omenti

spoken, written, and semi-spoken language

a minipost

My wife thinks it's funny when I'm talking with a native-speaking Montanan. After about fifteen minutes my accent shifts towards my almost hidden native accent.  It's still there,  buried under so many years living out of the state.  The funny thing is neither I nor my Montanan friend notice what's happening.  Similarly I can code-switch and fit into the culture of my parents church - at least over the phone as my beard and dress don't conform with the standards. 

 

In high school I spent a lot of time in Alberta and became fascinated by Canadian English.  I didn't realize Albertan, like the Montanan, was a dialect of its own.  There were the obvious Canadianisms comedians emphasize, but my attempts at using them were unconvincing.  Canadians tend to be unusually polite, but deep down inside they know your attempts are clueless. In college I ran into people from all over the world and quickly got to the point where many of the "rules" of spoken English didn't bother me like they did my k-12 teachers.  

 

A friend happens to be a computational linguist specializing in the rhythm and sound of a language - the prosody of language. Getting this part right - good enough to begin to add the meaning in speech that's often missing in text - is one of those hard problems.  I've read a few  of the papers in her field and find them jargon laden and bewildering.  Still, there's something very important that we just do naturally.  There's another branch of linguistics that's more accessible.  Sociolinguists studies how society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context impacts language.   The good stuff all of us use and misuse. Aalthough nothing like earlier changes in the language, there's constant change. The Gen Z meaning of wholesome comes to mind as a  recent shift in progress.

 

One of my most dramatic experiences with the sociology of language came as I was finishing my graduate work. A Chinese professor who didn't speak English was visiting the physics department. Not really an issue as there were several native-born professors and graduate students.  I was working something out on a blackboard and didn't realize he was watching.  He walked up, took a piece of chalk (yes -- we had lovely chalk back then), and gave me a look that asked permission to annotate what I was doing. It turned out he was interested in the same area.  We went back and forth using drawings and equations that were part of the culture we shared and had a lovely conversation for about fifteen minutes.  It occurred to me afterwards that we were relying on facial expressions and posture along with the chalk marks and never spoke a word.  Afterwards I reproduced what remained on the blackboard in my lab notebook.  Not that it was profound, but rather that it was such a nice chat.  He was only around for a few more days, but there were grins every time we saw each other.

 

Two weeks ago a linguist (not the prosody expert) gave me a beginner's tour of sociolinguistics by Valerie Fridland: Like, Literally, Dude  Arguing for the Good in Bad English.   It's great fun! Learn where change in language comes from (hint - it's not upperclass/educated males), how text messaging is entirely different for teens and their 35 year old parents, why ums and uhs in speech are beneficial and much more.   I'd go for the audiobook as she gives acoustic examples.  I'm not good at communication, but now at least I'm a bit more aware.   

 

 

invention

This morning I remembered a quote that would be perfect for a friend as well as many of you.  I'll get to it later, but it made me think about something that I've spent time thinking about for at least a decade.  As an introduction there's a question we like to ask others. 

What's the most important human invention?

Agriculture, towns, fire, cooking, clothing, etc.. tend to come up.   All  are important, but I like turning the question a bit.  Consider a central invention we all do - something that makes us very human.

 We invent tomorrow.  

Our minds create mental models - visions of the future - and give us a kind of time travel.  We run through potential scenarios we might encounter and can plan for.  They're usually in an episodic form and we imagine ourselves and others, often in some other place, experiencing a variety of options.  This time travel can flip and reach into the past.  We call it episodic memory.  These memories aren't perfectly accurate. They're more like screenplays we use to recreate the past with whatever bits of memory and shards of content we can access.  We can also create "what if" scenarios and use them to plan for the future.  It's a fluid time machine that can operate almost simultaneously in the past and future creating past and future episodic memories.  And critically, we separate past and future from each other and the present.

 

People are really good at copying.  Compared to other primates we're supercopiers. But we also experiment doing things like sticking our hands into fire, eating a plant we shouldn't have ..  and we, or those who watched us tempt the Darwin Award, remember and let others know.  We innovate and teach moving this information into our culture - a cultural evolution of sorts.   There's a lot to unpack here.  It's a beautiful subject to think and ask others about, but I want to keep this short and eventually get to the quote.

