My Dad was a Ford man. More specifically the Ford Falcon. It was a simple compact car with a 170 cubic inch displacement straight six coupled to a three speed manual transmission. It scored on the high end of the Mobil fuel economy test - about 19 miles per gallon when the average sedan was in the 12 to 14 range. But what he really liked about it was how repairable it was. Not only was it simple to work on, but most of his friends had cars with the same engine and transmission. If something needed fixing we could usually do it ourselves using tools borrowed from one of his friends. For more serious repairs there were specialized tools from Strobel's A to Z Rental, garages or (shudder) the Ford dealer.
The simplicity of cars of the day was balanced by crude manufacturing tolerances. Pistons fit so poorly in the cylinders that the first 500 or 1000 miles were done with great care using an abrasive oil to polish the parts into shape. It made a big difference in gas mileage and extending the life of the engine past 50,000 miles.
The dual gas shocks of the 70s opened the market for better cars that used higher precision design and manufacturing processes. That and the beginnings of cars that crumpled to absorb energy in crashes made simple repair much more difficult. The amateur mechanic had largely vanished by the 80s.
Clothing and shoes were expensive back then. Quality construction and repairability were important considerations while shopping. Tailors and dress makers were common. The same was true for appliances. Vacuum cleaners, toasters and anything electronic could be repaired at home or the local repair shop.
There are exceptions today .. Jheri makes her own clothing or buys high quality pieces with the intention of buying very little as she hopes each piece will last at least a decade. She's abandoned fashion and has created a style very much her own. I suspect some of you - Om for example - have a similar philosophy. But while it can be done in clothing, it's next to impossible when electronics are involved.
By the time I was fourteen I had three or four black and white TVs. None of them worked - watching TV wasn't interesting. The tubes, capacitors, transformers, switches and so on.. now those were useful! I designed and built a few radios and a stereo amplifier. It was straightforward and the experience taught me a lot about electronics. Now I look in a computer, TV or radio and see only massive integration. It's still possible to build things, but design is much more difficult. Learning about circuit elements is probably better done with computer simulations.
The right to repair movement has grown in recent years. I welcome it for some products, but given the tight integration of hardware and software I worry it may not be as generally attractive as proponents claim.
Smartphones are a case in point. Apple is infamous for discouraging third party repair. You can order a kit from Ifixit to replace a screen, battery and some other parts. It can work well if you have a bit of experience and Ifitit is upfront with the degree of difficultly. You lack the tools and technique to take apart, replace and reassemble the device to design specifications.
My personal results are mixed. I easily replaced the battery (twice!) on my first day, first generation iPod. The battery and screen on my out of warranty iPhone 5 was a different matter. After five hours of frustration I was left with an operating phone, but the case was fitting tightly and whatever waterproofness was gone. The misaligned case also interfered with the physical buttons on the side. I did get another year and a half from the phone though. It could be worse. I know someone who replaced the battery on an Android phone with an inexpensive battery from Amazon. The phone got very hot during charging and caught on fire when he took it apart to pull the battery out. It filled his place with acrid smoke, but fortunately only destroyed the phone and wastebasket
Apple is afraid of regulation so they offer repair kits for some of their devices. The Verge documented a battery replacement. You get a huge repair kit with a large hold on your credit card until Apple gets the kit back. The process probably works well if you're skilled at working with small electronic devices, but this isn't for everyone. Given the cost of shipping I suspect Apple's losing money, but they're also trying to make a point of what it takes to do a high quality repair. Of course a third party repair shop could buy the tools and perform quality repairs and I suspect that will happen. Lower quality shops abound, but your phone or laptop may be a bit wonky afterwards.
We need to understand what's repairable, what's sort of repairable, and what's not. Easy to repair smartphones have been offered but they're generally expensive and lacking in features. I suspect smartphones, laptops and smartwatches are probably moving to a subscription model anyway. Clothing and some appliances could made for longer lifetimes and repairability. Then again convincing consumers and companies to move away from a consumption model is a huge, but very important, challenge.
I've mentioned clothing, but should follow-up with other product areas where design for long life, repairability and upgrading is important. It's generally expensive, but in the long run can have advantages. You may live in an example.
My father never had the thermostat above 60°F and 55° was a more common setting,. At night it would be dropped to 50°. The house was well insulated and the furnace didn't come on that often if it was above freezing. During colder weather we spent most of our time in an insulated room in the basement. We had a lot of sweaters, thick socks, and scarves.
