omenti

where goes art?

GOOSE -n

A bird that supplies quills for writing. These, by some occult process of nature, are penetrated and suffused with various degrees of the bird's intellectual energies and emotional character, so that when inked and drawn mechanically across paper by a person called an "author," there results a very fair and accurate transcript of the fowl's thought and feeling. The difference in geese, as discovered by this ingenious method, is considerable: many are found to have only trivial and insignificant powers, but some are seen to be very great geese indeed.

The Devil's Dictionary: Ambrose Bierce

 

I've had four conversations this past week about the direction of art given new technology and that catch-all buzzword term "AI"  Two of the people seemed convinced it was going to kill art and put artists out of business.  Their arguments were basically 'skill, particularly technical skill,  isn't needed with AI' and why would anyone look at a film or listen to music when they could just ask a computer to whip up something for them that they'd love.

 

These sort of arguments have been around since photography started becoming readily available around the time of the American Civil War.  Why would anyone learn art or hire an artist?   Film and radio were going to put theaters out of business, the theremin was going to kill the violin (!),  CG was going to kill the acting profession and so on.  And now we're hearing similar arguments. 

 

Capturing someone's voice without permission should be banned.. the same with their likeness, but LLMs are never going to write clear and compelling scripts given how they work.   They can and do write scripts and tens of thousands of GPT generated books have flooded Amazon, but clever and compelling, they're not.

 

There will be people who figure out how to use these technologies for art of one form or another of varying degrees of cleverness.  Unsurprisingly there's already a lot of effort in pornography, artificial voices to narrate audiobooks, ML driven image editing tools like Photoshop and even smartphones. 

 

One of the more interesting areas is in the storytelling part of console type computer games (arguably some of that is coming to phones, but perhaps the high end is more interesting in the short term).   There's interest in making NPC (non-player character) interactions more realistic.  These are the extra characters you can't control, but they're in the world space of the game.   I'm aware of a few sort of rough approaches    Down the road a bit NPCs may have more realistic interactions, but it's still much more structured that - say - telling the computer to just put together something without structure.  

 

Like the art of today I don't think you'll see much success in the long tail. Something special - often a combination of luck, talent and timing - will still be necessary.   Students studying the arts won't be wasting their time any more than they are today.  Actively doing art can fire your imagination and increase your ability to sense and think about the world.  Even a modest background can be useful in any number of fields.  And I suspect we'll see and hear a few wonderful expressions of human creativity along with a lot of garbage - just like today.

 

If you're interested in the technology and art of where all of this may be going the best resource I know is Lynn Cherny's Things I Think Are Awesome substack. I've known Lynn since the mid 90s.. she's always been deep in these areas.  $6 month/$50 year  

Also Amy Goodchild shows how she generates meaningful nonsense as an artform using a simple homebrew generative system.  

 

 

 

higher order terms of good

A few days ago Om pointed to a fascinating video

Scott Yu-Jan designed and then 3d printed a nifty and, from a cool design point of view, iPad dock for his Mac Studio.  Chatting with Om I mentioned 3d printing (albeit metal printing) is used in ultra-low volume production of bikes - a track bike an Olympian would use in Paris in a few months starts around $30k with wheels going for several thousand each.  Om replied Everything good isn’t cheap. So there is that. I mean that is how everything works now sadly. 

 

I think he's right to first order.. thinking about it afterwards there rarer higher order terms where "good" can be inexpensive within bounds.  Before the 70s there was a rich DIY tradition supported by dozens of magazines aimed at everything from homemade boats to clothing and everything between. If you wanted something of quality you needed time and had to develop your own crafting and sometimes even design skill.  Now we tend to buy finished goods. Quality design and craft tends to come at a price.  

