omenti

hope for nature and humanity

In grad school I came across The Limits to Growth - a book by the Club of Rome. Basically a report on computer simulations of exponential population growth and limits of the carrying capacity of the planet for a number of resources.  It struck me as bleak and depressing suggesting zero population growth was our only path out. I was curious about their model and found issues with the underlying data set and models. It wasn’t possible to describe population growth trends with simple exponentials. Something else was going on. They admitted some issues, but swept it under the rug sort of claiming “correct” data would fit their model. It began to slowly eat at me.

 

A few years later  I found myself traveling to Princeton regularly as part of a collaboration. It’s a great place to run into people and ask questions.  Eventually I found some demographers and learned at their feet. They weren’t terribly impressed by the book. They freely admitted there were serious issues, some of which may be existential threats.  At the same time there were some extremely positive trends.. Instead of simple exponential models there are periods of development with different population dynamics.  At first I had a my doubts, but their models fit the available data and fit some emerging trends much better than the CoR report.  There are a  variety of models, but they mostly boil down to three main stages.

 

The first is a period where the death rate is very close to the birth rate - sometimes exceeding it, sometimes falling short. Humanity was scattered around the globe and regions would fade in and out.  Eventually with trading centers becoming stable with very low population growth. The death rates were enormous.. for a family to continue to the next generation you generally needed more than six children.

 

The second stage is marked by the introduction of sanitation and successful disease prevention. Death rates drop dramatically, but people still maintained extremely high fertility rates.   The sanitation and medical knowledge is quickly communicated to populations at a similar stage. This results in enormous population spikes.  In the US the core part of this stage was from about 1920 to 1970.

 

The third stage sees women gaining education, opportunity and control over their bodies and fertility. Incomes are rising and families begin to focus putting more into fewer children. The fertility rate drops .. often dramatically.  Think Japan and parts of Europe. 

 

Different regions of the world go through these at different times and rates. One of the huge drivers for the second and third stages is urbanization. At first it  seemed counterintuitive, but when you talk to demographers and read their papers it becomes clear the growth of cities is the rocket fuel that enables the rest.

 

About fifteen years ago I organized a small conference on this at Aspen. I left with great hope and enthusiasm believing that lowering some of the other potentially existential threats would only make this process easier. In my mind the immediate low hanging fruit was working on global warming. It could have been, but I didn’t understand the inertia and control of the fossil fuel industry.

 

I could go on and on about these demographic trends and had intended to, but it would be book length and others are more expert in the area. I may talk about it in the future. The next stage is cloudy I can argue for at least four very different paths .. some of them pretty awful. But I recently came across a nice discussion of the saving nature piece..

 

Now for the good part.  Sean Carroll of Caltech interviews Joe Walston - the senior VP of Field Conservation at the Wildlife Conservation Society.  Joe offers a better summary of these issues than I could in an hour of writing  It's a bit over an hour long, but worth it if you have any interest in demographic trends, why they happen and where they could go.

 

Finally it's interesting these trends appear to be society independent.  We like to think how different we are, but in many ways, for good and bad, we're the same.  I find that comforting.

 

 

 

the other scientific revolution of 1953 that radically accelerated knowledge

In the Winter of 1953 Francis Crick interrupted the lunchtime patrons of the Eagle in Cambridge to announce he and James Watson had discovered the secret of life.   In fact it wasn't far from hyperbole - they had discovered the structure of DNA and the world was forever changed.¹  Something else world-changing happened later that year.  Without it we  wouldn't have advanced past the technologies of the 1960s.  Surprisingly one of the people behind it thought it cute, but hardly worth publishing.  

 

But first a bit of historical context

 

The Manhattan project began with blackboards and experiments.  Individual researchers had their desk calculators, but it soon became necessary to work out how neutrons diffused when a critical mass of fissile material came together. A group of scientist's wives came together to perform the repetitive calculations.  Next came IBM card reading calculators and then von Neumann became interested in developments in electronic computing at Harvard, Bell Labs and the University of Pennsylvania.  There's a deep and rich history from this time on, but the important point was the meaning of "computer" was shifting from a woman with a mechanical calculator to an electronic machine.²

 

In 1953  electronic computers were still rare, mostly one-off machines that were expensive and temperamental.   It was still a world of research and development. A few people recognized practical applications, but the machines mostly weren't ready.  Except for physics.

 

Physicists were heavily involved in the birthing of electronic computers focusing on specific problems that tended to involve military projects or fundamental research to drive the hardware.  Fundamental research was seen as the tip of the R&D effort and was often funded from military budgets which were large enough to support these efforts.   Enrico Fermi  had an interesting idea.

 

He was interested in nonlinear systems thinking they might have something fundamental to do with entropy and why time only flows in one direction.  He, John Pasta and Stanislav Ulam conceived a simple toy problem - sixty four identical masses representing the atoms in a lattice connected end to end by little springs representing chemical bonds. Unfortunately calculating the restoring forces is a beast of a problem.

 

A linear system is one that can be described by a straight line on a graph.  Consider a spring.  Pull it twice as far and it exerts twice as much force. The same is true when you pluck a string on a guitar.³  Nonlinear systems have a more complex behavior.  With linear systems you just add up the contributions of each element without considering the others.  Nonlinear systems are nasty - you need to consider everything at once.  You might be able to calculate very simple systems with a few elements, but after things become very complex.

