omenti

when subtraction beats addition

The hammer and feather were released at the same time as a few million people watched back on Earth.  Absent air resistance, both objects fell to the lunar surface at the same rate.  David Scott had performed a version of the experiment Galileo Galilei is known for - the one your high school physics teacher said was true if you could ignore the air.

 

It turns out Galileo never dropped anything from the Leaning Tower of Pisa.   Instead he rolledballs of different masses down inclined planes.  The balls accelerated uniformly independent of their mass, but at a rate related to the angle of the plane.  He recognized their acceleration on a 90° ramp would be the same as dropping them from a tower.  One of his insights was if you get rid of friction and air resistance, the problem becomes simple.   This is one of the deepest insights in all of physics - that you can make seemingly ridiculous simplifications and get useful results. And once you know the idealized solution you can add in the fiddly bits that kept you from seeing things clearly at first. 

 

Physicists are trained to simplify wherever possible - (paraphrasing Einstein) just not too much. It's part of the art of the sport. It's so deeply engrained you find yourself using the approach in unrelated areas.  With this background I was struck by a piece in Nature showing people tend to add rather than subtract when solving problems.  It's very common.  Software can get overloaded with features in a hurry consider Microsoft Office.  It's fine to add some functionality over time.  The hard part is understanding something enough to subtract features to improve it's functionality takes serious creativity - in some areas it might be called taste.

 

Once the core ideas are understood it becomes possible to go much further. Before the scientific revolution of the 16^th and 17^th centuries Aristotle's teleological view of the world dominated Western thought.   An object's motion was determined by its nature and all processes were determined by goals.  It's a crude handwavy explanation that sort of makes sense if you don't ask too many questions.   Place a coffee cup around on your desk and give it a shove.  It moves for awhile and comes to a stop.   Everything in motion must constantly be moved by something. Galileo shattered this way of thinking and others built on it.  Newton came up with a good model for motion and gravity that still works well for most of what you and I do - you can and a probe on Mars and fly a helicopter there with it. .  About one hundred years ago Einstein, motivated by some foundational flaws in Newton's work, created "simple, but not too simple" theories that gave a much deeper view that solves a few thorny issues.  That helped to explode our view of the universe.  It also made global positioning systems work. 

 

With this deeper understanding of Nature our minds can travel to the most exotic places. Recently a visualization of a binary black hole system was released.  While the calculations are difficult, requiring a lot of supercomputer time, the core ideas are straightforward.  Enjoy the lightshow as the massive black holes warp nearby spacetime  (the notes are a good explainer)

 

There's much to be learned talking with people in very different fields.  Some are motivated by simplicity, but their approaches are often different and enlightening. .  These people have a lot of skill and experience playing with their kind of simplification.  I'm thankful for conversations I've had with some of you where you've been open enough to let me learn a bit from you.  It's sharpened my approach.

 

 

leaps of faith

minipost

Yesterday I had my first jab of a Covid-19 vaccine - specifically the Pfizer mRNA vaccine.  Despite political, production, and distribution issues several vaccines appeared and more are coming.  Going from decoding the SARS-CoV-2 genome to first injections took only about a half year and a year later a few hundred million doses have been produced. While some corners were safely cut, the real story - at least for the new mRNA vaccines - began nearly thirty years earlier.  

 

Katalin Karikó's work will certainly win her a Nobel Prize next year.   Here's a good telling of the story.  A major point is the work was judged unworthy and finding support was nearly impossible.  After about ten years another player, Drew Weissman, entered and the two of them managed to crack the final bits of the problem.  He'll certainly be sprinkled with the Swedish holy water too. The mRNA approach is important well beyond the current pandemic - it may mark a fundamental change in medicine.  It wouldn't have happened - at least not as soon as it did - without a certain type of reserch.  

 

Curiosity-driven fundamental research requires a certain type of scientist, time and resources.  While much of it fails to produce an immediately useful result,  it has an established track record of changing the world.  Industries don't do this kind of work anymore.  Most universities shy from it - there's a tendency to want results-focused work.  When it's funded you usually find it in physics and astronomy  rather than the biological sciences and that's a problem.   These leaps are driven by hope and curiosity.  They open doors that often require more than a decade of work - usually by other people in different organizations.   Expanding this work is how you create radical change.  I'd never argue results-driven research should be cut - after all, that's where the next five to twenty years come from.  But I'd love to see the Katalin Karikós of the world given more of a space.  And then there are the spin-offs - a good deal of the instrumentation used in medicine came out of  fundamental physics - but that's another set of stories.