 

There are exceptions - the higher order terms.  Often skill and tools are involved: woodworking, car restoration (I'm looking at you Bryan), dress design and making (now looking at you Jheri).  I do a bit of DIY work myself, but wouldn't call it 'good' as it lacks craftsmanship and good design.  Not having the skill is probably true for most of us,  but there are options.  If you learn how to use and have access to a good 3d printer, you can support Scott Yu-Jan.  He makes his living with popular YouTube video as well as support from patrons who get access to the digital files to his designs you can copy them yourself.  And there are many others.  

 

It's the tip of an iceberg most of us ignore. Kickstarter has hosted developing labor of love projects. Here's one I funded today as a gift:  a deep dive into how comicstrips are made. Over the years I've sponsored about ten Kickstarters.  A few have been amazing delights.   Etsy is another path to inexpensive low volume good if you look around.  And you can support artists and musicians.  Ask around art and music schools to see if there are students looking for work.  It's a calculated risk, but I've done this since grad school with projects ranging from homemade paper to the composition and performance of a piece of music. (way more satisfying than going the GAI route).

 

Om is absolutely right for the vast majority - the first order - of things and experiences we pay for - good comes at price.  But hunting the tail for the higher order terms of good is not only fun, but can lead to surprises. 

 

a bit of wilding in manhattan and brooklyn

A great feature of Bell Labs and later AT&T Research was the mentoring program.  For years I was a Summer student and graduate student mentor.   I was lucky enough to have been around some really outstanding people.  A few years were particularly great - one of them had two remarkable people: Jessica and Wayzen.  So many stories and a theme of too early invention and being a bit in front of the reach of your headlights. 

 

Jessica was from a largish family.  For several years I had meetings in lower Manhattan and would have lunch in Washington Square Park on nice days (NY Dosas on the South end of the Park is the best food cart I've ever come across).  I  kept running into Jessica's horticulturist sister Rebecca who was kind enough to join me for lunch and teach me things about the how and the why of urban parks.  

 

Last Fall she gave a talk that's worth sharing.  With all of the bad news and feelings, something positive.

 

auteur and other fine words and phrases

About a week ago my friend Paul reported on his walking vacation in Iceland.  Paul happens to be in his late 80s and hasn't lost his knack for physics or interesting words and phrases.  He sent photos and noting some beautiful displays of the lux septentrionalis.  In the 45 or so years I've known him I've picked up a fair amount of Latin, Greek and German.  He bears direct responsibility for some of the phrases I use.. cheating in a way as I'm not fluent in these languages.¹  Auteur is a particularly interesting word, so let's dwell on it.

 

Recognizing creation of a book is easy.  Usually there are one or two authors get the credit even though editors, proof readers, printers and more were involved.   It's similar in scientific papers - at least until you get to collaborations of a half dozen or more.  Music is created by a composer, but orchestral performances are jointly credited to the composer and a conductor.  It's the complexity of something - when more than a few creative people are involved, that the term auteur seems appropriate.  I'd nominate James Murray of the Oxford English Dictionary as one of the first auteurs of a series of books - he went far beyond what normal editors do. 

 

The term auteur is usually associated with film.  Even in the thirties one hundred people might be involved in making a film and more than a handful - actors for example - may have had centrally important roles.  Here the equivalent of the creation of the film  is usually given to the director.  A director may not know how operate a camera, the intricate lighting or be able to perform on stage.  What they bring is vision and the ability to communicate it. 

 

Alfred Hitchcock wanted control over every scene of the movie.  He had to work it out ahead of time and communicate it so he repurposed Walt Disney's invention of story boarding to acted film. Hayao Miyazaki draws or corrects a lead frame of each animation segment of his films and spends a large amount of time with  composer Joe Hisaishi to get the music right. His style is dictatorial, but animators regard him as the best - an auteur among animation auteurs.  Pixar has a handful of internally grown auteurs who have seen remarkable success.  Wes Anderson is so good that name actors fall over themselves to get parts before seeing scripts.   It's an impressive group.