 

The three physicists wrote down a mathematical description of the physics. Think of it as a strange sort of string that you pluck and then listen to as time goes on.  Solving it would require a lot of computer time.  The big iron at Los Alamos was called the Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator, and Computer or MANAIC-1 for short.  It had been built for thermonuclear calculations, but this trio had an enormous amount of credibility and it was clearly fundamental research. 

 

The three had no experience with programming, but Mary Tsingou was a mathematical physicist who knew how to reason with  MANAIC-1.  She set to work creating a program that became an experiment simulating how the lattice behaved for sixteen, thirty two and sixty four "atoms" with various spring forces.⁴  

 

Imagine of the frequencies coming out of the system in terms of sound.  They had expected a pure note that would shift  over to more chaotic noises and finally the equivalent of just a hiss.  That didn't happen. 

 

The lattice was "plucked" and a series of overtones appeared and dissolved into each other creating a complex mixture.   Then the whole process reversed and the overtones disappeared in reverse order until the original pure note reappeared and the whole process started over again.  

 

 

Here's an illustration.  Consider the top graph.  The purple points are just the first vibration mode of a simple string - think of it as showing what would happen if it was just a simple string.  The system we're talking about with equal masses and springs is in blue.

 

Even this simple little problem that had baffled some of the greatest minds had a beautiful and completely unexpected result and a new way of doing science had been developed - the computational experiment.  The computer had become not just a bicycle, but rather a telescope for the mind.

 

Much of science is impenetrable without computer experiments like these.  It's so common, I've done thousands, that you tend to think it's natural.  But it had a beginning and without it much of what we've seen from science after the mid 1950s and the resulting technologies wouldn't have been possible.  Inefficient cars and airplanes, no electronic revolution, no cellphones, no ....

 

Fermi thought it was cute, but not fundamentally important.  That may be true for the hypothesis they tested, but how they did it changed the world.

 

__________

¹ There were many others who were in on this, but Crick and Watson weren't exactly the sharing kind.  Most notably the x-ray diffraction work of Rosalind Franklin.  But she was a women and died before the Nobel was awarded anyway.  

² George Dyson (Freeman Dyson's son) penned Turing's Cathedral.  An excellent and very readable history of the efforts at Princeton.  That may be the most important early thread as the computer architecture used today was developed there.  Much of the slightly later development came out of Cambridge in England. 

³ Sort of ..  you can get it to behave non-linearly, but for now consider a spring that behaves like F = kx where x is the displacement, F is force and k is a constant that tells you about the spring's stiffness.

⁴ I don't know for sure, but have been told she programmed down to the iron in machine language. 

 

 

hearts, minds and actions .. moving people

In the 1960s living conditions in some parts of the developing world were beginning to make serious progress.  It wasn't terribly uniform, but some counties in Africa and Eastern Asia were feeling the impact of the green revolution, sanitation, and widespread immunization.  Korea was at the leading edge, but there was this problem.  A large percentage of the population was rural and agrarian.  To deal with very high infant and childhood mortality rates families had an average of six or seven children.  Now it was likely that the vast majority of those children would live and the fertility rate was the same.  The Korean government was faced with a serious problem.

 

Other countries had the same problem.  The standard approach was to shame people who had too many children and provide education about contraceptives through media campaigns.  It was a tough slog with success rates somewhere between miserable and non-existant.  Korea, on the other hand, had enormous success. All of their objectives were easily met inside of a single generation.  What happened?

 

Although the Korean program was national, media campaigns were absent. It was felt a better approach would correspond to the village oriented makeup of the population.  Information was provided to a few people in each village and then moved by peer to peer contact.  Curiously, although most villages adopted some form of contraction, techniques varied widely from village to village.  Pill villages, IUD villages, condom villages and so on.    The villages with the strongest social networks saw the greatest degree of behavioral change.

 

There was an academic problem.  Work on viral diffusion of information said that weak times would be a much more efficient mechanism for radiating information and changing behavior than these messier local and strong social ties. After all - there had been a lot of success predicting diffusion of contagions  where weak ties spread diseases much more efficiently than strong ties.  Think about a single plane with someone coughing ... And now millions will know about the best current cat videos inside of a day.  And the six degrees...

 

Think about contagions.  While they spread easily, convincing people to get immunized can be a difficult task and some groups adopt anti-scientific beliefs that can lead to breakdowns in herd immunity.  Why doesn't that simple information spread as quickly?   A high level answer moving simple information is very easy and weak tie networks are very effective.  Behaviors tend to be much deeper than simple information and require richer contact often of several types.  We use our close social networks ..  the strong ties of close friends and family ..  for behavioral reference and reinforcement.

 

I know an excellent science explainer.  Make that world-class.  Her parents love the beauty of Nature and moved to Hawaii before she was born.  She returns regularly, but is a bit of the black sheep as they're religious fundamentalists and have come to believe that global warming and science in general are attacks on their belief and identify.  (This linkage is almost uniquely North American. I've talked about it before and probably will again as it's both fascinating and frustrating.)

 

She was home a few months ago when a rare Hawaiian typhoon took a swipe at their island dumping three quarters of a meter of rain in a day.  It is now possible to model how likely a storm like this could exist without global warming.  In this case it was unlikely it would have happened without the current level of global warming.  As the storm raged she broke down into tears.  She shares their love of nature and the storm was a manifestation of change and destruction.

