omenti

ted lasso?

a minipost

I was listening to a panel discussion of elite sports psychologists, sports scientists, and a sports anthropologist when a question was posed:

 

Could a Ted Lasso exist?

 

If you haven't seen the show, Lasso is an American college football coach who is suddenly hired to coach an English Premier League team.  He had success in his D-II school, but it was clear he was hired to fail.  It turns out he didn't.

 

There was some laughter among audience members, but the panel members took it seriously.  It could work.  You'd need someone who was an incredible learner with success leading a team  of some kind.  Someone great at listening, observing and thinking.  They've need a Beard - a character who happens to be a serious soccer expert (among other things), but would never cut it as a coach.   Creating a bond with the players, listening to them, and be willing to experiment is key.  You'd also need management willing to put up with the time required to create a success.

 

The anthropologist noted some of these qualities are missing in NFL, NBA, MBA, and NHL coaching.  Coaches tend to be extremely confident of themselves and there is pressure to win.  Team culture can suffer and creativity is low compared with some other types of teams.  He pointed out some women's teams - particularly soccer and indoor volleyball -  are extremely innovative with positive team cultures well beyond any men's pro team he's seen. 

 

There was general agreement among those in the panel.  Coaching has a way to go in the big pro leagues, but the types of coaches selected are an issue.  A great women's soccer or indoor volleyball coach (several were mentioned) could be a Ted Lasso if they had a Beard at their side and the time to create change.   As an example a women's volleyball coach was mentioned.  Something of a household name in sports, he's as passionate figuring out how to coach a team of pre-teens as he is his countries national team.  He's experimenting and learning and might make a discovery with some twelve year old kids that works with his olympians.

 

It's culture all the way down at the top.  Maybe some of these multimillion dollar coaches aren't worth it, but it's unlikely the culture that selects them will change. 

 

It's an interesting game to think about the question in teams outside of sports.  

 

who are you going to call?

Drop two pieces of bread into the toaster and push the lever down.  You go about your business getting the rest of breakfast ready and then, after a few minutes, two pieces of toast pop up.  Have you ever thought about what's going on?

 

We usually think about the toaster receiving the bread and giving it back to us after a few minutes - electric heating somehow.  Someone from a few thousand years ago might wonder where the bread came from and what kind of magic transformed it into something similar but different after a few minutes.  He might wonder if the lever was some kind of prayer or incantation.  We can examine the process at a variety of levels and can find considerable depth.  We know the cord is plugged into a socket which has a path though a series of transformers and wires that usually lead to a generator that is turned by spinning a turbine with falling water or steam superheated by nuclear fission or the burning of fossil fuels.  When the switch goes on the load on the generators increases by a bit more than we're using.  The steps required advances small and large over the decades in science and technology.   For example getting the of generation and transmission of electricity to work efficiently depends on an understanding of Maxwell's equations and a fair amount of math.  

 

We don't think about these things because we trust them. There's a solid bedrock of reliable knowledge in much of our technology even though we're not one hundred percent sure of the science.  Our trust in science is nearly universal even though some of us chose to deny certain aspects.  Global warming deniers and flat earthers have no problem using the Internet - computer mediated communication built on silicon based semiconductor technology, fiber optics and much more.   Their mistrust is often based on something in their personal value system that to first order may seem orthogonal to the scientific arguments.

 

Not many people have a good handle on how science is done and how it progresses.  Many of us had to memorize the steps in "the scientific process" in elementary school, but it turns out it's messy and there's no formal process.  In college you may have come across Karl Popper's notion of falsifiability and Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shifts. Both of these models have been shown to be wrong.  The view among many scientists and philosophers of science is science is more or less makeshift, but produces reliable knowledge and tends towards self-correction and reliable knowledge over time.

 

A few years ago a few lectures by Naomi Oreskes at Princeton gave me the basis of something I'm more comfortable with even though it's not complete. She argues reliable knowledge is based on five factors:  method, evidence,  consensus, values and humility.  I won't go into these as each is a deep subject, suffice it to say that the last three are deeply social - something many "hard" scientists tend to have a difficult time admitting.  Science is deeply collaborative and these social aspects often determine what is worked on as well as how it, and the people who did it, are perceived. 