 

Keeping track of things quickly gets out of hand for our very limited memories.  It appears the first mechanisms were appeared over 20,000 years ago to deal with the information overload of keeping track of herd animals,  seasons.. important things like that.  It was the dawn of humanity creating an external memory system.   Moving forward the Sumerians are usually credited with creating a formal writing system.  At first accounting, but eventually our stories became readable.  And that takes us to a beautiful description by Carl Sagan.

What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time.

 

beyond abracadabra

More than a few in my line of work, particularly those from the generation before me, are amateur musicians.  The first time it became clear to me was in Gale Dick's living room on Friday evenings. He loved to play the violin and had a nice homemade harpsichord as well as a piano.  Friends would come to play, or in my case just listen to, chamber music.  Regulars included a couple of physicists, a mathematician, a chemist, as well as some real musicians who seemed to enjoy themselves anyway.  It was great fun and the beginning of a life-long addiction to live music, even though I'm just a lurker. 

 

Years later I asked Gale if he understood the connection.  He paused and then replied Bach letting it sink in before elaborating.  Bach ... you see, so much of it has beautiful symmetries...   He recalled when he was coming to grips with group theory in grad school.  The year before he'd come across Noether's Theorem and was blown away.¹  Years later, deep into the thicket of a difficult problem,  he found himself playing a Bach violin sonata in his mind.  

Then magic crackled and the work I was doing connected rather profoundly to those other areas. 

Words came easily to him and new ones, or at least ones I couldn't find in the dictionary, would appear.  As he described the violin sonata sequence, one I hadn't heard before appeared:

You see, Bach's music is this abracadaptor that connects two different kinds of magic giving birth to something that is also magic.

 

That was a long time ago.  Years later I found myself giving a talk at Disney Animation.  After lunch I spent the afternoon chatting with a number of people.  Then it happened.  We were talking about the curious physics that often appears in cartoons.  He said that Walt Disney had a set of rules that defined how things moved in his world building.  The rules are good enough that most survive intact. 

They're the abracadaptor that connects the original story with the artwork.  When it's well done the resulting magic is better than what went into it. 

 

Today I found myself using it in a text message to Sarah.  The beach volleyball season that ultimately determines selection for the Paris Olympics begins in Doha tomorrow.  She and her new partner Sophie have only been playing together for a short time and are still working things out.  

You’re armed with some new knowledge and are likely making great progress putting your abracadaptor into regular operation.°

° abracadaptor. n. - A mechanism or technique that connects two different kinds of magic.

 

There are people who do this: that rare skill that allows them to connect the conversation of those with very different backgrounds creating a deep and wonderful communication.  It's a skill I lack and I'm in awe of the few who can do it.  I like to use some engineering terminology to describe these people - impudence matches.  At its highest level two different magics are connected creating something deeper and an abracadaptor is afoot.

 

__________

¹ Don't worry about either of these if they sound foreign.  Both are important tools in the study of symmetry and deeply connected with physics.

 

types of stupidity

Recently Pip Coburn circulated a note on the importance of finding the right balance of challenge for your skill level to avoid boredom and frustration.  He noted the linkage to Csikszentmihalyi's work on flow, something that's fascinated me for some time as finding states of flow is important to me.¹  

The note made me think about levels of frustration and feelings of 'stupidity' one can have.  For some time I've identified types of stupidity with one being very useful and perhaps necessary in science.  Here's my response:

 

It’s fascinating to think about these things. Your comment on loving the work - “absolutely loving” it - is so important.

I think it’s important finding a field that no one can possibly master but, at the same time, know parts of it well enough to find where you may have a bit of success in if you apply yourself. As a beginning grad student I had no idea how hard it is to do research. It’s much more difficult than the most demanding courses as it’s an immersion into the unknown. Some people just give up and find easier paths. I find it useful to think about how to be productively stupid.

