omenti

THE FUTURE™

I'm certainly not a futurist.  Oh - there are some things I can predict with reasonable accuracy: that one of my ferrets will beg for a banana next week and next year, when an eclipse will happen somewhere, roughly when the Sun goes into its red giant stage...  The easy stuff.  Throw in people and culture and all bets are off.  I've made some informed predictions that were heavily dependent on technologies I knew a lot about that seem precent now, but if I'm honest and look at my old lab notebooks.. well..  I'm batting 200 at best.¹

 

Since then I've learned a bit more.   New business ideas can appear and develop rapidly, sometimes in a year or two.  Big technology leaps usually depend on basic research and are less frequent appearing at  twenty to forty year intervals.  They're often difficult to notice early on and are accompanied by widely negative and positive projections.  Then there is culture.  We - our basic needs, desires and dreams - evolve at a very slow rate.  Typically thousands of years.  Understanding this is critically important to thinking about the future.   I like to identify what preoccupies people and where future conflict is likely.

 

My model of the near term - say up to twenty year - future involves four areas.  There are probably more.  

    ° what is technically possible (understanding the combination of multiple technologies and a bit of the basics is important.)

    ° what is economically feasible and what are the externalities

    ° regulations and standards

    ° people, culture and social acceptance

   

There's a forest and trees problem.  You have to understand why a certain product or service is popular to see if it's something fundamental or if it's just a manifestation of the possible.  A few years ago people were running around playing Pokemon Go.   Many got excited about augmented reality games and saw this as the future. In fact it was a fad that quickly died out.  It was made possible when the quality and user cost of wireless networks and smartphones got to a point where enough people had them to allow a novel experience.  The underlying importance was the convergence of a good enough network and smartphones.  

 

When a wheel is invented you have to sort out what is a bicycle and what is a hula hoop.  We have a lot of hula hoops.

 

About ten years ago a few of the titans of Silicon Valley pronounced privacy dead.  Lots of people agreed.  I'm guessing almost none of them had any understanding of what privacy is and how it has developed over the past two hundred years.  It's very complex but anyone making decisions needs to understand the history and conflict and why modern notions are still unsettled.   Now we see two huge chastened firms claiming to go all in on privacy (I don't trust one and only partly trust the others).  I'll go out on a limb and claim it will still be a major issue at least two decades out.. probably more.

 

A few words on externalities, but it can get involved.  You can think of great projects that make enormous financial sense on longer time scales that are problematic.  Dealing with climate change and proper sanitation are two excellent examples.  Technology exists to solve both, but the people who benefit most are not those who invest.  

 

Prediction is difficult.  It takes a smart multi-disciplinary team and a rigorous process. You need to understand the past. There can be good success with the bicycle and hula hoop class questions.  Identifying new wheels are likely to be a once in a career issue if you're lucky.    All of these things are well above my pay grade.  I'm continuously reminded how simple physics is.

 __________

¹ In 1992 using, Moore's law and the notion that the Internet and wireless were so desirable that hundreds of billions in infrastructure investment would happen, I suggested in 2017 people would hold a piece of glass in their hand and have have a video connection with a friend halfway around the world and that "call" would effective be free.  The hardest part, in my mind, was the battery.  There were a few other seemingly clever calls, but more than a few duds.  At least there's the realization that I, along with many colleagues, did better than the very expensive futurists the company hired,

 

 

 

attacking global warming with deep insight from a brewery

The 1970s were marked by two dramatic energy disruptions that shook the world.  Petroleum became much more expensive and a geopolitical weapon. Small cars suddenly became popular and American drivers began to look to countries that made them.  In the US large sums flowed into energy R&D.  Much of it went into shale oil, but alternate energy labs appeared.  Electricity from wind and solar were far from practical, but there was a mini-boom in solar hot water heating.  It turns out you need solid engineering if you're going to water running in panels on your roof.  Unfortunately there was a lot of poor engineering, short module lifetimes, and water damage. 

 

Since then we've seen dramatic reductions in the cost of electricity from wind and solar energy.  Expanding these sources to levels needed to deal with global warming is extremely challenging - too challenging given the current political climate.  It's important to remember that electricity is just a way to move from a generator to a load.  It's very practical, but also ephemeral.  Storage is expensive as is the infrastructure to efficiently move it from where it's produced to where it's needed.