 

In spending time with an animation house as well as having worked on some large scale physics experiments, I see a common thread.  There needs to be a vision. There may be, and probably is, someone in the organization for each of the speciality skills who is better at their skill than the auteur.  The problem is having everyone do their best with limited knowledge of the rest causes project to drift from the goal.  It's the sort of thing David Epstein talks about in Range.   Someone has to have vision and taste and that's a special skill that requires development.  

 

It can apply to business.  Steve Jobs comes to mind and there are certainly others at various levels.  An interesting question is at what point does a project get big enough that an auteur is necessary and how does that vary by project type?  Many of you can come up with interesting examples.

 

Since sport is something of a mirror,  one can think of great coaches as auteurs.  It's certainly true  in team sports like football, soccer, indoor volleyball, etc.  Great coaches have developed a sense of the game and the taste in how it should be played.  Certainly they need a group of good players, but not necessarily all need to be, or even should be, great.  Finding a combination to execute the vision is the important piece.

 

__________

¹   Here's a non-alphabetical list of some that come to mind:

Danish (I know three Danes well)

klap lige hesten   "pat the horse" means shut up

det blæser en halv pelican "it's blowing half a pelikan"  means it's very windy

ingen ko på isen  "no cow on the ice" means  whatever the problem is, it's no big deal

så er den ged barberet  "the goat is shaved"  means the problem has been fixed, or the work is done

gå som katten om den varme grød  "walk as the cat around the hot porridge" means some is avoiding the problem

det regner skomagerdrenge  "it's raining shoemaker's apprentices" means the rain is very heavy

hygge a special coziness - what you might find on a snowy evening with good friends, food and a fire.

Italian

commuovere to be moved by a story to the point of tears

Greek

meraki    throwing yourself into something complete with passion, creativity and love.  This is how Paul approaches physics.

Tagalog

kilig the feeling of butterflies in your stomach as it romance or discovery

Malay

pisan zapra the time it takes to eat a banana - about two minutes

Swedish

fika gathering to talk and take a break from ordinary routines. Coffee must be involved.

resfeber the beating of a traveler's heart at the beginning of a journey. A anxiety with anticipation.

Welsh

hiraeth a homesickness for the time and place to which you can't return

Japanese

komorebi the sunlight filtering through leaves on the trees

boketto gazing into the distance without thinking about anything

wabi-sabi finding beauty in imperfections, an acceptance of the cycle of life

German

kummerspeck 'grief bacon'  the weight you gain from emotional overeating

freudenfreude finding joy in the success of others

Yiddish and Yinglish

shlimazel someone who seems to only have bad luck

(this part of the list is long .. mostly from friends on Long Island and NYC. Leo Rosten's The Joys of Yiddish is a wonderful resource)

Bantu

ubuntu 'I find my worth in you and you find your worth in me'  human kindness

French

flâneur a person who lounges or strolls around in a seemingly aimless way. Often seen as an aloof observer of urban society

sirop de poteau 'pole syrup'  imitation or very low quality maple syrup that must have been harvested from telephone poles.

auteur a person of influence or artistic control - often associated with filmmaking.

I'll stop here..  

 

 

 

 

 

wonderful inefficiency

Today the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman.  Richly deserved, their work has saved millions of lives and has created new pathways.

 

Each one had a key piece to the puzzle.  Normally they wouldn't have crossed paths, but working copy machines were a limited resource on their campus.  Katalin (her career path is amazing NY Times gifted) had the habit of reading very old papers and wanted to copy something when she ran into Drew who was also waiting for the machine. 

They talked

I can't begin to list how many collaborations and information transfers have taken place when disciplines physically collide.  Bell Labs was great at this in the day .. the Murray Hill cafeteria was a rich source as were the walking paths around the campus and the byzantine architecture of the place that randomly collided people with each other.  All wonderfully inefficient by many standards.  By design the main buildings at Pixar have a single large restroom that collides disciplines.  Many research organizations have slate blackboards (important if you have mathematicians and/or physicists) or whiteboards everywhere - restrooms, walking paths, along the walls -  for impromptu discussions. The disorganization of Building 20 at MIT is often cited as a founding example of this, but there are many earlier examples.