 

They watched and for the first time heard their black sheep science loving daughter.  They're certainly not convinced. Being against a belief in global warming is part of their core identify. But she was able to chip away at their belief.   Her strong tie with them is stronger than the (less strong) tie of their religion and much stronger than widely spread scientifically accurate but weak tied information about global warming.

 

Sometimes simple coded signalings to  strong tie groups are sufficient to bring change.  It seems likely that a lot of personal technology follows this path.  Certainly one can signal to an existing tribe.  If it's done in such a way to resonate with core beliefs it is possible to bring dramatic behavioral change.   New work on  behavioral change diffusion is emerging as people realize the current diffusion models don't always apply.  Viral messaging and weak, but far reaching networked communications fail to describe much of what people actually do and particularly how behavior changes. 

 

Social science isn't a "real" science if you compare them to the "hard" sciences.  Human behavior is still far too complex.  But progress is being made and a better understanding of how behavioral spreads will have deep implications.  Contrary to what Malcolm Gladwell might say, viral information spreading isn't as effective as many think.  (I keep thinking I should write something about Gladwell's books and talks, but...)  If you wonder why your viral ad campaign didn't see any sales bump for your new gizmo, there may be a fundamental reason related to messaging.

 

finding the right position for the slider between education and vocation

William Rowan Hamilton had become obsessed with the idea of a three dimensional number system - sort of analogous to complex numbers being a two dimensional system.  The story he later told was every morning his son would say 'papa, can you multiply triples?' to which Hamilton would sadly shake his head and say 'no, I can only add and take away'.   Then, on a walk on the 16^th of October, 1843, he  crossed the Broom Bridge in Dublin and suddenly knew how to do it.  Rather than adding a single dimension to the complex plane, he'd add two giving three imaginary dimensions and one real dimension perpendicular to them.  In his excitement he carved it into the bridge with his knife:  i² =  j² = k² = ijk = -1

 

He called them quaternions.  They had some use in the day, but when people invented linear algebra, the technique fell by the wayside ... that is until quantum mechanics  came along about eighty years later.  And then computer graphics further down the road.

 

It turns out they're a lovely way to think about quantum mechanics and perform real calculations. Erwin Schrödinger knew enough about forgotten math to realize it was a beautiful gem.  Decades later, trying to improve the speed of computer graphics, a physicist realized they could be a key to quickly calculating rotations in space -- and Tomb Raider became the first computer game with smooth graphics on using relatively primitive personal computers.

 

Hamilton had other accomplishments that deeply impacted physics and math, but the quaternion story has a certain romantic element. To this day physicists gather at the Broom Bridge on the 16^th of October to celebrate.

 

The story of physics is that it's extremely important to think broadly and to keep expanding your learning.  It is also is relevant to education and work across many fields today.  That's what I want to get to, but first this wonderful parody of a certain song..  perhaps the best math song ever.

 

What prompted all of this was an email with a link describing the most contrarian college in America.  It's laser focused on a vision of an education seemingly without much a nod to vocation ...  seemingly..   I'd argue that it's too focused on a narrow piece of education, but have no doubt its graduates have learned how to learn..  they have the beginnings of a real education.  Mark Roosevelt, its President, sums it up:

Education should prepare you for all of your life. It should make you a more thoughtful, reflective, self-possessed and authentic citizen, lover, partner, parent and member of the global economy.

It  takes a special kind of student to thrive in a school like that.  I wouldn't have survived - my interests, those that I was motivated to dive into, lay elsewhere.  I'm happy it exists and that there is spectrum of schools for those who look.

 

My belief is a deep education with at least a few focuses creates the second type of person Claude Shannon describes:

“There are some people if you shoot one idea into the brain, you will get a half an idea out. There are other people who are beyond this point at which they produce two ideas for each idea sent in.”

The ability to get multiple ideas is core to serious play and creativity.   I'd claim focusing on education rather than finding the minimally easy path helps create the neural connections that make this possible.

 

A worry is that many, if not most, schools and students tend more towards vocation.  Focus on what is important to get a degree that will get you employed to pay off that mountain of debt.  Many (not all) businesses, on the other hand, would do well to have broader employees who are still learning and growing - those who can think creatively.  There is a disconnect. 

 

I hope this focus on vocation changes.  The rate of real change is great and people will keep up better if they are broader and more adaptable.  When recommending colleges I tend to focus on education ..  often to the consternation of those asking.  Of course I may be a poor example.  My education was far too narrow, but I've been lucky and curious enough to have been able to expand it a bit.  The other note is you can get a wickedly broad experience at many more places than you might imagine.

 

 Finally there's this odd emphasis on over-scheduling many pre-college kids, but I've probably written on how it kills creativity enough.

 

fitting any body by throwing away the concept of sizes

When "Distinguished" was added before my Member of the Technical Staff Bell Labs title,  I learned those of us in physics and math research were expected to spend five to ten percent of our time working on "interesting" problems of important AT&T customers.  It turned out to be a great program.  We were be exposed to problems and ways of thinking we would never have encountered.   Even when we weren't able to help,  we always learned something.  For me it was  important to realize a person with an odd skill set can sometimes offer novel thinking and insight in an area they know little about. 

 

Three of us found ourselves at the Pentagon (the military was an important AT&T customer) listening to a Colonel talk about problems with military uniforms.  At first I felt like looking for an exit, but as he went on it became clear the problem was fascinating involving math, computer vision, and manufacturing processes that hadn't been invented. 