Great Falls, Montana lies just East of the Rocky Mountains. It can be much colder than its latitude suggests as cold arctic air can plunge Southward unimpeded along the Eastern slope of the Rockies. Global warming has changed the climate a bit, but thirty years ago -40° (F or C) would happen every few years and long spells with high temperatures staying below 0°F are not uncommon these days. It also happens to be very windy. The residents are became very good at adapting to the climate.
Our house was small so I slept in a small travel trailer most of the time during my high school years. The only real insulation in the Winter was snow.. There were a lot of blankets, a down sleeping bag, a beagle and two silky terriers. The dogs would make their own beds down to about 40°. Below that they'd join me in the sleeping bag. The only down side from these three dog nights was when the beagle had gas. The sleeping arrangement was always toasty.
Another bit of information comes from David MacKay. Staring in the mid 1960s someone at Cambridge interested in residential heat transport in homes put recording thermometers in a number of homes in town as well as a few other locations around England. The standard Winter daytime temperature was remarkably consistent - about 55° through the 70s. By 2000 it had crept to 62°. Lower readings than Americans expect, but the Brits may dress more practically. It would be interesting looking at the insulation value of standard wardrobes over time. I suspect the emergence of low cost clothing is partly to blame.
Over-reliance on Russian natural gas is presenting an enormous problem in some European counties. Short term solutions other than conservation are non-existent, but conservation holds a lot of promise. Heat people rather than spaces. A few days ago Jheri wrote noting she's working on warm Winter clothing lines for German and Nordic markets on speculation that natural gas will be rationed for a few years. The savings projections I've seen involve thermostat settings of 16°C (61°F) .. I know from experience you can go much lower and be perfectly comfortable. (That said I don't know how some of the high school girls survived with miniskirts back in the day.)
In the medium term there are a number of things that can be done, but I struggle coming up with anything at the home level approaching the impact of serious conservation. The same goes for petroleum usage. Infrastructure changes to encourage cycling can have a non-trivial impact. Fortunately a few locations (Denmark and the Netherlands) have made, or are making (Paris), great headway.
The medium and long term will be dominated by power generation and distribution, but progress can and should be made with "smart" heating and cooling along with smart fabrics. There's much to say about those areas, but for later.
Who knows.. maybe tech can be more meaningful than social media and blockchains..
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.
It was the dawn of the jet age the US Air Force had a serious problem. Early jets were suddenly complex and flying them was more demanding. There were a lot of crashes - a few days saw a dozen planes go down. Sorting through crash reports pilot error was the big problem. The question was what were the root causes?
Attention turned to training, mechanical issues, checklists and cockpit design. In the later there are issues of control type and layout and also the pilot. At the time military pilots ranged from about five foot four inches to six foot two. To get to the bottom of things Lt. Gilbert Daniels, fresh out of physical anthropology from Harvard, measured nearly 150 dimensions of over 4,000 pilots. The hope was to find and characterize averages or ranges of averages that could be used by cockpit and control designers.
He picked ten of the most relevant measures.. leg length, reach and so on and narrowed things down to an average range of heights from five-seven to five-eleven. Then all of the pilots were compared to the averages of the ten relevant measures. The expected result would be a subset that would be within one standard deviation on all ten. The answer was zero - there was no average pilot out of a sample of 4,000.
People who are looking for clothes that fit well are familiar with the problem average sizes. They were good enough measures to allow mass produced clothes to take off and prices fall to the point where clothing could become a statement of style for average people. It produces a lot a waste and lowered expectations of fit quality and access to design that might fit a personal style. Clothing can be tailored, but most people put up with lower quality in return for very low prices and the opportunity to always buy something new. Some groups are at a built in disadvantage - plus sizes are too difficult to deliver to size using current production and sizing techniques. And there are some groups who are out of normal size ranges who have to pay dearly for custom clothing if they want to express a personal style. There are many problems and a good deal of opportunity for change in an industry that does about $1.5 trillion a year.
A few years ago I supported a Planet Money Kickstarter that funded reporting on the making of a simple t-shirt from planting the seeds to taking delivery. The result was a fascinating serious that made two points. The standardized shipping container has had an enormous impact on the world's economy since about 1980. I'd put it's impact up there with computerization, although it has certainly used a lot of that technology. The other point is that apparel manufacture is complex with most of the steps, even in the developing world, being automated. Most of the steps but one .. sewing.