 

frogs, pots of water and the slow application of heat

A few weeks ago Om posted a piece on Apple's new laptop based on their M1 chip.  It's one of those huge transitions that gives Apple a much higher starting point  for desktop and laptop machines - machines that are still very important to many of us. They've been working on this for at least ten years as part of their smartphone silicon effort. People like Horace Dediu and Om (and even a non-technologist like me) have noted the progression of Apple silicon and wondered if it would be deadly to Intel.  For me the biggest surprise has been the software effort - writing was all over the place for on the silicon side. 

 

Zoom's emergence represents a pot that had been slowly warming for decades coming to a sudden boil with pandemic-fueled heat.  It's frustrating with a terrible UX and UI, can be iffy on highly asymmetrical Internet connections that are slow upstream (cable modems for example), causes enormous frustration for many, but it's better than other tools and works well enough.  Last week I described it as the modern equivalent of the <blink> markup in html during the early days of web browsers like Mosaic.  People think it's cool at the time, but it will be laughably primitive down the road.   

 

Remote video tools will get better and may change some habits. At the same time others are recognizing the importance of face to face. One university I work with just completed a survey that found 0% of 1600 students said they'd prefer in-class instruction to remote leaning when the pandemic quiets down.  Already there's a lot of experimentation on campuses and in some businesses.  An animation company saw productivity crater and is working on a better than Zoom suite of tools for internal use. The university I mentioned has found messaging apps like Discord excel in spaces that Zoom handles poorly.  And perhaps we'll get better Internet connectivity.  Price to performance in the US is abysmal, 5G is a largely marketing joke, cable modems are too asymmetrical (upstream is slow) to support serious video conferencing, and the digital divide has widened the already huge education gap.  There's a lot to fix.  It's like cycling - you need to sort out infrastructure and culture along with adding bikes.  

 

I'm confident tool improvements will come but serious leaps need to be taken and I don't have great confidence in the major players.  What I'm more worried about, at least in the US and Canada, is infrastructure. A friend is moving from Colorado to North Carolina and needs a very solid Internet connection.  The only advice I could give was to find cities that offered good fiber connections that we're from telcos.  That mostly narrowed it down to Ting, which left only a few cities. The movement of people from cities to rural and suburban areas is constrained by many forces - this is one. 

 

On to something else..

 

I've argued that virtual reality wasn't very important and augmented reality meant much more than projecting information in your field of view - and that Apple had just introduced their first AR product. 

 

In a way glasses are AR devices - they help you see more than you normally would. The same for microscopes, telescopes, stethoscopes, I have built bat detectors that let me augment my world by adding a bit of theirs, ... the list is long.  But back to my comment about Apple.   I have to admit I was wrong.  Apple's first AR product was the Apple watch, although they didn't know it at the time.  At first it was more of a fashion statement with a weird assortment of apps.  After a few years they learned what it was for.  People saw it as something for improving their health and fitness. Exercise, heart monitoring, and even the state of your body. Jutta has an app that interfaces with other hardware for diabetes management.  We're talking about life altering AR.   The area is growing rapidly and we won't even think of it as AR because we're used to its Hollywood manifestation.  Of course Alexa, Siri and other voice driven interfaces are AR.  They augment our local information space.  Apple's EarPods are just a portal you wear.  There's still a place to visual AR, but the pot's already boiling.  AR is here now.

 

Of course we should think about how these things fit into our lives. That's a serious area I'm not terribly confident about - at least if tech is making the design choices.

 

 

green flight

Two years ago the Environmental Protection Agency reported aviation accounted for about three percent of the nation's CO₂ emissions, or about twelve percent of transportation.  The international figure is about two point five percent.  These may not seem huge, but they've been growing steadily and, post pandemic, should continue their growth.  Making matters worse is the global warming contribution from the cloud-like contrails produced by the jet engines at altitude.   It's difficult to study, but indications are the contribution may double the global warming impact. 

 

A number of approaches have been suggested and are in various stages of testing.  Moving to bio-fuels isn't the greatest solution as growing and producing biofuels has issues and you're still producing contrails.  In the short term some airlines will move to it, but that may be part a PR and carbon credits game as much as anything. 

 

Electric airplanes exist and there are even a few (very) sort haul commercial flights.  The problem is the specific energy of the battery - how heavy is a battery per unit of energy storage.   Turbine fuel stores about eighty times as much energy as a safe lithium-ion battery of the same weight.  Airplanes frequently carry large amounts of fuel - the weight of fuel burned on a cross country trip is greater than that of the the passengers and crew.  The range of a battery powered airplane is severely limited even after accounting for the great efficiency of an electric motor.   We could get a lot closer with exotic batteries that aren't anywhere close to reality, but even then you're talking about a propeller driven (slower) aircraft. 