 

It turns out it's very hard to fit clothing to people without getting sizing good enough and then following through with proper tailoring.  The Army was worrying about human performance. Clothing fit and fabric type were big issues.  They wanted to know if there was some way to quickly take about two dozen measurements that could be used to drive automated manufacturing tools. 

 

It turns out the second part - computerized manufacturing - was and is a huge problem that's beginning to see solutions now.  We focused on the measurement part and invented a laser scanner that could scan a human in about one minute producing a 3d model of their shape accurate to a few millimeters assuming they stood very still.  Several prototypes were  built at a university  and were part of the largest anthropometric study of men and women at the time..  

 

Going through the data, we learned you could  fit over 99% of male and just under 98% of female soldiers by specifying a smaller set of measurements that could be taken by an enlisted person in a few minutes.  The accuracy was better than any but the best fabrication processes of the day.  They would just let vendors bit on it and pay whatever it took.  There wasn't a need for laser scanners.

 

My sense of style is between zero and some negative or even imaginary number, but the problem of making high quality clothing without resorting high end design and tailoring continues to fascinate me.   At the time it was a hard manufacturing problem that was central to a business that was north of a trillion dollars a year worldwide.  It's more like a trillion and a half now.  Millions of people, particularly women, complain about poor fit, fabrication and materials.  I'll written about that in earlier posts in the fashion section and there is the emerging area of smart clothing that I'll skip for now. 

 

The problem returned about ten years ago when I met a friend who happens to be a very thin women who stands six foot three inches.  Getting anything that comes close was an issue and she makes regular use of a tailor.  She has a serious sense of style, but she has to work at it to the point of designing and making her own clothing.  It turned out she knew others with tall clothing issues.  Two other friends are taller yet.  When you're thinking about a problem it's often useful to start with cases where current processes are broken.

 

There are any number of custom shops, but you still pay a lot, selection is often much lower and delivery times can be weeks long with remakes and/or tailoring required.  A friend with a very long inseam spends nearly $250 for a pair of ok, but not great jeans.  That's out of her range, so she sews extensions made from old jeans legs onto the legs of regular jeans.

 

In the meantime work on automated pattern cutting and automated measurement to pattern software has made real progress.  At this point the bottleneck step that is currently hard is stitching ... it's being solved, but only works for limited types of fabrics and designs and is more expensive than skilled human labor (remember that much of the human labor is in South Asia at horrible pay levels with awful conditions).   But development is rapidly progressing and Chinese companies are sinking serious money into the technology.

 

Looking back to the Army work, one of our measurement ideas was to have people wear a bodysuit covered with fiducial marks a computer vision program could recognize.  At the time it seemed too slow and calibration would be tricky, but it was something to watch.  We tried to patent the idea, but were turned down as it was a bit out there and completely out of AT&T business interests.  Now you can do it with a smartphone.  An iPhone X with a 3d sensor could do a wonderful job, but even a regular phone might be good enough.

 

Today someone sent a piece on a stab at the problem -   Zozotown.

 

Many other important issues come to mind, but throwing away sizing and fitting a wide range of body types is part of the what's necessary.  I don't know if this company make it, but we're on the cusp of radical changes in clothing manufacture that may rival the introduction of the shipping container.  One of the largest industries on Earth may begin the process of disruption.

 

she ruled the known universe

By the late 19th century astronomy had been revolutionized by photography.  Long exposures accurately produced much more detail than the best human eyes could hope to record and spectrography lead to the creation of astrophysics.  A real revolution was underway and large sums of money were going into new telescopes.

 

There was a fly in the ointment.  A night's worth of human observations were equivalent to a few kilobytes of information.  A good photographic plate contained thousands of times more.  Astronomy was entering its first age of big data. Finding items of interest and making accurate measurements required a lot of computation.  That meant human computers.

 

To create a catalog of the location, brightness and color of every star in the observable universe Edward Pickering created of the first computer centers at the Harvard College Observatory  The first computers were Harvard students, but Pickering found the young men unreliable.  He switched to female computers .. largely educated women who were unmarriageable for one reason or another, allowing them to have a full time job.  Pay was a bit more than a female school teacher made -  twenty cents an hour.  This group became one of most remarkable computer centers of all time.

 

Henrietta Leavitt  studied music at Oberlin and went on to the Harvard Annex (now Radcliffe) to get a college degree.  She enjoyed astronomy so much that her well-to-do family supported her volunteer work at the Harvard Observatory for a few years.  Her speciality was variable stars - the oddballs that changed in brightness over relatively short amounts of time.

 

She went back to her family taking a position as an arts assistant at a local college, but continued to work on a paper based on her observations.  She became ill and became deaf making marriage and work in music unlikely.   Henrietta got in touch with Pickering.  She could come back, but he couldn't pay her.  She went back to work without a salary - after all, her family was expected to support her.  Years later he started to pay her. 

 

She set out to characterize about 1800 variable stars in the Large and Small Magellaniac  Clouds.  As she worked something started to stand out in her mind.  If she assumed these stars were a similar distance away, after all, they were in the same cluster,  she deduced the period over which their brightness changed was related to their brightness. 

