omenti

sometimes you need one heck of a butterfly

In the early 60s Edward Lorenz was working on one of the first computational weather prediction models.  Many of the early explorers, new to computer programming, were getting bitten by limits of the machines and software.   Lorenz, the story goes, was running a numerical computer model to redo a weather prediction from the middle of the previous run as a shortcut. He entered the initial condition shortening it in a way he didn't think would matter given the accuracy it was measured to (say 0.504 rather than 0.504103)

 

"At one point I decided to repeat some of the computations in order to examine what was happening in greater detail. I stopped the computer, typed in a line of numbers that it had printed out a while earlier, and set it running again. I went down the hall for a cup of coffee and returned after about an hour, during which time the computer had simulated about two months of weather. The numbers being printed were nothing like the old ones. I immediately suspected a weak vacuum tube or some other computer trouble, which was not uncommon, but before calling for service I decided to see just where the mistake had occurred, knowing that this could speed up the servicing process. Instead of a sudden break, I found that the new values at first repeated the old ones, but soon afterward differed by one and then several units in the last decimal place, and then began to differ in the next to the last place and then in the place before that. In fact, the differences more or less steadily doubled in size every four days or so, until all resemblance with the original output disappeared somewhere in the second month. This was enough to tell me what had happened: the numbers that I had typed in were not the exact original numbers, but were the rounded-off values that had appeared in the original printout. The initial round-off errors were the culprits; they were steadily amplifying until they dominated the solution." ¹

 

Small changes to an input that was iterated many times created a big change in the output. He presented it at a conference causing someone in the audience to comment a single flap of a seagull's wings could change the weather forever.  Lorenz started using that in his talk changing it to the more poetic single flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil setting off a tornado in Texas.

 

The image resonated with many existing notions about complex systems including science fiction where a time traveler steps on a bug and returns to a vastly changed future.  From there it has managed to become an embedded concept - usually used to describe chaotic and large inefficient systems.  The problem is it isn't always true. In fact it's usually false.

 

Chaotic systems are often less sensitive to change than other systems.  Run a stream of water in your sink.  The motion in the flow is extremely chaotic - no computer could keep up with the details.  Stick your finger in for a second.  The overall flow changed while your finger was present, but quickly returned to its normal chaotic level almost immediately after you took it out. 

 

The climate system is extraordinarily complex. Predicting weather in advance has made incredible progress thanks to better models, hardware, and software.  It turns out there's probably a limit to how far models can predict based on fundamental changes in the atmosphere.  They aren't butterflies.  Butterfly wing flaps are quickly dampened out by thermal motions of the surrounding air.  To make a change you need big butterfly - a really big butterfly ..  the equivalent of several massive thunderstorms taking place in areas you can't predict ahead to the necessary accuracy.  A butterfly flap equivalent of several thermonuclear explosions.²

 

Inefficient complex systems tend to heal themselves.  The Internet, the way food used to be grown and distributed .. almost any large scale process before it was made "efficient" .. tend to be much more robust than efficient systems where "wasteful" redundancy has been removed.  I worry we're witnessing some of that now as the result of a large perturbation to numerous systems.

 

People often come away with the idea that you can manipulate a large complex system if you only can figure out what breed of butterfly to use and exactly when and where to turn it loose.  It's a fool's errand.  Instead you need to study these systems to learn if it is possible to steer them and how you might do it.  The real insight may be you need to change the system itself rather than its inputs.  

 

The same is true for complex efficient systems.  A very small change can crash them.  High efficiency can be the enemy of robustness. Of course systems can be too inefficient - the trick is to find the right balance to build robust systems.

 

________

It's easy to build simple systems where butterflies are very effective.  Lorenz's weather program was simple and easily influenced and it's really easy to find simple expressions that are hair trigger sensitive.³

 

__________
 

¹ E. N. Lorenz, The Essence of Chaos, U. Washington Press, Seattle (1993), page 134

² a few times 10¹⁵ J - several hundred kilotons to one megaton.  A large thunderstorm is in the ballpark.