 

Creativity requires friction. People need a chance to bump into each other.  I suspect this is true for many disciplines as creativity evaporates when people avoid each other for whatever reason.  With all of the remote work these days it's important to think about, and make time, the create interesting connections. Arturo Casadevall at John Hopkins tells his people to read something or talk with someone outside their field every day.¹

“And most people say, ‘Well, I don’t have time to read outside my field.’ I say, ‘No, you do have time, it’s far more important.’ Your world becomes a bigger world, and maybe there’s a moment in which you make connections.”

But back to today's prize and a comment on the Katalin. Her daughter Zsuzsanna Francia won gold in Rowing Eights in the 2008 and 2012 Olympic games.  There are other notables.  Harold Bohr was on the Danish Football team where he won silver in the 1908 Olympics. He was the mathematician bother of physics laureate Niels, who was solid amateur athlete.  And Olivia Newton-John was the granddaughter of physics laureate Max Born. 

__________

¹ a tip of the hat to David Epstein

 

those third places

a mini-post

Recently I spent the better part of an afternoon chatting with an urban sociologist about third places: parks, libraries, pubs, dog parks, gyms, bookstores, coffee shops, churches - those social places separate from home (the first place) and work or school (the second place).  She's particularly interested in what they meant during the pandemic, how they're changing, and how why young people see them differently.   

 

A few notes from the chat.  There isn't any order or story, just  think of them more as points to think about as you look at your own experience.

 

Third place visits have traditionally had a impact on physical and mental health, although it's difficult to tease out specifics.  Researchers have pointed out they can "level" differences like ethnicity, class, religion and age.  Dogs parks and some types of sporting events are used as gold standards for mixing people. (I can personally recommend a beagle)  Churches do a great job within a religion, but often raise barriers to outsiders.  Suburban parks that encourage physical activity tend to be frequented by young well-to-do white people, while parks with benches and picnic tables cater to families and ethnic minorities. 

 

Many small businesses are third places and many went out of business during the pandemic. They're coming back and have become particularly important to those who saw their first and second places collapse into a single place (work from home).  She suggested businesses should encourage work from home employees to find third places they enjoy given the mental and physical health benefits. She also loves that Washington DC has a tax on vacant retail space. Areas are more inviting and offer richer third space potential when there are minimal vacancies. 

 

Researchers sometimes tease out how introverts and extraverts fit into all of this.  Both benefit from third places, although the types of places differ.  She noted something fascinating.  It appears the depth of interaction times the number of interactions may be roughly constant across these personality types.  I'm skeptical of statements like that as studying anything as complex as human relationships is tricky, but it's interesting and may have an impact on business and public space design.

 

 

magnets and a most dramatic moment

The opening ceremony of each Olympic game is filled with pageantry and sometimes, with the lighting of the cauldron, drama.  In my mind the most electrifying occured in the 1992 Barcelona games when Paralympian Antonio Rebollo performed some serious diablerie. 

Across the ocean in New Providence, New Jersey David and Mary watched the scene on a small black and white television as they shared pedaling duties.  David was pedaling at the time and gasped.  Fortunately there was a flywheel.

 

Their parents didn't allow television in the home, but both of them had been involved in competitive kayak and canoe events.  Lynn had been an alternate for the Montreal Olympics.  Introducing Mary and David to the Olympics was a good idea, but Al decided to make it educational. The kids would be given an exercise bike, a generator, access to a television and help from their mechanical engineer father and mathematician mother.  They had a few weeks to work things out.