 

Although most people trust much of science, personal and group values can get in the way of trusting certain aspects as well as certain scientists.  We've witnessed this up close with the pandemic, global warming and evolution.  I worry that many scientists have made a mistake by hiding their values (that's changing with some of us) as well as separating science and technology.  The separation of science and technology was value based and began to become dominant after WWII. Somehow science was to be the pure pursuit of nature even though it's linked to technology at the hip.  Often technologists are well versed in the science underlying their work and some venture into applied science.  Scientists, particularly experimentalists, are by necessity amateur technologists.  I've done some technology and have a bit of a feel for it, but I'm certainly not skilled - I do much better on the science side.  I'm in as much awe of great technologists as I am of great scientists. 

 

A final point.  Who should you trust to do science?  If the light in your house keep going out when you plug the toaster in, it probably makes sense to call a licensed electrician.  When a pipe in your house bursts spewing out gallons per minute, you call a licensed plumber and not an electrician or dentist. A trip to the dentist and not the Ghostbusters is in order when you hit a cherry pit in a piece of pie and a tooth falls out.  And when you're thinking of the long term - say your children's lives - listening to experts on global warming makes sense while listening to Mobil-Exxon or the Farmer's Almanac doesn't.  In each of these areas there are mostly good players and a few bad ones. You find the good ones from the consensus of their community. 

 

three dog nights and a changing world

My father never had the thermostat above 60°F and 55° was a more common setting,. At night it would be dropped to 50°.  The house was well insulated and the furnace didn't come on that often if it was above freezing.  During colder weather we spent most of our time in an insulated room in the basement.  We had a lot of sweaters, thick socks, and scarves.

 

Great Falls, Montana lies just East of the Rocky Mountains.  It can be much colder than its latitude suggests as cold arctic air can plunge Southward unimpeded along the Eastern slope of the Rockies.  Global warming has changed the climate a bit, but thirty years ago -40° (F or C) would happen every few years and long spells with high temperatures staying below 0°F are not uncommon these days.   It also happens to be very windy. The residents are became very good at adapting to the climate. 

 

Our house was small so I slept in a small travel trailer most of the time during my high school years. The only real insulation in the Winter was snow..  There were a lot of blankets, a down sleeping bag, a beagle and two silky terriers.  The dogs would make their own beds down to about 40°.  Below that they'd join me in the sleeping bag.   The only down side from these three dog nights was when the beagle had gas.  The sleeping arrangement was always toasty.

 

Another bit of information comes from David MacKay.  Staring in the mid 1960s someone at Cambridge interested in residential heat transport in homes put recording thermometers in a number of homes in town as well as a few other locations around England. The standard Winter daytime temperature was remarkably consistent - about 55° through the 70s.  By 2000 it had crept to 62°. Lower readings than Americans expect, but the Brits may dress more practically.    It would be interesting looking at the insulation value of standard wardrobes over time.  I suspect the emergence of low cost clothing is partly to blame.

 

Over-reliance on Russian natural gas is presenting an enormous problem in some European counties. Short term solutions other than conservation are non-existent, but conservation holds a lot of promise.  Heat people rather than spaces.  A few days ago Jheri wrote noting she's working on warm Winter clothing lines for German and Nordic markets on speculation that natural gas will be rationed for a few years.   The savings projections I've seen involve thermostat settings of 16°C (61°F) .. I know from experience you can go much lower and be perfectly comfortable.  (That said I don't know how some of the high school girls survived with miniskirts back in the day.)

 

In the medium term there are a number of things that can be done, but I struggle coming up with anything at the home level approaching the impact of serious conservation.  The same goes for petroleum usage. Infrastructure changes to encourage cycling can have a non-trivial impact.  Fortunately a few locations (Denmark and the Netherlands)  have made, or are making (Paris), great headway. 