 

Electricity demand represents about a fifth of the world's primary energy supply.  This will grow with electrification in transportation, but the numbers are so staggeringly huge that it will be awhile before the needle moves.  Solar, wind and nuclear are the primary non-fossil fuel sources.  Two are growing and one is shrinking.  But even if all electricity came from clean sources it would just be a fifth of the primary energy supply.  

 

Thermal energy demand is larger at a bit more than a third of the supply worldwide. Space and water heating, industrial processes, cooking and so on.  In homes it's much higher than a third usually running above sixty percent.  Thermal energy can and is electrified, but you have to deal with the inefficiency of making, transporting and then converting the energy. Wouldn't it be neat if you could do it directly without the intermediate step?

 

You can and you have.  All of us have sat inside on cold sunny days next to the window enjoying the heat.  Insulated homes and insulating windows can dramatically drop external energy requirements.  Solar hot water heating is dramatically better than it was forty years ago and is required by code in a few regions.  But what intrigues me is the direct mechanical production of heat.

 

An apple rolling off a dinner table hits the floor with about a joule of kinetic energy.  The energy unit is named in honor of the son of a prominent brewer and followed his father into the family business.  The family had money and the young James Joule was tutored by John Dalton and a few other great scientists of the day.  Science became his hobby and passion.   In the 1840s he built early electric motors to see if it made sense to replace the brewery's steam engines.  It was far too early, but he established himself as a solid amateur scientist.  With this mindset and approach he set himself to was understanding the economics of brewing.  It would change the world.

 

He worked in many areas, but this most important work was on the convertibility of energy from one type to another.  The caloric theory of heat was accepted wisdom - basically heat was conserved and couldn't be created or destroyed.  While wrong, it led to the creation of some rather beautiful mathematics.  Joule found something deeper and more accurate -  that energy could be converted from one form to another.  As it happened brewers had the best thermometers allowing careful measurements to figure out what was really happening.  He mechanically did work to water by stirring it and showed a unit of work heated the water by the same unit.   The energy increase of the water by heating was equivalent to the work done by the mechanical stirring.   He had made the leap to the conservation of energy and created the basis for the first law of thermodynamics.

 

It's neat to think about a simple extension of his apparatus.  Put a mechanical stirrer inside an insulated box and spin it with a wind turbine.  Mechanical energy from the wind is directly converted to heat and can be used for home hot water or space heating.  

 

The sketch is just a simple version.  Vertical axis turbines aren't that efficient, but that may not be a major issue. While big turbines are more efficient,  it is impractical to move hot water far enough to make it practical.  The natural size of these units may be home with a small turbine or, where district heating is popular, a medium sized wind turbine.

 

The back of the envelopes are interesting.  A cubic meter of water (a metric ton or 1000 liters or about four average bathtubs) can hold up to about 90 kWh of heat energy.. enough for a two days for a family of three or four.  It's fine if the wind is intermittent.  When it blows, heat is added to the water.    Getting the size right for a household and location would require a fair amount of experimentation and modeling, but this is the sort of work that would probably be crack for mechanical engineering grad students.  It's a great exercise in systems optimization.

 

Here's a simple simulation for a small half meter radius turbine in a location with an average wind speed of 16 miles per hour over two days.  The first graph is wind speed.  The second is the mechanical power delivered to the mixer in the water.  Note that power increases quickly with windspeed (you know this if you've held your hand out of a car window or biked into the wind)  The last is the water temperature given good, but not fantastic insulation.   The water gets hotter and keeps its heat in spite of a very bursty power source.

 

There are a lot of ways to tap energy.  The direct conversion of mechanical energy to heat is particularly attractive given the enormous worldwide heat use.  This may be a good technique in some cases and there are undoubtedly others.  It's not very technical - heavens - it was easy in the 1800s and it's remarkable no one stumbled on it earlier - the technical capability to do this goes back about a millennia.   Now we have the capacity to measure and model as well as utilize a wide range of materials and construction techniques.  It may be interesting again.

 

There are a variety of mechanisms to deliver energy in some practical form for us to use.  Many are more efficient as centralized sources and some are better at smaller scales.  This is one that works best when highly distributed. 

 

 

the critical edge in a major sport

The other day I was in a Manhattan library wearing the t-shirt of my undergrad school.  As luck would have it someone noticed it.  She was from the same school - her Ph.D. was in mechanical engineering - and a most interesting conversation followed.  It turns out she happens to work on suspensions for one of the more famous Formula One teams. 