³ I won't spell it out, but if you're comfortable with differential equations consider y'' - y = 0  (say y(t) is position as a function of time) with the initial conditions y(0) = 1 and y'(0) = -1.  The solution is simple and predictable.  

Now imagine you have a measurement error and y'(0) = -1 ± ε  where ε is small.  Different, eh?  :-)

 

 

beyond birding

There are a number of ways to learn about systems, but you're usually stuck with observation and modeling when it comes to complex systems.  Every now and again systems you're interested in get a large wack. Fires in California are an example of localized system perturbations.  Reactions may or may not be what you had expected, but you can learn if you observe carefully.

 

COVID-19 has given a lot of systems that involve humans a major wack.  There has been a major drop in transportation and the power production curves have shifted.  Online education with a large variety of techniques will result in some failures and perhaps some successes. How effective are different appraoches and in what context?  How effective is telemedicine?  What happens when you delay elective surgery?  What is the outcome of delaying treatment for a variety of conditions?  What approaches work for dealing with pandemics?  What forms of government are effective for restoring economies? How much socialization do children and adults require? 

 

We live in a suburban area, but normally crepuscular animals are wandering around in daylight.  Which ones and why?  The sound levels in the woods are very different.  I'll be recording and labeling sound ambient sound levels and seeing how they change as this goes on and as we come out of it.  Many animal populations have been hurt by human activity.  Will some make a comeback and how quickly will they fade as we go back to business as usual.

 

It's easy to make long lists.  If you're so inclined there are any number of activities where amateur observation can be effective. Carefully recorded observations will be important even if you don't know what to do with them now.   Bird watching and amateur astronomy could be a model - amateur observations have turned out to be very important over time.  

 

Some of these activities could be great for curious kids and others may give business and life changing insights to adults.  And it's a lot more fun than sitting back and watching tv.

 

 

 

the great reset?

I've been on the lookout for signals in this wild storm and offer a few early comments.  They aren't terribly well thought-out, so take them with a grain of salt and in the spirit of encouraging those who are more observant of change. 

 

Society didn't screech to a complete halt when an army of workers and students went home.  Communication services on the Internet are providing connection for most of us, but perhaps the nature of what we're doing is shifting. People seem to be valuing voice or video one-to-one links over text messages and email.  We're spending more time talking to people we haven't connected with in awhile.   Synchronicity with the rich non-verbal communication that comes with vocal inflections and the visual physical mannerisms that we're wired to understand are suddenly valuable again.  It's not as good as real presence, but with the mistakes, pauses, silences,  emotion and even the electric excitement of authentic human conversation it's the best many of us have.

 

Unedited imperfect personas facilitated by a network connection.  Authentic communication rather than the heavily edited unauthentic asynchronous online personas of FaceBook and Instagram.  Apart, but not alone.  What an inefficient use of attention :-)

 

A belief I've held since I began to work with anthropologists and sociologists 25 years ago  is human relationships are necessarily inefficient.  Think about walking on on a sidewalk in the Winter covered with freezing rain and the same sidewalk in the Summer - enough friction is a feature.  The drive for efficiency in many social tools ignores the need for social friction.   We've been trained to be inauthentic online.

 

Are we witnessing a shift?  If so will it last?

 

We need to make choices and perhaps now we're getting an opportunity.  Zoom is clearly more efficient and may be preferable to normal meetings for some, but what is the balance and purpose of your connection?  We should think about that.  I worry that some will see online education as "better" - I won't go into it here, but consider that disastrous for many fields.   And then there are personal assistants - I'm in agreement with Sherry Turkle: we need to think carefully about their place and the tech community is intellectually underpowered to tackle the thorny questions.

 

One more thing.  Some of us are finding a bit more time on our hands.  Be on the lookout for serendipity and seize it appears.  I was lucky this week and will keep looking.

 

Stay well and stay safe!

local mobility

Our family physician sent a note to his patients over 40 recommending cardiovascular exercise and losing excess weight as additional defenses against COVID-19.  They won't prevent you from getting it, but you'll be in better shape to fight it.  Among other things he recommended dusting off your old bike for trips to the store.  