 

The medium and long term will be dominated by power generation and distribution, but progress can and should be made with "smart" heating and cooling along with smart fabrics.   There's much to say about those areas, but for later.

 

Who knows.. maybe tech can be more meaningful than social media and blockchains..  

 

Who knows.

 

 

 

after a fall

a quick minipost

 

Or after THE fall..  

 

The Olympics can brings years of effort into very sharp focus for some of the best athletes in the world.  A decade or more of hard work and sacrifice can fall one way or another in under a second.  By any rational measure they're all amazing to get as far as they have.   And of course the athletes don't buy that - at least not initially.

 

A few people have recommended a new book on regret.  I haven't read it, but getting the recommendations while the Olympics are underway seems natural.  I don't consider the phrase no regrets to be useful.  Regret can be a powerful motivator, teacher and catalyst for self-reflection.

 

Every successful group and organization I've been around holds postmortems for projects independent of outcome.  In large particle physics experiments it's common to hold internal and external postmortems.  These are particularly important where the culture and institutional memory are long term goals.  External postmortems are held for other experts - often competitors - and are important for ferreting out and fixing issues that hadn't been considered. (Feynman frequently said ~ The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool...)  Of course there are regrets and people can feel a bit stupid, but you learn and grow.

 

At a personal level regret can be a highly motivating teacher.   With enough reflection you become much better at making decisions and you get better at what you're doing.    And sometimes life's big decisions come into clearer focus.  Are you really doing what you like?  Are you doing what you should be doing? Should you change your goals or invent completely new ones?   A life with a singular focus can lead you down a path that you realize all too late was the wrong one.  The self reflection of regret seems like a mechanism to make midcourse corrections, learning and growing as you travel.

 

I've had wonderful failures and mostly useful regrets.  To some I may seem like a failure, to others a success, but to myself I'm lucky enough to still be learning - plus -  all of my fingers and eyelashes are still intact.

 

opportunity++

Now it's posh, but London's Soho district was a rather unfortunate place in the mid 19th century.  The region was experiencing dramatic growth, but it didn't connect to London's sewer system.  Residences crammed in with slaughter houses and rendering plants overloaded a primitive sewer system that was unable to serve everyone.  Cesspools ran over and untreated waste flowed directly into the Thames.  This was taking place during a worldwide pandemic. London had seen outbreaks before, but the 1854  outbreak on Broad Street changed the course of history.

 

John Snow is famous for mapping out cholera deaths in the area and noting a cluster served by a water pump on Broad Street. The pump drew water from a well that was contaminated by human and animal sewage. The Broad Street pump was removed from service, but didn't make much of a dent in the three or four thousand cholera deaths in London.  What made a difference was what he did next. - an analysis of deaths in regions served by water pumped from the Thames.  He set up a double blind experiment and showed cholera was carried by an agent in the water rather than the dominate theory that it was "bad air" (miasma).  It was the beginning of scientific epidemiology and modern public health. 

 

There's a pub named in his honor near the location of the pump that started his line of reasoning.

 

Over the last year and a half we've been  learning just how important public health is.  It seems odd to unquestionaingly spend so much on a war industry when a pandemic mixed with politics and a fear of science has prove more lethal than war.  That aside we're learning fresh air is critical with airborne spread diseases.  During an outbreak that means masks universally worn as a first and final line of defense and frequent air changes.  With the delta variant of SARS-CoV-2  it looks like you need at least fifteen air changes an hour to qualify as safe with minimal masking.  Outside of clean rooms and operating theaters that's a tall order indoors.  We can get part of the way there with in-room air cleaners, upgraded HVAC systems and opening windows when you can.  I've been spending some time doing this to learn a bit and have come to the conclusion that, although effective, it's sort of a piano wire and chewing gum approach.   Real fixes require an architectural design approach informed by science to create new spaces as well as retrofit existing ones.  Very few people do the science and much needs to be done.  New technologies probably need to be developed and there needs to be a better understanding of what can be done with what exists.. 