’Stupid’ is an unfortunate word, but I haven’t found anything better. Productive stupidity isn’t the relative stupidity you may feel in a a class where the other students are doing very well. It’s also not where someone who happens to be very bright is working in an area that doesn’t use their talents. (Stephen Hawking would have been a terrible point guard in the NBA even though the position demands strategic and tactical thinking.) Rather it’s a kind of existential fact .. an absolute stupidity. It puts you in the position of being ignorant by choice (here I use 'ignorant' in the 19^th century sense - realizing there's an area you don't know much about and choosing to pursue it). So it’s fine to have failures here and there as you try to find your way. And sometimes, something wonderful is found. The process can generate serendipity. Of course you end up doing many less challenging things as part of the process. They’re often rewarding, but it’s amazing when you find something totally new. It’s what drives a lot of people.

I’ve had some great conversations with people who push their fields and hear the same thing with different words. Yo-Yo Ma, Sarah Pavan (beach volleyball Olympian), a number of physicists and mathematicians as well as several artists.²  The words were different, but the paths were very familiar.

There’s another piece to this.  Bringing together a very diverse set of people who excel at productive stupidity is something of an amplifier. Often there are interesting hints and even keys that you never would have thought of. That and it’s often a lot of fun.

__________

¹ Years ago I attended a talk by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.  Afterwards I had a few questions including "how do you pronounce your name?  He said this is good enough for Americans:

Me-high Cheek-sent-me-high

² There are many others who probably do something like this .. these are just the people I've talked about it with.

 

 

six is a surprising number

Ting-Chang Hsien was a dear friend when I was in grad school.  At the time China was beginning to send a few scholars to work with American counterparts and Ting-Chang came to Stony Brook for a few years to work in an area of particle physics the school was noted for.  Near the end of his stay     he decided to see America.  He flew to my parent's home in Montana and, renting a car, spent several weeks traveling through the West.  The day before he flew back to New York my parent's neighbor, Lloyd Erickson, stopped by to chat.  Extroverts by nature, Lloyd and Ting-Chang dove into conversation and homemade ice cream.  Ting-Chang mentioned as a teenager he was a student in Shanghai with an interest in music as well as math.  The school was run by missionaries - his mother was a devout Christian - and his favorite teacher told him he had real talent for math and should give up the piano.  He said "she was from Minnesota .. one of her brothers was technical and worked for a company there."  Lloyd sat up,  "I had an aunt who was a missionary-teacher in China.. she left before the war and and got married."  Ting-Chang mentioned the name of his teacher.  She was in her late 80s and still alive.  Lloyd brought out family photos.  That night old teacher and the physicist talked on the telephone for a long time. 

 

We all know it's a small world.  We find common connections with total strangers even if we don't consider ourselves well connected.  I tend to be shy and don't have that many friends, but continue to be surprised.  Of course there's the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

 

Steven Strogatz does applied math at Cornell.  In the mid 1990s he and his student Duncan Watts were interested in the problem of synchronization.  How is it that some insects like beetles manage to synchronize their sounds at night?  Why is it that types of glowworms blink in unison?  Why is it .. there are many of examples of this in nature ...  They weren't trying to solve the underlying science, but rather were looking to see if there was a deeper mathematical underpinning.  Cornell has lots of beetles in the Summer.  They could make measurements. 

 

They considered two extreme cases.  One is very regular.  Think of a checker board.  Each square on a checker board filled has an immediate group of neighbors - small neighborhood cluster.  To "talk" to square on the other side there are about eight degrees of separation.  Each square is only directly connected to the nearest neighbors.   This kind of model is well-studied in physics where a force may only have a very short range. None of us have connections that limited.    Next consider complete random connections. If you know 150 people, each of them would know a similar number so the total number of people connected by two degrees of separation is about 150² - 22,500.¹  Most of us know that's wrong (except for some early models of Internet connectivity:-) 

 

Their gut feeling was the real answer would le somewhere in between.  Technically they were looking for the phase transition .. the point at which most of the beetles were suddenly in synchronization, or everyone seems to have these seemingly random connections. The small world problem.  What they found was a fairly simple mathematical description that said you only need a small bit of randomness.  In your circle of friends an outlier or two.. or knowing someone with such connections.   

 

Their short paper showed examples ranging from power plant distributions to noise making bugs and is one of the one hundred most cited papers in all of science and math.   They also noted that given connections afforded by travel these days pandemics could spread rapidly.  It's very difficult preventing that phase transition.