 

I've been an advocate of human and human-electric hybrid transport for approximately forever.  Of course transportation is a system rather than a vehicle and countries like the US and Canada much needs to be done. That said, local errands and commuting are within the range of many.  There's an enormous amount of new activity in and around this area these days. Unfortunately there's a lot of bad information and products that won't meet your needs.  You need a compass to find your way.  I'll recommend two that are gold standards.

 

Horace Dediu has been doing great work promoting micromobility - vehicles from two passenger 500kg intracity electrics down to scooters as well as the physical and information infrastructures that support them.  He has a blog,  podcast, and newsletter. If you're looking for where all of this is going and it's impact on society and business, Horace is the best person around. (I'm biased - he reads this blog:)

 

But what if you're looking for something like a cargo bike?  There's been an explosion of new models, both pedal only and pedal-electric hybrid.  Unfortunately there's a lot of garbage and sorting the wheat from the chaff is difficult task.  Most bike shops cater to people interested in recreation.  They might be great at repair and understanding carbon-fibre frames and aerodynamics, but practical cargo bike experience is hard to come by.  For this flavor of micromobility my strong recommendation is Arleigh Greenwald a.k.a. BikeShopGirl.    Her page has links to her blog, useful how-to podcast, honest cargo bike reviews and more. Arleigh has huge amounts of practical experience and as a mechanic knows how well various models will hold up. She's also into getting kids started on bikes. Just consult with and buy from her if you're close to Denver.  She offers consultations for local people .. if you're out of the area you might try and write and offer to pay something for her specialized wisdom.  

 

Of course you can just dust off that old bike for some exercise to keep from going stir-crazy.  A good bike shop can tune up anything for not that much.  

 

 

lessons

Recently Om wrote an excellent piece on Derek Jeter’s career and some lessons one might draw from it. Even if you don’t like baseball, it’s worth reading.

 

Consistency, finding opportunity, leading by example .. and the ultimate goal.

 

One of my heroes is Ray Davis. I got to know him when I was a grad student and postdoc at Brookhaven National Laboratories. He was an experimental physical chemist who was doing some interesting solar physics. He was also of those people who mentored those more junior by example. I sailed with him on his homemade sailboat and joined him on numerous nature walks around the BNL installation as he photographed almost everything. He’d show up on Mondays with bandages from whatever home repair he had attempted. 

 

It’s worth reading a personal statement he made in 2002

 

also check out how people recognized him at the bottom. I’m sure he didn’t put that in himself. He was exceptionally humble.

 

His statement doesn’t go into the controversy and drama of the Homestake Gold Mine experiment. By 1960 physicists had a good idea how fusion took place in the Sun. It’s a somewhat complicated multistep process and different from how manmade fusion machines or bombs work. Some of the energy is released in the form of neutrinos. You may have head about neutrinos. They have a very small mass and barely interact with matter. A standard comment is more than half the neutrinos that strike a piece of lead a light year thick will travel though as if it didn’t exist. But the Sun was making a lot of electron neutrinos and a few will interact. In the late 60s Ray decided to count them and nail down what was going on in the Sun’s core.

 

He was exceptionally careful. Every month he was able to count about three dozen argon37 atoms They started out as chlorine37 but were turned into argon37 when an electron neutrino struck them. Ray spent years making sure hhis results were accurate. His numbers were very consistent… and about a third of what everyone knew was required for the Sun to shine like we see it. It seemed eithre Ray was wrong or the solar models were wrong. Ray persisted. People were in awe of how careful he was. The solar models were also holding up in other tests.

 

It turned out new physics was afoot. Ray was only sensitive to one type of neutrino - the electron neutrino - the type the Sun had to generate. What they found, when another observatory was built that detected another type was neutrinos oscillated from one type to another as they sped along. It was as if your Ford changed into a Chevy and then a Toyota regularly. You owned a “car” that was an admixture of these different brands. Startling new physics. Ray had peered into the core of the Sun with a tank of chlorine about a mile underground in South Dakota and by not giving up when the numbers seemed wrong, found Nature was answering with a new question

 

Ray was sprinkled with Swedish holy water in 2002 for his work.