 

Formula One may be the most form of auto racing. Four wheels hanging out in the breeze and an open cockpit, its roots go back to Grand Prix racing about ninety years ago.  After WWII it was associated with some of the most famous car makers and drivers.  It has enormous popularly worldwide with something like a half billion people following any given race and over 300 million fans who follow most of the season. Good drivers make in the eight figures and some have career earning exceeding a billion dollars.  A massively important form of sports entertainment larger than the NBA and NFL combined. 

 

F-1  technology side has made huge advances over the years.  Thanks to tire, suspension and aerodynamic advances the cars can corner with lateral accelerations over six times that of gravity.  That's more than an astronaut experiences during re-entry and on par with the limits of a jet fighter.  Top speeds are on the order of 240 miles per hour on relatively twisty tracks.  Teams spend a lot of money - she said an average team might have 100 engineers, technicians, physicists and mathematicians - over a third with Ph.Ds. - working on every little bit of vehicle performance.  Cars get much better during the racing season not making improvements every race means almost certain failure.  She said a few American universities major talent suppliers - notably Caltech and MIT - but England is the real ground zero for car design and tuning talent from a half dozen schools.  

 

So there's this question.  How much success is the driver and how much is the car?  The feeling is the driver, even though operating a car under such conditions probably is an athletic performance, is less important than the car.  Put a great driver in a lesser car and they might improve the performance of the car a bit, but they'll never win.  A lesser driver in a great car probably won't win, but will place much higher one might expect.   But there's a human story and sport is all about human performance.  You probably won't see much interest in autonomous cars zipping around a circuit even though they might outperform humans.  

 

But there's another story.  The master designers and aerodynamics people are very important, but there are enough very good ones and enough viable approaches that the top half dozen teams are on fairly equal footing. the most important person on the team, and sometimes it is two people, is the strategist - usually a mathematician or physicist. 

 

The cars are rich data sources sending hundreds of channels of telemetry for analysis giving the state of almost anything you can image about the car.  Additionally tracks, weather, cars, tires, competition and tactics and strategy are all modeled ahead of time.  Variables are thrown into the mix that makes the strategist even more important.  Tires are a good example.  There are three levels of grip... the grippiest tires wear very quickly, the least grippy more slowly. You have to use at least two during a race meaning a pit stop with a tire change is necessary. Additionally there are two types of rain tires.  It's an exercise in modeling and game theory sorting out how this will play out. The most consistent factor in winning races appears to be the strategist.  Three of the top ten are women.

 

As the sport changes to stay relevant hardcore fans are being challenged to examine some of the race data during the race .. there's thought about making it part of the race itself, but keeping the competition level high and the fans engaged is the key point.   One thing she mentioned is heart rate and blood pressure telemetry from the pit chief as a car comes into the pits at 70mph stopping a few inches away as he has a few seconds to make the swap.  

 

There are a lot of interesting things you can say about this type of data and its analysis.  The fact that some believe understanding it is more important than the driver speaks volumes. Some of the teams monetize this by letting their largest sponsors in on their technics of dealing with rapid change and strategy and tactics.  A few of the analysts have been loaned to these sponsors for non-trivial sums to look into their businesses. 

 

It makes you wonder about other sports.   It would be interesting to create a plot with understanding of athletic performance (including psychological elements) along one axis and understanding of strategy along the other.   Understanding hydrodynamics created a revolution in swimming along the first. A deep data and model driven understanding of strategy has driven Formula One performance along the second.  How much potential does a given sport have? 

 

 

 

 

finding a voice

On those clear and moonless nights stars would suddenly rise from the edge of the butte marking its shape and size.  Besides the stars the only other lights were a distant aircraft beacon and a flashlight modified to give off a faint red light to protect your night vision and to look around for sleeping cows.   Montana is this magical place.

 

There were three places Brian and I would haul our little telescopes. North of town near Benton Lake on the Bootlegger Trail.  East of town there was a  turnoff near the O'Day farm on the way to the Highwoods,.  And to the West was a little farm near the butte just South of Fort Shaw.  Mary was the owner of the last place and a family friend.  She had two conditions.  First you had  to be careful at the gate to make sure her cows didn't get out and second was was letting her look through the telescopes and sharing stories about the stars. 