Sewing has been fiercely difficult to automate. A variety of approaches have been tried, but fabric stretches and threads move non-linearly and are not simple flat sheets. A skilled seamstress ( in the developing world over 90% of the sewing is done by women) is performing difficult computations and manipulations.
A few researches took the hammer and tongs approach of taking high resolution very high speed (1000 frames per second and higher) video of the fabric and figuring out where every thread is and how it is moving. This information goes to small manipulators - fingers if you will - that move the fabric into just the right position as sewing takes place. Researchers at Georgia Tech made the most progress and a company was spun off - SoftWear Automation. It was snapped up buy Tianyuan Garments Company - one of the largest apparel manufacturers in the world. They've announced a plant in Little Rock, Arkansas with 21 production lines of Sewbots. The cost goes to about thirty cents a tshirt - about half that of a woman in Bangladesh sweatshop. The factory will produce 23 million tshirts a year for Adidas - all made in the US by a Chinese company. Costs will fall furthers in the future.
There are any number of vexing social problems that should be solved. Very few people will be needed for automated sewing production. Currently about five million women in Bangladesh alone depend on the meager wages they get from the lowest cost apparel makers. Conditions can be awful and the wages far too low, but for many this is the step above true poverty. Of course other things need fixing such as education and the place of women in society, but fully automating apparel will put real pressure on millions of people. One hopes we don't repeat the terrible labor phase problem that plagued the Industrial Revolution, but I wouldn't count on it.
Current systems only work for a limited range of clothing like t-shirts, but jeans, dress shirts and uniforms are considered solvable problems that will fall in the next year or two. Within five years the industry should start feeling an impact. There are other problems. A good overview of current ethical and environment issues is Overdressed by Elizabeth Cline.
Back to the sizing problem. Apart from lower costs and domestic assembly, automated sewing offers the potential of clothes for any human size and shape at a reasonable cost and for almost any design. The technology for body scans is well developed and could be scaled quickly. Paired with flexible manufacturing lines - probably within overnight delivery range and quite possibly owned by companies like Amazon - your measurements could be matched to designs in a day or two. About five years ago I predicted this could happen in ten years. I think we're still on track, but it is likely to be a premium for awhile with the major focus being slashing the costs of current fast fashion and mass manufacture and creating an assembled in the US branding.
Other potential changes like the disruption of how design is done and who owns it and perhaps low cost seriously advanced machines for home or fabric store use. I haven't carefully reviewed the IP, but perhaps there's more of an opening than for 3D printing.
Currently there is a technology press dog pile on the supposed failure of the Apple watch that similar to their proclamations of the iPod and iPhone on their first birthdays. I'm not terribly interested in these proclamations - it is far too early. But as technology becomes more personal and persistent, new questions arise. Unlike the iPod and iPhone, the current incarnation of the watch didn't work for me, but there is so much that can be done. Jheri and I have a running conversation on fashion and technology. She has an extremely strong personal style and a deep interest in the history of fashion. I knew she was critical of the watch, so I asked for more detail. Her reply was interesting enough to share:
Oh the watch! I do wear a watch. My great grandfather's gold pocket watch has seen much and has stories. I look at it and imagine Belarus and my heritage. It is on a large strap I made and I enjoy its company even if it doesn't keep great time. I pick my bag to complement it. It is very much part of me.
I was loaned an Apple watch soon after it was available along with a several colors of sport bands that weren't for sale. Its case is beautifully built and I like the feel of the sport band, but the shape isn't my style. To be constantly with me it needs to be so brilliant that I will overlook the style. It wasn't brilliant.
The watch was not like my iMac, Macbook, iPad and iPhone. I tried it for a few weeks but it was confusing and slow. It didn't show its face quickly enough when I moved my wrist to my face. It will get faster by watch 3, but now it is molasses. A watch needs to convince me to wear it. This one went back.
I run and cycle but don't use Fitbits. Motivation is not an issue with me. I run in the ice, snow, rain and dark when I'm at home and traveling. I was given a Fitbit that lasted about nine months before it failed. It didn't match my needs and I ended up forgetting it most of the time. The Apple watch has fitness apps, but they don't match my needs. I did check it against the Polar chest heart monitor that I sometimes use for indoor aerobics. Its reading was very different. My trainer and physician claim the Polar is very accurate. Apple will probably improve it, but there isn't anything for me now.