 

It is remarkable that his institution - BNL - gave him that level of freedom. It’s also remarkable how he stuck with it and impressed all of us with the beauty of his work.

 

lessons…

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.

 

happy bob from finland

Several years ago I met Jutta Haaramo though a bit of serendipity.  We share some interests and it's been great fun talking with her over the years.  A bit over a year ago I learned about her efforts to make a dent in the Universe and do something about juvenile diabetes management.  It's a tough problem that consumes an enormous amount of time and worry on the part of the children and their parents.  It also happens to be an area where technology can be used to help out.  

Jutta is amazing - she put together a team and an iPhone app that uses a bit of machine learning and gamification was born.  This is really great stuff and is just emerging into something that can be used.   So if you have diabetes or know someone who does - or if you're interested in serious medical aids that can run on iPhones and Apple Watches read on as Jutta continues with a guest post.

__________

 

My son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes five years ago when he was just six years old.  In type 1 diabetes (T1D) your pancreas stops producing insulin, so you need to dose it manually to keep blood sugar at a normal level. Keeping blood glucose stable is hard, as everything affects it: insulin, carbohydrate consumption, exercise, stress, other hormones etc.

We started to use continuous glucose monitor (CGM) to follow his sugar level every five minutes. For insulin delivery we use an insulin pump that delivers insulin in small doses throughout the day. Before every meal we calculate the carbs as the insulin is dosed according the amount of carbs eaten

 

 

Diabetes management is really complex. There is a risk of short term complications (severe hypoglycemia i.e. too low blood glucose and hyperglycemia, too high blood glucose), which can both be fatal. But the long term complications, which are caused by elevated blood glucose over time, are as scary. Heart disease, nerve damage, kidney failure, blindness, premature death can all be caused by diabetes. Diabetes also takes a huge amount of time: counting every carbohydrate you eat, calculating insulin doses, changing infusion sites and sensors just needs to be done, no matter how tired or overwhelmed you might feel.

No wonder there are many who know the mental burden of diabetes far too well. But being stressed about your condition does not help you to take any better care of yourself.  Rather, we noticed that humour and positivity did help. Noticing the small wins (“oh, your blood glucose was really good at school today - well done!”) made a big difference.  So we wanted to turn that approach into a new way of diabetes management. One that gives insights to future glucose levels and rewards you when you're succeeding in managing on your own.

 

This idea turned into Happy Bob, an app that uses gamification and machine learning to turn health data into rewarding and engaging experiences.
Users can follow their own blood glucose data and there are stars which can be collected when blood sugar is kept within target levels. The star counts are displayed and a user can achieve daily star targets and share scores with others. The app also uses personal blood glucose history data with machine learning to predict the user’s blood glucose up to two hours ahead. The prediction helps to foresee high and low blood sugar before they happen.

The interface is simple and playful.  Happy Bob is also available in the Snarky Bob mode for those with a more sarcastic sense of humour.

 

The app is currently available on iPhone and is used by both children and adults. Users tell us Happy Bob makes diabetes management more fun and helps them to be more aware of own data. Everyone enjoys collecting stars and getting positive feedback. It’s still early but the app retention is really good.

Next we plan to add more health data in the experience, to provide a more holistic health management experience and more ways to be rewarded. Our goal is to help users foresee periods when they should pay extra attention to their blood sugar and health to prevent the risk of complications.  We also want to add ways to use the stars earned, as that’s something many users have been asking for. We believe that by creating a daily, fun habit of good glucose management with Happy Bob, many people with diabetes can have a better life and health.

 

Happy Bob user feedback

 

First check out this video from Happy Bob user T1Swimmer .. she's great!  It should come up for those of you who aren't FB users 

https://www.facebook.com/T1Swimmer/videos/441338936474643/

 

If you are interested in testing out the Happy Bob App, have an iPhone and wear a CGM (continuous glucose monitor), you can download the app in the App Store https://apps.apple.com/app/happy-bob/id1444877516

For any information, please get in touch with me at jutta@happybob.app. You can follow us on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/happybob_app/ or read more at our website https://happybob.app/

 

My three boys. Finland has the world’s highest incidence of type 1 diabetes. Diabetes is on the rise across the globe. With good glucose control most of the complications can be prevented.

