or phone.  Some are going to be better for carrying around in the store and others - particularly those with video instruction - are going to be better in the kitchen.

 

A seriously good personal chef told me she has converted a few hundred of her recipes to pdf and has them, along with photos of many, on her iPad.  She also can easily calculate nutrition labels for what she makes using an inkjet printer in her truck for the final label.  She said it has fundamentally changed how she interacts with clients and has improved her business.  She's telling home cooks the two most important tools they should buy are a good chef's knife and an iPad.

 

Several do-it-yourself activities are more practical on an iPad than in printed form.  Some applications are appearing for home repair, dress making, crafts, photography, and probably much more.  For a modest amount of money any expert in some DIY field can contract with an app writer and a videographer and have a product.  There will probably be explosive growth.

 

At this point in time apps on tablets make more sense than direct Internet connections due to connectivity issues - plus there is a well established market.  This is a great example of a major change in education.  

 

Inexpensive and effective ongoing education for the motivated amateur.  How great is that?

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¹ 3d printing...  grrrr