 

The apparent brightness of a light changes by the inverse square of its distance.  Double the distance to a light and it appears a quarter as bright.    Henrietta had discovered if two of these variables - known as Cepheid variables - had the same period, but one was one hundred times dimmer, you could deduce it was ten times farther away than the brighter star.  

 

Measuring the distance to objects in the Universe is core to astronomy and cosmology.  Distances to nearby objects - out to about fifty light years away - could be measured using parallax.  Hold a finger in front of your face and look at it with your left eye.  Now your right.  You'll notice a shift in position.  In astronomy you note a position at one part of the Earth's orbit and measure again six months later. Knowing the diameter of the Earth's orbit and the angular difference between the two measurements allows you to calculate the distance with trigonometry.  Unfortunately the technique  only works for nearby objects as the angles become too small to measure with increasing distance. 

 

By the early teens distances to several nearby Cepheids had been measured using parallax. Leavitt's yardstick had been calibrated.  Her result was one of the most important developments in astronomy - certainly worthy of the Nobel Prize.   She was unknown outside of astronomy, but was finally nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics.  When information was being collected by the Nobel committee it was discovered cancer had taken her a few years earlier.

 

In the mid twenties Edwin Hubble used the Hooker telescope and Leavitt's relation to measure the distance to Cepheid variables in what was then called the Andromeda nebulae. The distances he found were mind blowing - about a million light years.¹  Andromeda was much farther away than anyone had imaging and couldn't be in the Milky Way.  It was a galaxy and the Universe was made of more than just the Milky Way. 

 

The physics of the how Cepheids work took decades to work out, but her relation didn't require a detailed knowledge of the mechanism.²  It became a workhorse and is still regularly used out to distances where you can still see Cepheids.  Over time a series of other yardsticks have been created all using her notion of a knowable absolute  brightness and the inverse square law.  It's how science advances, but someone has to take that first huge leap.  Someone should make a movie about these remarkable computers, particularly the deaf one who figured out how to measure from here to the stars. 

 

__________

¹ The currently measured distance is something over twice as far out - well within his measurement error.  The million light year distance was mind blowing at the time.

A small detail.  Astronomers often use the parsec as a unit of length rather than light-years.  A parsec is a parallax-second - the distance one astronomical unit (the radius of the Earth's orbit) subtends an angle of one arc second..   it's about 3.26 light-years.  Everyone else seems used to light years so I use them here.

² Cepheids are bright  yellow giants - anywhere from 4 to 20 times the mass of the Sun and up to 100,000 times as luminous.  During their period they see their radius change about as much as 25 percent.   They have a lot of helium in an outer layer.  Helium changes in opacity depending on how ionized it is.  Doubly ionized helium - helium missing both electrons - is more opaque than singly ionized helium.  As helium heats up it becomes more ionized.  At the dimmest part of the star's cycle the outer layer of helium is most opaque.  It absorbs heat from the star's radiation and expands.  As it expands it cools and the helium layer becomes more transparent.  At some point it begins to contract due to gravitation getting hotter as it goes.  The transparent mostly singly ionized helium becomes doubly ionized and opaque and the cycle starts over.  It's a huge fusion powered heat engine.

 

hunting serendipity through waylosing

I've been lucky at the art of getting lost just enough.  If you've walked with me while I'm thinking you've probably noticed my sense of direction and local awareness can be low.  If I'm by myself awareness comes into focus, but getting lost - just enough - is something I enjoy and can be a source of serendipity.   I should probably explain.

 

Alarm was the order of the day when Sputnik went up on October 4, 1957.  A big military threat from the USSR , satellites needed to be tracked. Some folks at MIT put together do-it yourself plans to enlist amateur satellite trackers across America.   All you needed was a knowledge of your latitude, a simple sighting device, a pivot and a clock.  Thousands of homemade sighting scopes were made overnight in home shops and within a month a factory was mass producing a kit that was set out to high school science classes around the county.  

 

It turned out a good clock was centrally important.  Knowing the time of a position reading to a second or two was necessary.  Shortwave radios were common in the 50s and satellite trackers were asked to tune to WWV in Fort Collins, Colorado to listen to the reference time signal.

 

A couple of physicists considered about the inverse problem.  What if you had a lot of good clocks in well defined orbits and could read their times?  That's enough (well, sort of) to figure out your position on the globe.  You'd have a global positioning system.  

 

It seemed like an extremely hard problem at the time.  You'd need to orbit atomic clocks and there were any number of issues.  But navigation was a hard problem - a really hard problem.  DARPA eventually went to work on it and, armed with boatloads of money,  made it happen.   Mix in the revolution from Moore's Law, add a few dozen years and navigation had been democratized.

 

Many of us get around following instructions from our GPS systems not paying great attention to what's around us.   Kids in the backseat watch videos or play games.  While this may be ok for some types of travel I think a lot has been lost.

 

I like to pay attention to areas I visit regularly to see change that is otherwise invisible.  There's an undeveloped and heavily wooded swamp next to where I live and, assuming I'm home, I take spend an hour or so every day around noon.  Over the sixteen year I've been doing this a richness of change from year to year rather than season to season emerges.  You get to know about certain animals and plants.  Stop and listen. Let your mind take flight. Try it at night with the fireflies and crickets knowing a coywolf or two is watching.  It's here that a lot of ideas seem to present themselves.  