 

 

THE FUTURE™

I'm certainly not a futurist.  Oh - there are some things I can predict with reasonable accuracy: that one of my ferrets will beg for a banana next week and next year, when an eclipse will happen somewhere, roughly when the Sun goes into its red giant stage...  The easy stuff.  Throw in people and culture and all bets are off.  I've made some informed predictions that were heavily dependent on technologies I knew a lot about that seem precent now, but if I'm honest and look at my old lab notebooks.. well..  I'm batting 200 at best.¹

 

Since then I've learned a bit more.   New business ideas can appear and develop rapidly, sometimes in a year or two.  Big technology leaps usually depend on basic research and are less frequent appearing at  twenty to forty year intervals.  They're often difficult to notice early on and are accompanied by widely negative and positive projections.  Then there is culture.  We - our basic needs, desires and dreams - evolve at a very slow rate.  Typically thousands of years.  Understanding this is critically important to thinking about the future.   I like to identify what preoccupies people and where future conflict is likely.

 

My model of the near term - say up to twenty year - future involves four areas.  There are probably more.  

    ° what is technically possible (understanding the combination of multiple technologies and a bit of the basics is important.)

    ° what is economically feasible and what are the externalities

    ° regulations and standards

    ° people, culture and social acceptance

   

There's a forest and trees problem.  You have to understand why a certain product or service is popular to see if it's something fundamental or if it's just a manifestation of the possible.  A few years ago people were running around playing Pokemon Go.   Many got excited about augmented reality games and saw this as the future. In fact it was a fad that quickly died out.  It was made possible when the quality and user cost of wireless networks and smartphones got to a point where enough people had them to allow a novel experience.  The underlying importance was the convergence of a good enough network and smartphones.  

 

When a wheel is invented you have to sort out what is a bicycle and what is a hula hoop.  We have a lot of hula hoops.

 

About ten years ago a few of the titans of Silicon Valley pronounced privacy dead.  Lots of people agreed.  I'm guessing almost none of them had any understanding of what privacy is and how it has developed over the past two hundred years.  It's very complex but anyone making decisions needs to understand the history and conflict and why modern notions are still unsettled.   Now we see two huge chastened firms claiming to go all in on privacy (I don't trust one and only partly trust the others).  I'll go out on a limb and claim it will still be a major issue at least two decades out.. probably more.

 

A few words on externalities, but it can get involved.  You can think of great projects that make enormous financial sense on longer time scales that are problematic.  Dealing with climate change and proper sanitation are two excellent examples.  Technology exists to solve both, but the people who benefit most are not those who invest.  

 

Prediction is difficult.  It takes a smart multi-disciplinary team and a rigorous process. You need to understand the past. There can be good success with the bicycle and hula hoop class questions.  Identifying new wheels are likely to be a once in a career issue if you're lucky.    All of these things are well above my pay grade.  I'm continuously reminded how simple physics is.

 __________

¹ In 1992 using, Moore's law and the notion that the Internet and wireless were so desirable that hundreds of billions in infrastructure investment would happen, I suggested in 2017 people would hold a piece of glass in their hand and have have a video connection with a friend halfway around the world and that "call" would effective be free.  The hardest part, in my mind, was the battery.  There were a few other seemingly clever calls, but more than a few duds.  At least there's the realization that I, along with many colleagues, did better than the very expensive futurists the company hired,

 

 

 

attacking global warming with deep insight from a brewery

The 1970s were marked by two dramatic energy disruptions that shook the world.  Petroleum became much more expensive and a geopolitical weapon. Small cars suddenly became popular and American drivers began to look to countries that made them.  In the US large sums flowed into energy R&D.  Much of it went into shale oil, but alternate energy labs appeared.  Electricity from wind and solar were far from practical, but there was a mini-boom in solar hot water heating.  It turns out you need solid engineering if you're going to water running in panels on your roof.  Unfortunately there was a lot of poor engineering, short module lifetimes, and water damage. 