 

Hydrogen often comes up as the perfect clean fuel - the combustion product is just water.   Although it's the most common element in the universe and accounts for most of your body's atoms, we need hydrogen gas and that's extremely rare on Earth.  Hydrogen gas (H₂) must to be produced and it takes a lot of energy to create it - more than you can get out of it.  Most of it is produced from a petrochemical process that involves carbon emissions.  This is called black or grey hydrogen and, if you manage to capture most of the carbon emissions it's called blue hydrogen.  What you want is green hydrogen - hydrogen produced using electrolysis with electricity from wind, solar or nuclear power.  That seems like a nice use of excess intermittent power. 

 

It's important to think of hydrogen as an energy storage medium - a non-rechargeable battery of sorts.  It has a very low - essentially unusable energy density at atmospheric pressure.  You'd need impossibly large tanks (think about Hindenburg sized tanks) or you can compress it or liquify it and shrink your tanks to something more manageable.  In gas form at a very high but probably safe pressure it needs about five to ten times the volume of  jet fuel. Liquid hydrogen gets you down to about three and a half times the volume.  

 

Engineering is all about finding an optimal solution to several problems that generally interact.  You could convert a turboprop or turbofan to burn hydrogen and see where that takes you.  Turboprops seem to be workable on short haul routes (1,000 km or less) with small passenger loads (under 100 passengers).  They'd be slow and fly at lower altitudes than today's jets.  Turbofans present a number of problems - at altitude they're making contrails and the range and payload isn't great.  One needs to think a bit out of the box.   

 

You might use a hybrid jet fuel/hydrogen engine that climbs to cruising altitude on jet fuel as fuel consumption is much greater in that phase. Then the switch to hydrogen fuel is made when the engines are throttled back at cruise altitude.  You could also design a lifting body aircraft that has a lot of internal volume for liquid hydrogen fuel tanks without being too large for conventional airports.  Tricks might get you across the US with a few hundred passengers, but flights across the Atlantic or Pacific would require something more. 

 

The prop-driven airplanes present other opportunities. A fuel cell converts hydrogen to electricity and electric motors are more efficient that jet engines.  There are a number of little problems that can be overcome, but a fuel cell propeller airliner may just be a short to medium range solution.

 

I didn't go into the NOx problem.  The high heat of combustion in a jet engine creates nitrous oxides when the nitrogen in the air is heated to high temperatures.  That's a problem - particularly at the high altitudes jets fly at and burning hydrogen won't fix it.  The way around it is to use fuel cells and electric motors, but that's for lower altitudes and slower speeds.  There isn't an ideal solution - you just hope to reduce as much as you can.  

 

Airbus is working on the problem - or at least they were before the pandemic.  I can believe the target date for the propeller aircraft, the lifting body is probably more than fifteen years out.

There may be a near term niche for hydrogen powered flying vehicles.  Agricultural and inspection drones are much larger than hobbyist drones.  They're limited to half hour flight times with batteries, but new fuel cell drones with small high pressure hydrogen tanks have appeared in Korea.  They can fly for hours and that may be the first practical opening for aerial hydrogen.

 

normal?

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

there is a season

The wheels appear to be coming off the Major League Baseball season.  The NBA basketball may have built a tight enough bubble, but at great cost. And I'll bet a fair amount that NFL and college football will be disasters if they take place.  Some sports and associated logistics may too difficult to handle given the poorly controlled pandemic situation in the US.  There is some truth in what Sean Doolittle said:  "Sports are like the reward of a functioning society."

 

There are examples of carefully executed seasons even in the US. Before getting an example there's a more interesting question:  Why do people care about sports?  I'm not terribly coordinated but am a fan of and advisor to one of the Olympic sports.  The science of sport is deep and fascinating.  I've dabbled a little and have found it's a way to connect dots and gain insight in areas I hadn't considered.  Unexpectedly it became a gateway to learning about neurology and metabolism and a good way to teach introductory physics.  And that's just the beginning.  Sport is one of those interesting lenses for looking at the world. Not to mention sports are a form of rich story-telling that take can even create a community identity.

 

BBC's The Why Factor had an episode asking "why people care about games". (23 minutes audio) It touches on some psychology and cognitive neurology among other things. 

 

As I write the last day of the AVP beach volleyball season is about to begin in Long Beach, California.  The athletes saw the international and American schedules evaporate along with the Olympics. The center of gravity for North Americans is Southern California - specially the South Bay region of Los Angeles. The AVP decided they could pull together a three tournament schedule spread over three weeks and finally managed to find a venue - the parking lot of the Long Beach Convention Center - and a few sponsors.   Amazon PrimeVideo handles the video.  It was an intense effort - a bit of the story appeared here before the tournaments began. 