 

The small world problem is very beautiful.  It's one of those topics that should be taught in a course that doesn't seem to exist.  In college you get music and art appreciation.  I'll never do good art or music, but 101 level non-major courses gave me a better appreciation for those very human endeavors.  

 

Math is important enough that students in high school get either working on mindless problems they'll never see again or pre-STEM work that only a small percentage will use.  People are properly recommending and even building 'data science' courses.²  These seem like a great idea - familiarity with tools, presentation and interpretation - but I'd like to see a math appreciation path.

 

Math appreciation would have history from a number of civilizations.  Was math the first example of external memory?  Why did people use different number systems?  Why was double-entry accounting so important to Italy?  What about zero?  Imaginary numbers?  The Fibonacci sequence in nature.  Why does a slice of pizza fold the way it does?  What is infinity, are there different kinds?  How are coffee mugs and doughnuts similar? What is the fairest way to vote in a democracy? It's easy to think of dozens of lecture topics that might even inspire a few students and create links to what they finally go into.

 

Just an idle dream I guess..

__________

¹ Apologies to Robin Dunbar - he'd say the number is almost always used out of context anyway).  

² I hate the term.  Generally anything that adds 'science' to a label isn't science.

 

unexpected arcs

Three weeks ago breathless reports on the 'breakeven' fusion event at the National Ignition Facility began to appear.  While a remarkable achievement, it's more a marker of progress along a long and difficult path rather than an event promising a hopeful turn in decarbonizing the energy supply. 

 

Nuclear fusion has been hyped since the late 1950s.  Fission based reactors turned out to be straightforward.  All you had to do was refine uranium ore and then control a reaction to heat water and run an otherwise conventional power plant.  The cold war led to any number of atoms for peace projects suggesting a nuclear everything future.  The realization that nuclear fusion was much more efficient and "cleaner" than fission led to optimism and work on controlled fusion.  After all, it happens all the time in stars doesn't it?

 

Power from nuclear fusion has been twenty years in the future ever since.   Science and technology have made serious progress, but the challenges are great.  There's also the issue of cost per kilowatt-hour. If you build a plant that produces more power than it takes to run it, will it be economically competitive with other low or no-carbon solutions? 

 

There's a simple invention → development → application → change arc of technology mindset that doesn't describe the real world. It turns out you can travel a good distance along the arc only to see failure.  The garage-worthy helicopter, supersonic airliners and dirigibles have all be built and commercialized, but have failed for a number of reasons that are likely to keep new versions failing for the foreseeable future.  Somehow the dream factor persists in many of these and new failures continue to rhyme.

 

There are hugely successful inventions that have solved a problem, but turn out to have a deadly flaw that caused great harm.  DDT,  chlorofluorocarbons and leaded gasoline are obvious examples.  Less obvious are inefficient transportation.  Standardizing on 3,500+ pound vehicles to move people a handful of miles on average trips has led to millions of traffic deaths, a large pollution toll and a structuring of infrastructure and where and how people live that is proving difficult to change even though much better choices exist.  Sometimes tend to fire, aim and then look for damage around the target.  Sometimes it takes decades and change is expensive. 

 

There are a wishlist class of inventions where some progress is made, but effective deployment is a long way off (fusion power plants)  or unlikely as the underlying approaches are flawed at this point (self-driving cars, hyperloops, neural implants, space elevators, nuclear powered cars and airplanes, etc.)

 

It's very easy for an imaginative artist or writer to sketch an idea that is technically impossible.  We have a tendency to sort through the chaff and find amazing predictions from a hundred years ago.  It's useful to realize how much noise there is and that these things didn't happen in the author's or their children's lifetimes.  Still - every now and again you run across something that stops you.  This is one of my favorites - not only because it suggests wireless video communications, but it also nails the social element of two people ignoring each other so they can look at a screen.

 

Then there's a class of necessary arcs that we need to get past application and into wide-spread use.  Flexible power distribution to move power from generation to where it can be stored or used.  An advanced worldwide pandemic monitoring system.  Water management and treatment to deal with changing local climates as well as use needs.  More efficient agriculture that can deal with changing climates.  Changes to transportation and housing infrastructures that are less damaging.  Some of these aren't terribly sexy, but require social and political will - areas where progress is often very difficult.  And in the background there needs to be investment in fundamental science.  While progress can be difficult to predict, historically it's easy to predict that there will be unexpected discovery that can lead to something useful down the road.