 

Since then we've seen dramatic reductions in the cost of electricity from wind and solar energy.  Expanding these sources to levels needed to deal with global warming is extremely challenging - too challenging given the current political climate.  It's important to remember that electricity is just a way to move from a generator to a load.  It's very practical, but also ephemeral.  Storage is expensive as is the infrastructure to efficiently move it from where it's produced to where it's needed.

 

Electricity demand represents about a fifth of the world's primary energy supply.  This will grow with electrification in transportation, but the numbers are so staggeringly huge that it will be awhile before the needle moves.  Solar, wind and nuclear are the primary non-fossil fuel sources.  Two are growing and one is shrinking.  But even if all electricity came from clean sources it would just be a fifth of the primary energy supply.  

 

Thermal energy demand is larger at a bit more than a third of the supply worldwide. Space and water heating, industrial processes, cooking and so on.  In homes it's much higher than a third usually running above sixty percent.  Thermal energy can and is electrified, but you have to deal with the inefficiency of making, transporting and then converting the energy. Wouldn't it be neat if you could do it directly without the intermediate step?

 

You can and you have.  All of us have sat inside on cold sunny days next to the window enjoying the heat.  Insulated homes and insulating windows can dramatically drop external energy requirements.  Solar hot water heating is dramatically better than it was forty years ago and is required by code in a few regions.  But what intrigues me is the direct mechanical production of heat.

 

An apple rolling off a dinner table hits the floor with about a joule of kinetic energy.  The energy unit is named in honor of the son of a prominent brewer and followed his father into the family business.  The family had money and the young James Joule was tutored by John Dalton and a few other great scientists of the day.  Science became his hobby and passion.   In the 1840s he built early electric motors to see if it made sense to replace the brewery's steam engines.  It was far too early, but he established himself as a solid amateur scientist.  With this mindset and approach he set himself to was understanding the economics of brewing.  It would change the world.

 

He worked in many areas, but this most important work was on the convertibility of energy from one type to another.  The caloric theory of heat was accepted wisdom - basically heat was conserved and couldn't be created or destroyed.  While wrong, it led to the creation of some rather beautiful mathematics.  Joule found something deeper and more accurate -  that energy could be converted from one form to another.  As it happened brewers had the best thermometers allowing careful measurements to figure out what was really happening.  He mechanically did work to water by stirring it and showed a unit of work heated the water by the same unit.   The energy increase of the water by heating was equivalent to the work done by the mechanical stirring.   He had made the leap to the conservation of energy and created the basis for the first law of thermodynamics.

 

It's neat to think about a simple extension of his apparatus.  Put a mechanical stirrer inside an insulated box and spin it with a wind turbine.  Mechanical energy from the wind is directly converted to heat and can be used for home hot water or space heating.  

 

The sketch is just a simple version.  Vertical axis turbines aren't that efficient, but that may not be a major issue. While big turbines are more efficient,  it is impractical to move hot water far enough to make it practical.  The natural size of these units may be home with a small turbine or, where district heating is popular, a medium sized wind turbine.

 

The back of the envelopes are interesting.  A cubic meter of water (a metric ton or 1000 liters or about four average bathtubs) can hold up to about 90 kWh of heat energy.. enough for a two days for a family of three or four.  It's fine if the wind is intermittent.  When it blows, heat is added to the water.    Getting the size right for a household and location would require a fair amount of experimentation and modeling, but this is the sort of work that would probably be crack for mechanical engineering grad students.  It's a great exercise in systems optimization.

 

Here's a simple simulation for a small half meter radius turbine in a location with an average wind speed of 16 miles per hour over two days.  The first graph is wind speed.  The second is the mechanical power delivered to the mixer in the water.  Note that power increases quickly with windspeed (you know this if you've held your hand out of a car window or biked into the wind)  The last is the water temperature given good, but not fantastic insulation.   The water gets hotter and keeps its heat in spite of a very bursty power source.

 

There are a lot of ways to tap energy.  The direct conversion of mechanical energy to heat is particularly attractive given the enormous worldwide heat use.  This may be a good technique in some cases and there are undoubtedly others.  It's not very technical - heavens - it was easy in the 1800s and it's remarkable no one stumbled on it earlier - the technical capability to do this goes back about a millennia.   Now we have the capacity to measure and model as well as utilize a wide range of materials and construction techniques.  It may be interesting again.