 

Her stories were more interesting. They came some an elderly Assiniboine man she knew when she worked as a public health nurse at the Fort Belknap Reservation. It seems wrong I can't remember his name.    His people had named constellations to orient themselves at night, but they weren't those I knew.  The idea that someone could look at Orion or the Big Dipper and not see those shapes was delicious.  One night she casually mentioned there were "medicine wheels"  - astronomical calculators of sorts to track cosmic cycles - equinoxes, solstices, planetary motions and sacred days.  North American Stonehenges.  It shouldn't have surprised me. There is order and regularity in the sky.  There are people who observe and try to make order. It is only natural to make clocks and calendars.

 

We're funny about time.  We build instruments to measure it, but our senses can't dealt with very short or long periods.   It flies when we're having fun and drags when we're not.  A bit over a hundred years ago we learned that it doesn't exist by itself, but it is part of something deeper called space-time. At the deepest level it's still a mystery  What we do know is Universe is always changing.  As people we look backwards and forwards. We wonder what will happen - where we've been and where we might be going.  

 

Science is a tool for sorting out things that happen in Nature - and this is one of my frustrations. For two decades we've known that human activity is responsible for the increase in global temperature and increasing accurate forecasts have been made since.  We even know steps we can take to reduce the impact of the problem.  This is settled science with better confidence levels than almost anything in - say - medicine. But there's this problem. How do you get people to take action?

 

Scientists are generally poor public communicators and the basic story of global warming isn't exactly a riveting story with a feel good ending.  There's guilt with blame to go around and the problems are mostly cast as something future generations will bear.  Furthermore people in wealthy countries will be able to afford to minimize the problems it causes locally.  It's easy to forget, Even if it wasn't politically contested, it's not on the top ten list of many who want to take action.  

 

I've been thinking a lot about the role of the scientist as a communicator.  There's a tendency to feel like you need to provide a full story even though the subject is complex and no single person is up to the task.  It's different when you go to the doctor.  Your primary care physician lacks specific knowledge but that isn't seen as a problem.  She can refer you to a specialist.  A generalist's high level knowledge and connections to more complex understandings happen to be one of her specialities.  There are questions that you can ask both a medical doctor and a scientist and learn something deep.  A few years ago I was on the train with a heart surgeon.  I asked him what he thought about mortality - his own as well as his patients.  It sparked a conversation that was fascinating for both of us.  The train stopped at Penn Station and we spent the next hour at a coffee shop talking. His answers were undoubtely unique to him. They were his stories that motivated him and his telling made an impact on me. 

 

People seem to be wired for story telling. They sometimes go deep - even to our identity.

 

Maybe this is a way forward.  Michelle Alexander offered an interesting thought experiment - what if reincarnation existed and we came back to live in a world we helped make?  If it was random chances are we'd be poor living somewhere that wouldn't be able to respond to the problems like a wealthy nation.  Thinking along these lines may be an exercise in empathy.  You could ask questions about other religious traditions - say those that ask people to be stewards of the Earth.  There may be conversations lurking that could help people find common ground.

 

Conventional storytelling doesn't have  many storylines.  Think of the Lord of the Rings - a heroic effort to save the Earth against seemingly impossible odds.  Are there ways to create stories that might lead to deeper thought?  These are much more natural channels to a person's heart than a PowerPoint presentation.  I've made a few attempts, but I'm not a good at this sort of thing.  I'm open to ideas and some of you might be brilliant.  

 

A really neat idea is the global warming fairy tale. Fairy tales can be short, but powerful approximations for larger ideas. Kate Marvel is a climate scientist who has taken that path.  Give her  Slaying the Climate Dragon fairy tale a spin - it fits on a single page and touches many ideas.

_______

 

The call came about fifteen years ago.  It was Mary's family.  She had left a note asking for a favor.  She wondered if monuments could be placed on their property to mark the dates she came to the world and left it as well as noting the rise of Sirius and the Peliedes .. two of her favorite objects...  as well as the seasons.  She also wanted to know where North would be at one of periods H.G. Wells described in The Time Machine.

 

Designing a medicine wheel is a learning experience.  How accurate should it be?  How long should it be valid?  The Earth's axis wobbles and precesses.  Our orbit varies a bit year to year.  The ground moves.  There is constant change .. often too slow for us to notice, but the Earth - Nature - is always moving on.  It filled me with optimism thinking about those that will follow.

 

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.