 

It's fun to enjoy the stories writers and artists weave.  Creating your own is a great way to work with the imagination of a nine year old on a rainy day. Time and interstellar travel won't come along with scores of other ideas that help move stories along.  

 

 

teaching and technological change

On Saturday my niece sent a few photos from her son's robotics competition.  While standardized components and a simple scripting language are used, there's a lot of room for learning and creativity.  Winning teams spend much of their time modifying the basic design along with moving to more sophisticated programming languages.  The basic hardware is quite expensive so many of the groups are sponsored by their schools and sometimes local businesses.  It seems like a great way for kids who like to build things and play computer games to learn a bit of engineering and programming.  My niece's son isn't interested in math or science at school, but loves to build things.  It's a path that has him learning.  Given the right advisor there could be a lot of learning.  It's also a nice example of using technology as a teaching vehicle.

 

Sometimes new technologies are seen as a way to cheat.  I've read that some teachers worry that language models like GPT-3 will give students easy access to ghost-written essays.  Of course there's still the problem of students buying essays from human, but this may be cheaper and easier to get.  One can imagine a number of ways to deal with this.  A teacher might ask something like "based on the debate Adam and Sally were having last Tuesday, how would you.."   Indexicality - pointing to something in the context in which it occurs - is something these language models can't address.  Better still may be to focus on critical thinking in the class and test on something that isn't a simple regurgitation. Essays seem like a very uncreative way to teach writing and critical thinking skills.   And there will probably be teachers who figure out how to involve language models as a tool to teach creative thinking.  That would be a leap similar to using robotics competitions to teach shop, basic engineering and programming skills.

 

I'd like to see changes in how science and math are taught in high school.  Currently there's a push to eliminate areas most students will rarely use.  I'd counter that by teaching the subjects in a way to improve critical thinking.  Pure math may be a way forward, not the "new math" that crashed and burned in the 60s, but big ideas.  It doesn't have to be about formal proofs and calculations (although tools like Mathematica and Maple can be useful experimentation and visualization tools).  I've probably belabored it before, but simple topology, infinity, the continuum, maps, abstraction, inference and model building. None of this has to be taught with rigor, but playing with them can open pathways students have never thought about.   Sure teach some of the regular math, but it doesn't have to be so repetitive. I'd add probability and risk analysis as well as personal finance. The same with science - do away with memorization and focus on the concepts and how we arrived at them.  Of course extra points for making it playful like the robotics competition.

 

But I'm not a k-12 educator so all of this may be silly.

 

And for college here's something by the wonderful Woodie Flowers of MIT on changes he'd made to university engineering curriculum and beyond.  (Woodie was one of the most innovative teachers at MIT)

 

preview season

As many of you know I like to celebrate major accomplishments of friends.  This time I'll offer previews from two good friends as well as another that could have an impact on education.

 

The first is  Juliette Powell's second book.  The A.I. Dilemma: 7 Principles for Responsible Technology is the working title and it's a further development of her dissertation at Columbia.  I've been fortunate enough to have read the nearly-final draft.  Well balanced and accessible to non-specialists, it's going to be an excellent resource for people trying to sort out promises and pitfalls that can impact much of the future.  One person who had an advance look will be using it as required reading for a college course.  Be on the lookout!

 

The second is from Sarah Pavan.  One of the best beach volleyball players in the world, she's also a clear and deep thinker.  As I've aged I've learned to learn from those outside my area.  She's  been a source of ideas. At the elite level women's beach volleyball is a mental game with communication being one of the defining aspects.  A few months ago her teammate of five years decided to quit the team.  Sarah was faced with finding someone with the necessary complementary skill set as well as the drive, passion, ability to communicate and chemistry.  Canada only has a few candidates, but Sarah found the right one in Sophie Bukovec.  I expect to see them developing as a team over the next year as they focus on the Paris Olympics in 2024.