 

Some of the teams are a bit rusty, but the intensity of play is very high.  Beach volleyball is not a wealthy sport - only a handful make enough to do as their only job and this was the only money available.  More importantly this is the only serious competition available.  There is a lot of covid testing with one and two day turn-around times.  A positive and you and your partner are out for the season.  The players were told to not use indoor gyms for training.  The players quarantined before hand and only a limited number of media, officials and players are allowed on site. They're keeping things clean, but they recognize airborne transmission is probably more important so everyone but the players is masked and isolated.   Of course no spectators are allowed.

 

The game play has been excellent.  Rather than fake crowd noise the AVP and Amazon decided enhance the fan's experience with the court's sound field.  Twenty microphones are scattered around the main court and more installed in the player's time-out corners.   It worked brilliantly but after the first tournament PrimeVideo had to run a content warning click-through to the tournaments.  It seems some of the players have foul mouths when they're excited. 

 

The AVP consulted with a infectious disease experts from local universities. The plans for what to do if something goes wrong are much more detailed than the already complex operational plans.  It make me wonder what kinds of plans schools and universities have for when something goes wrong.

 

PrimeVideo streams and archives the tournaments here if you're interested.

 

 

smart cities aren't

The chocolate chip cookie recipe arrived at my office a few weeks after I left Orlando.  I baked a batch a few days later - they were exactly like the ones I had in the board room.  Incredible.  And then there was the room's Coca Cola machine.  Not only did it have a knob to adjust the syrup percentage, but the crystal glasses were already iced.  It was my first visit to a Disney theme park - not that I hadn't been given an opportunity.

 

My twelfth birthday present was tagging along with my father to a training session in Los Angeles.  Friends and relatives had my time all mapped out - Disneyland, Hollywood, and so on - but were disappointed when I turned all of it down.  Somehow I had talked them into letting me visit the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the planetarium at Griffith Park, and the museum at the La Brea tarpits.  Disney just didn't seem to have much to offer.  And somehow, a few few decades later, I found myself spending time visiting major customers of our company to listen to their problems.  Disney was a big customer.

 

Disney was designing the Town of Celebration and were looking for "cool" technologies.  We were interested in it as a test bed and potential showcase. Over the course of about a dozen visits I ran into a good deal of technological  and social cluelessness along with smatterings of seriously interesting ideas.  The Disney Imagineers were great and through them I met Randy Pausch of CMU who was also asking questions about Celebration. (If you haven't heard about Randy, check out his last lecture.  It's the best thing you'll do today.)  The executive class wasn't in the same league.

 

A few projects took flight, but most on their list weren't available or practical (sensing someone's health via their toilet:-).  Celebration was supposed to be a model of the New Urbanism movement, which sounds like a good idea on the surface, but you need social glue to make it work and that didn't exist.  So a town was developed and Disney exited as political problems surfaced.  On the other hand I had a preview of what was to come from an anthropologist who was studying the project.  I also learned that Waffle Houses aren't very vegetarian friendly. 

 

A call from an old friend who disappeared to Googleland years ago brought all of this back. He had been with Sidewalk Labs - Google's urban technology arm.  Their goal is to somehow improve life using Google technology.  It sounded like an underpants gnome affair. 

 

The first project was going to be sited on Toronto's waterfront.  In addition to high tech offices there would be residences with Jetsonish features like pneumatic tube trash collection, heated streets to melt snow,  autonomous vehicles, and a digital panopticon to measure and project as much as they could about everyone and everything.   Some rather intense local opposition developed. Who knew Canadians might worry about digital privacy, data ownership and the monopolistic nature of the design.  Opposition increased as it became clear Google would be the main beneficiary until the corona virus appeared giving Google an excuse to exit. (for those interested in an analysis this paper by Teresa Scassa of U Ottawa is excellent.)

 

For about two decades a few large corporations have been interested in the "smart" city.  It's a rich topic to think about.  How is information gathered, who owns it, who processes it and who owns the processed information? How does the information interact with people?  (I was told Google wanted to predict potential criminality in conjunction with the police). Who defines benefits?  Who decides what makes people "happy"

 

I suspect top down approaches are doomed to failure - modern day versions of the company town where you're always being watched.  A more interesting question is what is possible from the ground up and what is possible that isn't data oriented?  We're going to see an explosion in sensor technology with a lot of rich companies pushing to exploit opportunities.  Thinking deeply about the evolution of cities and suburbs is more important than ever.  This place may be interesting as it isn't so top down and its technology is more distributed.  

 

A final comment. My gut feeling is one of the best ways to improve urban life involves removing cars and moving to active and public transportation as much as possible. It's a different use of the term "smart", but I think some Nordics are moving in that direction.   Some tech is involved, but it's mostly physical  infrastructure, laws, public education.  But that's just one person's opinion.

 

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!