 

There are a variety of mechanisms to deliver energy in some practical form for us to use.  Many are more efficient as centralized sources and some are better at smaller scales.  This is one that works best when highly distributed. 

 

 

the critical edge in a major sport

The other day I was in a Manhattan library wearing the t-shirt of my undergrad school.  As luck would have it someone noticed it.  She was from the same school - her Ph.D. was in mechanical engineering - and a most interesting conversation followed.  It turns out she happens to work on suspensions for one of the more famous Formula One teams. 

 

Formula One may be the most form of auto racing. Four wheels hanging out in the breeze and an open cockpit, its roots go back to Grand Prix racing about ninety years ago.  After WWII it was associated with some of the most famous car makers and drivers.  It has enormous popularly worldwide with something like a half billion people following any given race and over 300 million fans who follow most of the season. Good drivers make in the eight figures and some have career earning exceeding a billion dollars.  A massively important form of sports entertainment larger than the NBA and NFL combined. 

 

F-1  technology side has made huge advances over the years.  Thanks to tire, suspension and aerodynamic advances the cars can corner with lateral accelerations over six times that of gravity.  That's more than an astronaut experiences during re-entry and on par with the limits of a jet fighter.  Top speeds are on the order of 240 miles per hour on relatively twisty tracks.  Teams spend a lot of money - she said an average team might have 100 engineers, technicians, physicists and mathematicians - over a third with Ph.Ds. - working on every little bit of vehicle performance.  Cars get much better during the racing season not making improvements every race means almost certain failure.  She said a few American universities major talent suppliers - notably Caltech and MIT - but England is the real ground zero for car design and tuning talent from a half dozen schools.  

 

So there's this question.  How much success is the driver and how much is the car?  The feeling is the driver, even though operating a car under such conditions probably is an athletic performance, is less important than the car.  Put a great driver in a lesser car and they might improve the performance of the car a bit, but they'll never win.  A lesser driver in a great car probably won't win, but will place much higher one might expect.   But there's a human story and sport is all about human performance.  You probably won't see much interest in autonomous cars zipping around a circuit even though they might outperform humans.  

 

But there's another story.  The master designers and aerodynamics people are very important, but there are enough very good ones and enough viable approaches that the top half dozen teams are on fairly equal footing. the most important person on the team, and sometimes it is two people, is the strategist - usually a mathematician or physicist. 

 

The cars are rich data sources sending hundreds of channels of telemetry for analysis giving the state of almost anything you can image about the car.  Additionally tracks, weather, cars, tires, competition and tactics and strategy are all modeled ahead of time.  Variables are thrown into the mix that makes the strategist even more important.  Tires are a good example.  There are three levels of grip... the grippiest tires wear very quickly, the least grippy more slowly. You have to use at least two during a race meaning a pit stop with a tire change is necessary. Additionally there are two types of rain tires.  It's an exercise in modeling and game theory sorting out how this will play out. The most consistent factor in winning races appears to be the strategist.  Three of the top ten are women.

 

As the sport changes to stay relevant hardcore fans are being challenged to examine some of the race data during the race .. there's thought about making it part of the race itself, but keeping the competition level high and the fans engaged is the key point.   One thing she mentioned is heart rate and blood pressure telemetry from the pit chief as a car comes into the pits at 70mph stopping a few inches away as he has a few seconds to make the swap.  

 

There are a lot of interesting things you can say about this type of data and its analysis.  The fact that some believe understanding it is more important than the driver speaks volumes. Some of the teams monetize this by letting their largest sponsors in on their technics of dealing with rapid change and strategy and tactics.  A few of the analysts have been loaned to these sponsors for non-trivial sums to look into their businesses. 

 

It makes you wonder about other sports.   It would be interesting to create a plot with understanding of athletic performance (including psychological elements) along one axis and understanding of strategy along the other.   Understanding hydrodynamics created a revolution in swimming along the first. A deep data and model driven understanding of strategy has driven Formula One performance along the second.  How much potential does a given sport have?