 

When the the friction wheel generator was finally adjusted and working, they were shown how much power they produced and how much power various televisions used.  A twelve year old could keep a small color set going for a short time, but that was it.  They wisely chose the black and white set.  Through trial and error they ended up with a bicycle chain transmission and abandoned the exercise bike for one of their own on a homemade stand. They could now produce nearly twice the power for the same amount of perceived work.  A flywheel was added to make everything smoother.   They had something by the opening ceremony and the kids spelled each other off and developed an amazing sense of how long the commercials lasted.  They saw the torch lighting.¹

 

It's too bad they had a standard generator.  Something with better magnets would have had increased efficiency.  Not enough to move them into a color set (if they were a few years older and more athletic they probably could have managed), but certainly a better experience.  The strength of the magnetic field in a generator or motor is centrally important.  The strongest fields come from superconducting magnets, but they need to be cooled to near absolute zero rendering them impractical for most applications.

 

Electric vehicles use either induction or permanent magnet motors.  The permanent magnet designs tend to be lighter and are more efficient.²   There's a rub.  You're trying to optimize cost and magnetic field strength (among other things).  Rare earths like neodymium work much better than the cheaper ferrite-based magnets and have generally taken over the medium and high end automotive market.³ 

 

The problem with rare earth materials isn't that they're rare .. they fairly comment.  They are, however, unevenly distributed and difficult and toxic to mine and process.  Most of the active mining and processing is in China and it's an environmental disaster.  The US had a single mine in California in the fifties.  Since then it's had t an up and down existence including being closed for economic and environmental reasons.  With the interest in EVs it's back in operation again  and the US has gone from 0% of the world's production of neodymium to about 15% in about seven years.  In theory the mining and processing and safer and less toxic than the Chinese effort. Production should increase in the future.  The US is also largely unexplored - serious mineral exploration has only just resumed after a 60 year hiatus. 

 

The higher cost has some companies, notably Tesla, talking about going to ferrite permanent magnets.  They'd be heavier, less efficient, but would be cheaper and may be the core of lower-end vehicles.  Another alternative is to use a more efficient vehicle.  Electric bicycles and other micromobility solutions use small motors.  You can build 50 to 200 electric bike motors with the materials from one Tesla-class motor.  Not only that these vehicles are very practical for the short trips that dominate much of our mobility needs.  Sadly some areas have saddled themselves with transportation infrastructures that encourage inefficiency.

__________

¹ Mary continued in the families sport tradition and went to Princeton on a fencing scholarship.  She found she was interested in aeronautical engineering and went on for a Ph.D.  I heard she had something to do with the rotor design on the Ingenuity helicopter currently flying on Mars. 

² There are often questions about how permanent magnets work.  Most people have seen electromagnetic induction in school.  A current flows if you move a magnet in a coil of wire and a current through a wire produces a magnetic field.  Permanent magnets are more difficult to talk about .. I've done it at least once, but this short video is a nice intro.

 

³ There are other rare-earth based magnets, but a neodymium alloy is the most common.  It's an allow of neodymium, iron and boron - Nd₂Fe₁₄B - that forms a crystalline structure.  They have widespread use outside of EVs.. GM and Sumitomo Metals independently developed them about 40 years ago to get away from much more expensive and brittle samarium–cobalt magnets.

There's a lot of talk about tetrataenite (an iron-nickel structure) permanent magnets.  In theory they have better magnetic characteristics than neodymium alloys and should be much cheaper, but they're off in the future.  If they happen, expect some unhappy rare earth mining companies. 

 

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)

 

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 ...  

 

 

 

 

 

when not keeping your cool is a virtue

Why are we paying someone to heat parts of our house we aren't in?

 

This was one of my Dad's  deep questions.  Two adults, two kids and three dogs in a small house subject to Montana winters. Cold snaps could be deep and long - a week or more with highs well below 0° F ( -18° C) weren't uncommon.  More impressive were the lows:  -30° F (-35°C) came at least once every Winter and record lows were below -40°.  Dressing for it was a necessary skill.  Inside the home my Dad controlled a powerful technology - the thermostat.