 

Cities are great too.  I live reasonably close to New York City. If I have the time I'll go somewhere very unfamiliar and learn something..  I'm not a terribly outgoing type unless I know someone, but curiosity can take the lead.  It's not so much being a flâneur as it is looking, listening and asking questions.  

 

The same for universities.  Some of the places I've gone to school and worked encouraged cross-disciplinary collaboration.  Sit in on a departmental lecture outside of your field, ask questions afterwards, walk into people's labs, ask them what excites them now.  And for sports - you can learn a lot about a sport if you spend a bit of time with a competitor.  

 

Waylosing (a wonderful term I heard a few year ago) is very efficient in its inefficiency if you're after more than getting from point A to B.  And normal travel is getting more and inefficiently efficient.    

 

As you get good at it you find yourself asking questions .. why are things the way they are.  Start out with simple things for practice. Why are stores arranged the way they are?   What about the open lots or failed businesses along a route you take?  How many types of ants can your find in Central Park?     How does someone react when you give them a harmonica or a balloon:-)  A lot of this is mental exercise that just comes in handy.  There's a certain pleasure to working out something yourself.  Of course you don't need to - and can't - do it all the time, but it's fun when you do.

 

I worry that the technologies that isolate us from our environment lead us to making poor use of our  travel time (and time in general).  They can be very useful, but use them appropriately.  Other technologies  like cameras, binoculars and microscopes can extend your question asking capabilities.  Choose appropriately.

 

The weather is good this time of year for most of the readers. If you're planning a trip try the classic road trip stopping randomly along the way - get lost, ask questions and look.  The journey can be where serendipity lurks.  

 

Many of you have developed deep waylosing skills.  I'm up for walks...

 

Finally it has been observed that very efficient operations tend to stifle creativity.  That doesn't mean that inefficiency guarantees creativity.. There are a lot of issues . clearly a lengthy subject for another time.

 

 

 

the magnificent violence hidden in a single raindrop

 

The sound of a skater on thin ice.  Predicting a rainstorm of molten iron on a star fifteen years in the past.  

 

It's been a year since I worried about participating in the first March for Science and two Earth Days have gone by.  I've been thinking a lot about the place of science in society.   Somehow it's often perceived as disengaged, from culture, cold, dispassionate and disconnected from almost all of society.  As if it is irrelevant.   At the same time there is widespread confusion global warming, GMOs, evolution,  the impact of technologies, and vaccines along with confusion about the relationship of religion and science and the big fundamental questions such as the origin of the universe and life, the mind and the fundamental laws of physics. 

 

It isn't that way.  Science is very relevant, but there's a communication and image problem.  While formal science and math education need to be fixed, perhaps fixing science communication is something that needs to happen first. 

 

It takes real work and a good deal of thinking to express ideas usually addressed by equations and dense manipulations of experimental data in such a way they're clear and accurate enough.   There are some people who make it look easy.  My thesis advisor made a big point of it and I've gradually become a bit more adroit, but if someone was to ask about something I haven't thought about translating, I stumble and fail.  

 

Issac Newton was arguably the first mathematical physicist.   As an undergrad I made the mistake of trying to wade through the Principia Mathematica - his magnum opus.  Its notation is obscure and the Latin is approximately  dense.  Asked why he didn't write it in English he replied "to avoid being baited by little smatterers in mathematics" .  He wanted to make it obscure.  

 

It's an easy trap to fall into.  Flying home to Montana at the end of my junior year I found myself sitting next to a pretty girl.  Too shy to start a conversation, I pulled out pencil and paper and worked out a solution to a problem a little more cleverly than in the exam.  The paper filled with what must have been unintelligible scribblings as I killed any chance of conversation.

 

Galileo Galilei had a different approach.  He had a deep conviction that ideas were to be shared and understood by almost everyone.  He created stories with good dialog and characterization and used the tool of metaphor to make his points - the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems being a fine example.  His work was readable and interesting enough to become popular and that made him powerful and his science a threat to established dogma.  A few followed in his footsteps as great storytellers  - Darwin and Faraday come to mind.  But science became an institution in the late 19^th century with its own culture and language.  

 

That's the challenge..  to use metaphor, images and even characterization to tell the story.  It has to be accurate enough and not dumbed down.  This is important even when scientists talk to scientists in different fields. You tend to think what you're doing is clear - and it is for anyone who has been working in that field for five or ten years.  Many scientists suffer from imposter syndrome.  Science in other fields can look very hard - much harder than what you're doing.  You fail to realize they've been working at what they do as hard and long as you have and they may feel the same way if you gave a talk.  Science is hard won with a lot of work.  It is the best description we have of how the Universe works and is often how we find ourselves on the threshold of the unknown.  That's the basis for ripping good tales.   It's worth creating them.

 

Years ago there was this wonder public talk as part of a Caltech lecture series.  The speaker described being on the rim of the Grand Canyon and those millions of years of erosion.  Thousands of feet below a river thundered and raged.  In the distance a thunderstorm - the source of those waters. The words of Lauren Isley came to him as he watched:

 

the magnificent violence hidden in a single raindrop

Indeed. 

 

A few people are good at code switching, fluently moving among different descriptions..  I'm working on it.