 

Creating clean spaces goes well beyond the current pandemic.  Clean indoor rooms can have an impact on the flu plus there are a number of chemicals that outgas that we mostly ignore.  And many of us have had to deal with PM 2.5 pollution from forest fires and combustion.    The question is how do you make this desirable enough that we learn how to make and implement better designs than we have?   How do you spark a revolution in public health that involves architecture design and retrofit on a massive scale?

 

Unfortunately successful public health measures are often seen as expensive overkill.  Perhaps carbon dioxide concentration is the answer.  Over the years studies have shown decreases in cognitive functions and alertness linked to higher  CO₂ concentrations.¹ Generally 1000 parts per million is seen as a boundary, but some studies show decreased mental ability around 800 ppm.  Many offices and schools regularly exceed 1000 when occupied.  Your car is probably several thousand in a half hour  if you aren't bringing in outside air.  How much would a school spend to upgrade the mental ability of its students?  Would a company pay extra for more alert workers who function at higher cognitive levels and get sick less often? And what about homes?  Many homes are worse than offices - maybe working from home should be rethought or at least certified.   

_________

¹ A fairly recent study on cognitive function associated with CO₂ and VOC exposure 

 

 

some really big changes

event                    species eliminated     million years ago        cause(s)

End-Ordovician                       85%                 444                     global cooling  

Late Devonian                    70-80%          372-359                    multiple events, low O₂ in oceans    

End-Permian                      90-95%                 252                     volcanism

End-Triassic                            75%                  201                     volcanism

Cretaceious-Paleogene           75%                   66                      impact event, volcanism?                                              

 

In the late 70s a group led by Luis Alvarez found a very thin layer of an element that shouldn't be there in locations all over the Earth.  Iridium is very rare on the Earth, but common in meteorites and probably asteroids.  The layer was found in enough places that could be accurately dated.  Dinosaurs fossils were abundant below the layer and non-existent above it.  About three quarters of the species on Earth had vanished in a short amount of time.

 

It remained an interesting hypothesis until about a decade later when a 200 kilometer wide crater was mostly in the Gulf of Mexico and just happened to date to the end of the Cretaceious - about 66 million years ago.  It looked like the smoking gun, but any remnants of the asteroid were under layers and layers and layers of limestone.  But a few years ago what may just be the smoking gun was found.  The area around the crater has a large amount of high sulfur evaporate sedimentary rock. Drilling deep into the crater the sulfur-rich rock is mostly missing.  When the asteroid slammed into the earth so much energy was liberated that layers of this rock were vaporized.  In the atmosphere they combined with water and surrounded the Earth with a thick dark cloud layer that dramatically dropped the average temperature of the Earth.  For something like ten to twenty years temperatures on the land were near or below freezing. Not good if you're a plant. Not good if you're cold blooded and/or have a large enough body mass to require a lot of food.   

 

At the same time a large amount of carbon dioxide was emitted.  This probably helped preventing the temperature from going way below freezing, but it acidified the oceans killing a lot of marine life.   Land and ocean-based food chains were interrupted.  

 

The Chicxulub impact event is very compelling, but is it the whole story?

 

Perhaps not.

 

Around the same time, perhaps a few hundred thousand years earlier, something dramatic was underway in what is now Western India.  Four major volcanic events produced enormous lava flows collectively known as the Deccan Traps.  About a million cubic kilometers it would be enough to cover the US with about 120 meters of lava. Could it have been part of the extinction event?  After all, two of the major extinction events were volcanic and this one was approximately huge. (over three hundred times larger than the Yellowstone event)

 

Over twenty or thirty thousand years enough carbon dioxide was released to dramatically increase the Earth's temperature.  There's a growing consensus that it was part of the extinction event, although there's a lot of academic debate as to how important it was . Was life weakened by this increase and then finished off by the asteroid, or was most of the damage done by the eruptions?  A lot of interesting questions are being worked on.

 

The last extinction is relevant because at least one part of it was quick.  We're now at the beginning what appears to be the sixth extinction event.  The one we're causing and perhaps an extensional threat to humanity  It's also shaping up to be a very swift event. Learning how the atmosphere and oceans respond to such events is important. 