 

 

And finally potential news from what I consider the most important college course in the country. Sense & Sensibility & Science is a course at Berkeley developed and taught by faculty from Physics, Philosophy, and Psychology departments.   Here's an overview:

 

This is a course on the ideas from science that are most widely useful for everyone. Many insights and conceptual tools from scientific thinking are of great utility for all kinds of reasoning, from reading the news critically to making decisions under conditions of uncertainty. The focus in this course is on the errors humans tend to make, and the approaches scientific methodology has developed (and continues to develop) to minimize those errors. The course includes a discussion of the nature of science, what makes science such an effective way of knowing, how both non-scientific thinking and scientific thinking can go awry, and how we can reason more clearly and successfully as individuals, as members of groups, and as citizens of a democracy.

Every day we make decisions that can and should be informed by science. We make decisions as individuals, as voters, and as members of our various communities. We make decisions as students and parents and policy makers. The problem is, we don’t do it so well—a fact sadly apparent in political debates. It’s easy to blame poor decision-making on the greed, irresponsibility, ignorance, or incompetence of other people. But the problem seems to be more basic than that. It seems we face a paradox. Living in a democracy means that everyone’s view counts the same as everyone else’s. But to make decisions informed by science, we often need to defer to those with relevant expertise. Therefore, we shouldn't rely on a democratic system to make the best decisions. Or should we? This basic tension between science and democratic decision-making serves as a unifying theme for Sense & Sensibility & Science (SSS), a course that aims to equip students with basic tools to be better thinkers. We will explore key aspects of scientific thinking that everyone should know, especially the many ways that we humans tend to fool ourselves, and how to avoid them—including how to differentiate signal from noise, evaluate causal claims, and avoid reasoning biases. We’ll then look at the best models for using science to guide decisions, since the rational and arational (e.g., values, fears, and goals) then have to be combined. We will explore these themes experientially, often with in-class activities and discussions, and we will culminate in two open-ended projects to design better methods of deliberation and decision making, first as groups, and then as individuals. Co-taught by faculty from Physics, Philosophy, and Psychology, S&S&S fosters intellectual advancement for interdisciplinary knowledge seekers.

 

Browse through the topics and resources section.  You'll get something reading the recommended materials and thinking about the topics.  It's one of the few places outside the community where I've seen scientific optimism discussed. A book is being developed aimed at college students, although it should be widely applicable.  There's a serious need to put together something like this at the high school level even though many states would probably label thinking about the process of science as 'woke'..

feel free to comment!

fairness, inclusivity, safety and social convention

There's so much that isn't fair in this world, but most competitive sports make an attempt to provide a reasonably level playing field through the establishment and enforcement of rules and categories.  Rules vary from sport to sport but some constants are the elimination of performance enhancing drugs, a degree of safety for participants, and the creation of categories.  Some sports allow a certain amount of violence or danger balancing what the fans and athletes want vs modifications to the rules that might make the sport less desirable.  In other words there's a social convention.  Sometimes that social convention changes after serious injuries or deaths.  Positive change has come in world rugby in the past few years, but other sports are more resistant to change.

 

More recently fairness and inclusivity have come into play.  Categories exist to prevent grossly unfair contests.  You don't want a wrestler up against someone half their weight.   Twenty year olds don't compete with ten year olds or seventy year olds. Men and women usually are have categories of their own in most sports.  And para-athletes generally have separate competitions with a dizzying set of subcategories to allow fairness given a wide range of capabilities.  Fairness comes first in these, but it allows inclusivity to play and potentially succeed in a given sport.   But like so much else in the world there's change.

 

South African Oscar Pistorius became a below-the-knee amputee in both legs as a child due to a congenital defect.  Using racing blades, he became a good sprinter - an Olympic class sprinter.  There was controversy about how much of his performance came from him and how much from the blades?  Are blades as good as or better than real lower legs?    He was charismatic and there was a large amount of social pressure that running should be inclusive.   A few calculations were done early on followed by a few real tests with this unusual subject.  Some of the early results indicated the energy return from the carbon-fibre blades was the same as the achilles tendon - in other words no advantage.  That was the message the public received. The more careful work that followed has shown he had a significant advantage from lower contact time with the ground and added leg length - enough that 'he was probably a good, but not elite runner turning in performances well beyond his athleticism.  The blades are performance enhancing prosthetics.  