 

BUT its not enough and this is the problem I've been struggling with for the past year.  Some areas of science have become politicized.  Human-caused global warming is almost universally accepted by the scientific community, but that has an impact of some of the largest businesses in the world and a massive misinformation campaign has been conducted.  Scientists and expertise are actively being ignored and ridiculed in some corners.  Science education in much of the country is under attack and has been damaged. These issues led to the March for Science.  That wasn't enough.  Much more contact than a simple attempt to raise consciousness is required.   I think storytelling is part of the solution, but you have to understand the audience.

 

I'm most comfortable chatting with one curious person.  With a two-way conversation the level of the storytelling can be adjusted and, if I'm really lucky, they'll tell me their story about something that interests them.  This is even true talking with scientists in other fields.  If I'm speaking to a class I have a sense of the expected level.  A general audience?  Let's just say that hopefully can learn from failure. 

 

I thought about dividing up - segmenting - the population so I would know a how to address, or even ignore, different groups.  Looking around I settled on the Six Americas segmentation from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University.  Designed to ferret out beliefs on global warming, it breaks the US population into six separate groups identified to reasonable accuracy using a 36 question survey.  The nice thing is it works for science in general.

The Alarmed are fully concerned about the danger of global warming and are taking personal and political steps to combat it. The Concerned believe it is real, but isn't that important to them yet - maybe it's a top ten issue, maybe not. The Cautious, Disengaged and Doubtful represent a range understanding and acceptance of the problem and none are meaningfully engaged.  The Disengaged and Doubtful generally will vote against those who want to do something about the problem as they see the fight as wasteful.  The Dismissive are convinced it isn't real for a variety of reasons.  They fight it actively and well-funded powerful groups support their cause.  Dismissal has become part of their personal identify. (this is important as it is true for other areas of science)

 

I've wasted far to much time combating the dismissive with evidence.  They simply will never buy it. The doubtfuls are also a tough group to talk to.    That leaves the concerned, cautious and disengaged as potentially useful audiences and each has different information needs. In fact, when it comes to global warming, the only group seriously interested in actions and steps are the alarmed.  Mentioning that to other groups can be counterproductive.

 

Let's say you have a message and understand which of the six Americas are in the audience.  Now you have to be trusted.  A Ph.D. in physics has negative value in some of the groups that might be important to address.  It has been noted that celebrities taking up the cause can be more impactful if changing minds is the goal.  So if you are an athlete, film star or other person in the public eye...

 

 

a candidate for urban and suburban mobility

I have a serious interest in how we get around.  Currently the tech press seems entirely focused on car sharing and self-driving cars as THE FUTURE™, but those approaches are problematic.  I've spent a fair amount of time highlighting those issues, but rather than drone on for pages and pages I'll recommend a new book from a friend - Elements of Access by David Levinson .. essential reading for anyone trying to make sense of cities and suburban areas.  It's non-technically, fascinating and humorous.  From the about:

 

Transport cannot be understood without reference to the location of activities (land use), and vice versa. To understand one requires understanding the other. However, for a variety of historical reasons, transport and land use are quite divorced in practice. Typical transport engineers only touch land use planning courses once at most, and only then if they attend graduate school. Land use planners understand transport the way everyone does, from the perspective of the traveler, not of the system, and are seldom exposed to transport aside from, at best, a lone course in graduate school. This text aims to bridge the chasm, helping engineers understand the elements of access that are associated not only with traffic, but also with human behavior and activity location, and helping planners understand the technology underlying transport engineering, the processes, equations, and logic that make up the transport half of the accessibility measure. It aims to help both communicate accessibility to the public.

 

Bike sharing is currently experiencing explosive growth in urban areas around the world.  Bikes are very efficient in terms of density - you can put a large number of cyclists on bikes on the street - and energy use.  About eight years ago I measured the cycling energy expenditure of a friend at a little better than 1,000 mpg_e at a shade over a constant 13 miles per hour.¹  An added benefit of cycling is it is good for your health (assuming your path is safe enough) - good enough the both the Netherlands and Denmark factor cycling into their healthcare cost structure as a benefit.   In Northern Europe they've been integrated as an import element of transportation.  Infrastructure, laws and the public accommodate and encourage cycling and it's dovetailed into other elements of transport - bike to the commuter train and then to your office.  But there are issues.

 

First is most people don't ride long distances.  Even the Netherlands, with the highest bicycle use in the world, reports about 76% of commuting trips are less than five kilometers (figure about three miles) and fewer than one percent are longer than 15 km (about 10 miles).  There are many reasons: bikes are too slow/ trips take too long, hills and winds, the weather, long trips and long term use are hard on the wrists, back, shoulder and crotch. 

 

The electrically assisted bike or ebike solves many of these problems..  The speed can be up to twice as fast and hills and wind are much less problematic.  You feel like superman (or woman) on one. They're quite addictive and set to be hugely important in areas that have the right infrastructure - safe path, clueful motorists, parking and charging locations, traffic calming and so on..  not difficult technically or expensive, but change is often difficult. So ebikes are great, but they still have problems for many parts of the world.

 

There are niches where electrically assisted velomobiles could come into play.  Currently the only places you're likely to spot one is the Netherlands, Belgium or  Germany.  They usually have three wheels and a recumbent riding position and have an aerodynamic fairing.  I've seen four in the US - three were made by amateurs and one was a Dutch import.  I tired one and that proved to be an eye-opener. 