 

When people were around during daytime the thermostat was set to 62°.  The nighttime setting, from 9 PM until the first person got up at about 5:30AM,  was 55°   If people were out of the house  the setting was 52°.   As far as I could tell these were his fundamental constants.  Warm clothing, sweaters, quilts (my parents cheated and had an electric blanket)  made it comfortable and sometimes even too warm.  There was only one thermostat and a few areas of the house were always a bit colder or warmer.  The dogs found the warmest regions at dog level. They also had warm blankets that they'd drag around where needed.

 

Since then I've learned a bit about home heating.  Some of the best information on home energy measurements comes from England.  They found standard modern construction homes see seven to ten percent energy savings for each degree celsius drop between 15°  and 20° C .  Lowering the thermostat setting from 70°  to 61° (21° to 16° C) could translate to 30 to 40% reduction in your heating bill.  It could also make a serious impact in places facing severe gas shortages this coming Winter.  

 

There are other tricks.  A big key is to heat the people and not the airspace where they aren't.  We had a small, partly finished family room in the basement.  We were there a lot during the Winter as it was the warmest room in the house.  Four people and three dogs radiated body heat along with four 150 watt lamps in the ceiling and a small electric heater (pro tip -- if you have a male dog, don't put one of these on the floor).  My Dad had a tendency to drop the thermostat to nighttime levels when we were down there. Most of our books lived there and a long work bench allowed my sister and I to work on homework and hobbies.  There was a TV, but it didn't get used that much.  It's where we told stories.¹  In the Summer the warm rugs on the floor came up and the room was a naturally cool place to escape the heat of the un-airconditioned home.  

 

The English studies I came across note the average English home was heated to 13° C (55° F) in 1970 rising to 20° C by 2000.   Our house wasn't all that different from the average English house. 

 

There are many other tricks for saving energy - insulation, heat pumps and so on, but they won't happen in Europe before this Winter for most people.  Insulation, done improperly, can be a two edged sword.  Forced air heating, the most common type in the US, fills the house with heated air. Insulation keeps as much of the heat as possible inside.  The problem is that often the air is trapped inside.  Stale air can be unhealthy (VoCs, high CO₂ levels, etc.).  There's a simple technology that can help - in fact you needn't look farther than your nose.  Your nose is a heat exchanger.  Cold air comes in and is heated up without releasing much of your body heat when you exhale.  Most industrial buildings and some homes have heat exchangers - they're required by many building codes to keep super insulated homes healthy.  Something to look into if your place is heavily insulated.

 

Localized radiant heat allows you to circulate some air from the outside and still be comfortable - you're heating people rather than the air.  You've probably noticed Scrooge's chair,  in many adaptations of A Christmas Carol, has a high back curved sides.  These were common in the Victorian era.. sit in front of a fireplace and focus the warmth. People have experimented with heated chairs with good results - notably work at Berkeley in the past decade.²  (They also designed and tested cooled chairs for the Summer).  People who live on the Japanese island of Hokkaidō modify the short legged Japanese family tables by putting a blanket over them and a small heater underneath.  I've used one of these visiting a couple from Sapporo when they were living in NY and was amazed how well it worked in their otherwise chilly house.  Teenagers like them for other reasons when their parents aren't home.  

 

In short there are many paths to clever - no silver bullets, but a lot of silver buckshot.  Twenty or thirty percent conversation levels are quite realistic for many people.   I won't mention adventures in an unheated 15 foot trailer with three dogs at -25°F (my mother thought colder temperatures were dangerous)

__________

¹  Nordic families seemed to tell a lot of stories.  Our heritage isn't Nordic, but many of our neighbors were and some of that rubbed off on us. 

² Here's an example and test of a heated/cooled chair. You could make one of these.. I haven't seen anything commercial.