 

Performance-enhancing blades raise an interesting question.  What if a world class runner adopted them?  Would a 9.30s 100 meter dash be fair?  How about a 1hr 50m marathon?  Would elite runners have to get amputations to compete?  Fortunately the really elite runners are staying away from this, but now we have another very good runner trying to compete.  Sports physiologist Ross Tucker has a great interview with Peter Weyand - one of the best biomechanics physiologists on the science and pseudoscience involved.  If you're interested in these things start at about 26 minutes in this episode. 

 

There will be innovation.  What happens in field sports that demand good court vision with augmented reality glasses?  Will they be banned and in what sports?  Will performance enhancing prosthetics for stick and racket sports come about?  What is pure and fair and where does inclusion fit in?

 

And now to a socially charged issue: transwomen and female sports.  To first order biological sex has two categories while gender is a continuum.  I think that gender should not be a category for discrimination, but that biological sex should be used to establish categories for fairness and, in some sports, safety.  There's a good deal of solid science that shows male puberty results in advantages in size, muscle mass, VO₂ max and a few other metrics.  These advantages are important in most sports and would exclude biological women from the elite and next to elite categories in most sports where men compete.¹ Testosterone is cited as the advantage, but suppressing it later in life only results in a small drop in performance (there are a few poorly done studies that claim otherwise).   This has become a social issue with a rightwing party calling for blanket bans in many activities including sports.  There's been pushback by allies.  In some cases female athletes have been threatened by sponsors to not speak out and go along with inclusion rather than fairness.   Should transathletes compete with men, females, or have their own category?  That seems to be a social decision that only a few sports bodies have addressed at this point. 

 

I'll admit to a bias.²   I believe in solid science and fairness. I think transwomen need to compete with men or have their own category. Politically I'm on the left on most issues and think transpeople should work and live how they want, but that doesn't extend into sport where categories exist for reasons of fairness.  Fairness to women overrides scientifically unsupported inclusion in my mind.

 

__________

¹ A chart showing the performance difference between biological male and female elite athletes. Longitudinal studies show a drop in male advantage from 5 to 30% after three years of testosterone suppression and a non-longitudinal study showed a similarly small drop after about 15 years. 

 

 

In the real world this means a transwoman swimmer who was poorly ranked as a male was able to easily defeat all of his NCAA female competitors even with a few years of testosterone suppression.  In sprinting it has been shown that biological Olympic gold medal females don't even make it into the top 2,000 for men.  It has been posited man ranked 1,000 could easily beat any women even if he had testosterone suppression that dropped his advantage by 30%.

² I have an involvement with beach volleyball and love both the men's and women's game.  I know a few Olympians on the women's side who sometimes train with amateur men who easily outpower them.  The fact the women are less athletic doesn't make their game less interesting..  it's just that the two styles of play are very different.

 

chindōgu flavored technologies

Chindōgu is the curious Japanese art form of inventing gadgets that seem to a clever solutions to  problems, but which end up causing more problems than they solve.  You may have seen examples like:

toilet paper dispenser hats: you never run out of tissue when you have to sneeze

baby mops: a baby outfit that also mops the floor

umbrella ties

many more .. search the Internet

 

To keep the art form pure you're not supposed to make money - almost guaranteed as the public will see the gadget as useless and won't buy it.  (there was a tragic mistake - the selfie stick started as chindōgu)  I know of an engineering professor who taught a course on creative engineering using it as a vehicle for student projects.

 

For a few years I've found it useful to extend the term to cover technical and social technical inventions that are seen as solving problems by the maker, but are clearly clueless.  A few examples from the past month:

Flat panel displays in cars are a bit of automotive chindōgu.

Blockchains are an example of computational chindōgu.

Meta's Horizon Worlds is pure techno-social chindōgu.

 

Perhaps you might find hunting for this kind of chindōgu useful.  I find it to be a nice way of thinking about what might represent meaningful and useful longterm change.  And of course sometimes you label things incorrectly and have to come back and rethink.  That may be even more useful.

 

And then there are potlatches..  the destruction of wealth to impress and gain status.  Fully autonomous (class five) vehicles, NFTs, Facebook's version of the meta verse, hydrogen powered cars ...