 

It was homemade, human power only and very heavy at a bit over forty kilograms. The body rattled and it configuration really needed a suspension.  But wow was it fast!  A human delivers about a hundred watts to the pedals to a bike during light commuting - about the same as what it takes to keep you alive (your brain takes about 20 to 25 watts).  Up to about six miles per hour most of the drag on a bike (or velomobile) is rolling resistance - tires against the ground.  Above that and air resistance becomes more important dominating around 15 miles per hour.  If it takes 100 watts to go about 13 mph, it takes about five to six  times as much power to go twice as fast (eight times as much power to overcome the wind).

 

Now here's something critically important -- the power needed to overcome air resistance goes up as the cube of your airspeed.  A bicycle or ebike has a drag factor nearly fifty times as great as a velomobile.² The homemade design I rode was "dirty" compared to modern velomobiles, but was still probably thirty times better than a bike or ebike.  That made an astonishing difference.  Once rolling, cruising at twenty five miles per hour was easier than fifteen on a bicycle.  

 

Velomobiles are difficult to get up to speed.  Stop and go driving is far from fun.  But the problem vanishes with electric assist plus,  in stop and go  riding you can recover much of that energy using regenerative braking.³

 

Properly executed they offer some protection from the elements and storage space for a few grocery bags.  In cold weather you don't need a heater because you're pedaling away at with about 300 watts of waste heat (a human pedaling a bike is about 75% efficient) - more than enough to heat a small enclosed volume.  In the Summer you can use the motor more and open the lid.  And you can run on the order of a hundred of them with the same amount of energy your family car needs.  It would place a very small load on the grid... so low that no changes would be required.

 

There are issues with infrastructure as they're larger than bikes. You're not going to sling one over your shoulder and carry it up to the office.  It may be they're more useful for longer commutes and suburban use.  You can fit about six of them in the parking space necessary for a car.  Currently non-electricxs are handmade and go from $5,000 to $12,000 - about the price of a high end road bike.  In moderate production that could quickly drop below $4,000 even with electric assist.  

 

The most interesting e-velomobile I've seen is the eWAW from a small company in Belgium. It has a carbon fiber roll cage/frame, very light weight (33 kg with motor and battery) and a very low center of gravity for cornering and stability.  It has a tiny 250 watt motor and a lithium ion battery about three times as big as what's in your laptop.   It will go nearly 100 miles on just battery power.   All of these numbers could be improved, but it's quite impressive as is..  Improving the breed would be a great project for a mechanical engineering class.  Back of the envelopes suggest it could be very safe under 30 mph assuming calmed traffic - potentially safer than a conventional bike.

 

It wouldn't be the best first for all areas .. nothing is.  The US is particularly unfriendly to cycling, but I wonder how this would work in the many cities with populations under 100,000 that often have large areas with 25 or 30 mph speed limits? 

 

Cities are beginning to realize curbspace is some of their most important real estate and I think part of the mix to deal with traffic in the future is to take into account the area a vehicle takes up when figuring out how to charge for road and parking use.  Bicycles are set to capitalize on this. I'd had discussions with two cities in the EU that are thinking in terms of banning cars from city centers and relying on bikes, and in one case, velomobiles, as important elements of access.   It is likely the future will not play out as tech writers suggest it will.

 __________

¹ She isn't an ideal case.. she's very tall and the bicycle had upright handlebars giving her a lot of projected surface area.  Here's an earlier bit on bike efficiency.

² The coefficient of drag or C_d multiplied by the area facing the oncoming air.   On a bike the C_d is 0.8 to 1.0 and the area is about a square meter.  On a velomobile the C_d is generally under 0.15 and the projected area is about a third of a square meter.  You can push much lower.. the human powered land speed record car - the Canadian Eta - has a C_d of 0.03 and an non athlete could easily power it to normal legal highway speeds in the US.  I wrote about it earlier. 

³ Turn the motor into a generator slowing you down and charging your battery.

 

heat by chance

minipost 

We still have a bit of snow on the ground - slushy stuff that is partly translucent.  I tried forming someone of it into a sphere.  With clear enough ice and some polishing with your gloves you can make a spherical lens good enough to start a fire.  (from several years ago)  I didn't get there today, but a neighbor asked what I was doing and how could I stand all of that cold going to my hands.  I said it wasn't bad, but that's not what's going on.  Cold isn't moving from the snow to my hands - rather heat is moving from my hands to the snow.  There was a puzzled look.  

It turns out to be easy to understand what's going on and that discovery was part of a revolution taking place in physics at the end of the 19^th century that led directly to quantum mechanics.   It's not some fundamental law, but rather just chance .. nothing deeper than that.

Boltzman figured it out.  You can think of heat in terms of molecules vibrating in a solid or shooting around in a gas.  The more energy they have, the greater this agitation.  Consider a tank of air with a divider.  Make one side hotter than the other.  It's air molecules are zipping around faster than those on the other side.  Remove the divider and the hot and cold gases mix.  (you could do this with liquids or solids - same idea)

It is more probable that a faster moving molecule collides with a less energetic molecule than the other way around.  In the process it leaves a bit of its energy.  Energy is conserved and given enough of these collisions the extra energy in from the faster molecules tends to get equally distributed and everything eventually comes to the same temperature.

At the time it was crazy to think that something as how heat flows might be governed by chance.  It would take years to understand his result.  In the process a very deep understanding of heat would emerge and prepare people for a radical rethinking of what the microworld was. 

In the meantime enjoy the fact that you're heating up a bit of the cool March air when you go outside.