__________

Some of you know I've been trying to do something about global warning for about twenty years.  I've made another major change in approach.  I've never expected a major impact, but my first two approaches of education and storytelling have been failures.  I've moved on to targeted conversation.  Well beyond my pay grade, but in retrospect it appears to involve less titling at windmills.

 

 

on good design for those who need it

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

low distortion rearview mirrors

 

History Does Not Repeat Itself, But It Rhymes

      -  Mark Twain

Except it wasn't him.  

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

on fundamental change

 

Ludwig Boltzman, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics. Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously.

It's not uncommon for a professor to quote the first paragraph of States of Matter by D.L. Goodstein on the first day of an undergrad statistical mechanics course.  Statistical mechanics is an outgrowth of the study of thermodynamics which had become a major intellectual effort attempting to understand heat engines in the 19^th century.  You can derive the results of thermodynamics from it and it led to much deeper explorations including the beginnings of quantum theory.  It's also concerned with entropy.    Entropy is at the heart of understanding change.  It's deep enough to be tightly connected with why time only goes forward and what cause and effect are.  Popular definitions aren't accurate. It isn't the tendency to disorder and it isn't the entropy computer scientists talk about (although Shannon's entropy is an exceptionally important tool for thinking about information). 

 

Unfortunately the fundamental concept of entropy is a bit abstract.  xkcd notes a problem common in science and undoubtedly many other places.  I'm frequently guilty, but I started to put together a post on the difference between entropy and complexity and why increasing entropy doesn't imply increasing complexity that doesn't involve math.  I found myself sketching pictures and wishing they were animated.  Then I remembered Sean Carroll did a series of very short YouTube videos with Henry Reich creating the animations as part of Henry's Minute Physics series.  They're wonderful!

 

The third video: Where does complexity come from?,  gets at the core of the entropy and complexity and why entropy isn't disorder.  It works as a stand-alone, but I recommend watching all five in order.  They achieve a good balance of getting the basic concepts across without any danger of anyone committing suicide.

 

Sean begins with why doesn't time go backwards and covers a fair deal of what the Second Law of Thermodynamics implies.  Things like cause and effect, the origin of complexity and even how life can exist.

 

Some deep and sexy physics without the math.

 

 

silver linings?

The pandemic has been responsible for an enormous amount of pain, agony and death.  While we're not out of the woods and won't be for the foreseeable future, a few potentially positive change has been made more likely. It's easy to make a long long and think about some more deeply, but for now a short list.

 

° mRNA vaccines have been under development for over two decades.  Their value has been shown in the most dramatic fashion.  Expect many more - some for conditions that have been very difficult or impossible to treat.

° American contributions to a worldwide network of outbreak observatories were killed by the Trump administration. Finding the next outbreak early enough to contain it requires this kind of work.  We've been lucky and able to catch and contain a few recent candidates early.   Finally there's  a large amount of interest and it's likely to happen.

° We saw an existence proof that parts of nature repair quickly when human impact is reduced.  Unfortunately most of these improvements have disappeared, but many of us have seen them and perhaps some of us will be better motivated to create change.

° Many cities tasted alternative transportation and street use.  It seems to be sticking in some areas. The automobile doesn't belong in cities for a variety of reasons.  Side note:  Electric cars are insufficient - the transportation system needs serious reworking.

° It appears that part of the reduction on business travel may be permanent. 

° A huge social experiment is underway to see what kinds of work can be done remotely.

° Likewise a similar social experiment is underway on remote education.  This is a very complex problem involving much more than what is normally thought of as education.

° Serious work is underway on indoor air quality. This has positive implications beyond airborne viral transmission.

° It's still a way off, but more thought is being given to single payer insurance.

° Massive universal basic income experiments are underway worldwide.

° There are indications young people are spending less time connecting online.

° There's  renewed interest in good science communication.

° A few have been afforded the opportunity to create personal change.  This may prove to be one of the most interesting impacts.

There's much more than this - I wrote these down in a couple of minutes.  I encourage you to make your own lists. Some of these are rich topics for exploration.