omenti

types of stupidity

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

__________

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

Me-high Cheek-sent-me-high

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

 

 

six is a surprising number

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Just an idle dream I guess..

__________

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

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

 

unexpected arcs

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

teaching and technological change

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

preview season

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

feel free to comment!

fairness, inclusivity, safety and social convention

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

__________

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

 

 

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

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

 

chindōgu flavored technologies

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

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

baby mops: a baby outfit that also mops the floor

umbrella ties

many more .. search the Internet

 

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

 

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

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

Blockchains are an example of computational chindōgu.

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

design for kids and community in japan

a minipost

 

About twenty years ago I was associated with a human computer interface department. A good deal of the work was associated with this nebulous concept of “community”. The term tends to be defined in the mind of the person talking about it .. like the word god. We had a list of about twenty words that needed rigorous contest when we publishing internally or externally .. community was everyone’s first choice for the list, That said most of us default to a warm and fuzzy concept. How people and neighborhoods should interact. The sort of thing Bob Kraut worries about. (to be fair he also thinks about communities like QAnon)

 

A recent 99% Invisible podcast focused on Japanese community of place design.. deign for the six year old Mixed use zoning, very narrow roads, a school house at the center and very independent kids. Some of us worry about urban and suburban design and traffic - how to you minimize the two or three ton vehicle carrying a driver and a bag of groceries? We often look to the Netherlands snd the Nordics for inspiration Indeed they’re excellent examples of moving from 1970s car-centric design to something better for cyclists and pedestrians. Japan offers a different path - one that seems unlikely in the US.

 

Here’s the a link to the audio, a transcript and a few videos

 

A comment .. most of us of a certain age grew up with kids walking and cycling everywhere - starting around six for walking and seven or eight for cycling. It was the only way a kid could deal with the scale of suburban design with fixed zoning and wide roads. That’s the environment the Dutch and Nordics started with rather than doubling down on complete car dependance.

 

31 is the new 35

Andrew Revkin and I had a brief exchange about the power of labels.  Both of us object to the phrase "climate emergency."  Even though it is an emergency that could escalate into an existential threat, people don't respond to labeling longer term threats as emergencies.  I've been suggesting we've entered an adaptation epoch.  Andrew, a much better communicator, is still searching.

 

The past two or three years have taught us short term temperature excursions can be dramatic.  Last year the Pacific Northwest recorded previously unheard of temperatures -  the highest in the area in at least 7,000 years and probably much longer.  This Spring it was South Asia.  Last week record heat came to England and parts of Europe.  These events are probably going to be more common and time goes on and greenhouse gas levels continue increasing. 

 

Wet bulb readings of 35°C (95°F at 100% humidity)  have long been considered unsurvivable.  A person in good physical shape would probably die in a few hours. Such events are extremely rare. Until the past decade they've only been recorded a few times and then only for an hour or so.  They're increasing in frequency and length - mostly in the Indian subcontinent.  Finding cooler spaces for people is a matter of life and death.  

 

It's become clear the 35° number was something of a guess.  Recent careful work shows it's more like 31° for young people in good physical shape.   Older and compromised people have lower limits.  The Tokyo Olympics had periods with wet-bulb temperatures in the upper twenties. Athletic performance during these periods was certainly compromised (I saw it happen to a friend). 

 

What can be done?  Cities suffer from heat island effects.  All of the asphalt and concrete increases the local daytime temperature and holds them at higher levels at night. (hot nights may be harder on the body than hot days).  Air conditioning helps, but it costs money and a power grid that not everyone has access to.  Reducing the amount of asphalt and concrete while planting trees can make a big difference.  It's a great justification for reducing the number of cars and roadways in cities (green spaces are a key motivating reason for the dramatic change currently underway in Paris).  Unfortunately green spaces are usually linked to wealth.  In many places racism and redlining have produced some of the worst heat islands.

 

There are other tricks that are easily implemented.  White paint  on roofs can make a difference. Paint that holds up to temperature and monsoons for the better part of a decade isn't cheap, but is becoming more popular.  In Western countries more reflective shingles are appearing. Some of these look fairly normal, but are highly reflective in the infrared and can make a difference in cooling bills. 

 

And you can send some of the excess heat directly to space.  

 

If you're in a very dry area go outside on a clear night and look up.  Feel the cooling on your face.  Now hold a piece of cardboard between your face and the stars.  You'll notice a warmer feeling.  Remove the cardboard and your face gets cooler. 

 

Your body glows - you've undoubtedly seen infrared photos and videos of people.  We radiate photons at a variety of wavelengths, but it peaks around 9.5 microns - about twenty times longer than visible light.  The  atmosphere is transparent to visible light and also from 8 to 13 microns.  Photons from our bodies can radiate to space.   Deep space is really cold (a bit over 2° above absolute zero) so your face is radiating some of it's heat directly to space - enough that you can feel the cooling.

 

Clever material engineering has produced materials that are good at absorbing the heat around them and then radiating it into space. It's enough to reduce cooling requirements - at least in places with very dry atmospheres.  There's still work lowering costs and making the surfaces last longer, but it's something else to try.

 

Back to the idea of an adaptation epoch. Many things will need to be tried and efforts will stretch for generations.  There's enormous opportunity.  It's both sad and dangerous there's so much 19^th century political inertia, but I'm optimistic more clever people, organizations and governments will finally emerge.  As a species we don't have a choice if we want to survive.

 

expectation dislocation

a quick minipost

I was listening to a  training technique discussion sports scientist Ross Tucker was having with a Royal Marines Green Beret.  Royal Marine training consists of a lot of what you might expect and adds a few areas you might not.  Expectation dislocation is considered one of the most important.   How do you psychologically and tactically deal with unexpected change?  How do you train people to handle it?

 

In science dislocation of expectations are considered a good thing, although they can be extremely frustrating at the time.  The overlooked, doing something stupid, being on the wrong track, the holy grail of unexpected discovery, and things mostly out of your control like equipment failures.  These things tend to play out more slowly than the battlefield or in sports.  Early in your career you make a lot of the stupid mistakes, find yourself on the wrong track and tend to overlook the obvious.  You learn with experience, but curveballs aren't uncommon and sometimes there's the taste of discovery.  

 

Sport offers dramatic examples.  I've had conversations with Sarah about preparing for and recognizing these dislocations in her sport.  How do you manage the psychological implications when you're trying to be "in the moment" at the same time?  Covid and the postponement of the Olympics had a huge impact on her.  But there are smaller examples.  Here's one of the most striking ones:

 

Sarah and Melissa face April and Alix in a semifinal in Cagliari.  Both teams are amazing - arguably the best in the world.   It's night with a chilly heavy rain.  At the 6:30 mark in the video Melissa goes down with a seriously dislocated shoulder.  After a doctor looks at it and a physical therapist re-locates it, she decides to go on - playing with one good arm.  The Canadians need to figure out local tactics and find a strategy as they go along. They only have their shared experience and all to brief moments of communication.  At one point a very fast spike targets Melissa's injured arm.  Something lights up in Sarah and she goes into her beast mode.  They win and go on to the gold medal match.  Unfortunately Melissa's arm isn't in great shape the next day and  they only take silver.

 

It's widely applicable.  Your car breaks down on a trip, a bad medical diagnosis ... any number of things ranging from very bad to very good.   How do you handle them in your life or your line of work?  How do you prepare yourself for these events?  These moments that can probe what we're made of.