The applications were mostly useless. A friend says it is great for alerts, but my view is different. I want to control when and how I use technology.
A few weeks ago you said you no longer believed the best camera is the one you have with you. You went on to say the best camera for some people like new parents may be an always there smartphone and some people take great images with them, but you needed to stop taking snapshots and start relearning how to see images. Yes! that is so right! I carry an iPhone, but have stopped photographing and posting everything. I'm learning how to use my medium format camera. You are forced to think about the image and these images become stories. They aren't poorly composed photos of the moment that are lost with 40,000 other poorly made photos.
I need time to myself and those wanting to get in touch with me can wait. My phone goes deep in my bag when I walk and is off most of the day. I'm not tempted by social media anymore. The watch was taking the distractions from my bag and putting them on my wrist. People who want constant connection will love that, but for me notifications can wait.
I think I react to seeing so many of those around me fail at the real world. Even if they aren't looking at their phone, their wrist says something and their mind leaves the world for awhile. I consider it rude when you are talking with someone and they check their phone or look at a notification on their wrist.
My grandfather's watch is not in any danger. I wonder what new technology I will allow into my life. If it is to work I want to be the one who allows it.
The end of Jheri's comment remind me of a very productive coworker at Bell Labs in the mid 1980s. If you called her you'd get her answering machine:
Hello, this is Pat. I don't use the telephone except from one to one thirty Eastern time. If you need to reach me my email is: (a bangpath on a public unix machine - not her research machine). I will check that when I come to work and when I leave. You can usually find me in the Unix room.
People don't multitask well - rather we switch context. You're working on something and the phone rings. You have to switch your mental state for awhile and then switch back to where you were. A good deal of research shows this switching often requires ten minutes or longer - much longer if you were deep in thought. There was a tradition in my first Bell Labs laboratory of declaring a half day period when your phone went quiet and you indicated if someone could knock on your door by a colored flag. Having several hours straight to thing alone or work with others of your choice was very powerful. When I moved to a different organization I began to come in at five in the morning to give myself a few uninterrupted hours. Interruptions from a smartphone or watch are an issue for some. Control and context are necessary.
What does Jheri expect of something as immediate and persistent as something on her wrist? What function, interface and design would be enough to displace the bit of family history that has become part of her style? Perhaps her phone will be her mostly persistent device for a long time. Wearable compute power will change, but perhaps not as quickly as some think. Interfaces will have to change. I also tried an Apple watch and found it a mixed bag. It wasn't enough to match my needs, so it is gone.1 In fairness I note that satisfaction surveys indicate people who own Apple watches like them a lot.
The need and willingness to be interrupted are a central theme. Ideally the information needs to be understood and appropriate in the context of what you are doing. At one point some of the people in my department studied how high level executives dealt with information. The conclusion was these people are so well served by their administrative assistants that any electronic aid of the time would be counterproductive. The best assistants were very high quality information filters and organizers. Building something like them is difficult and gets even more complex if you aren't king of your domain.
Will status be measured by your ability to control your filters and the access others have to you? Will it be your freedom to shut things down and be unconnected?
For a few years I've been going through a phase of limiting technology like Jheri to focus my thinking. It is great to know that I have capabilities I only dreamed off ten years ago, but I'm learning life works better for me if I limit their use. I suspect this is uncommon, but I've seen a few others, include at least two readers, doing the same thing. Smartphones are changing our lives and a view into almost persistent computing and communication. Wearables will only extend that and, as such, are fascinating. The notion that fashion and style are involved deepens the puzzle.
__________
1 There will clearly be performance improvements. Perhaps not as much as we've seen in smartphones given the battery constraint and the fact die shrinks won't be as dramatic, but there will still be improvements here and perhaps in other power hungry components. Interfaces are much more difficult to get right. I'm very curious to see if major changes are afoot at Apple or any of the competitors. And, at least for me, there is no compelling application I need to have. It is clear there will be many use cases and polarized views.
Much of the Internet of Things may turn into a nightmare of badness. I continue to believe the Apple watch has potential to tame some of this as a trusted connection to other local devices and possibly services. There is also a great deal of untapped potential for smartphones. We're at a very early stage and thinking of smartphones as mature is a mistake.
__________
Recipe Corner
I love humus and peanuts - so I combined them. This is really simple. I heated it up with a bit of Sriracha that was sitting around. Vary that and the amount of peanuts to match your taste. A trick when blending hummus in a food processor is to use very cold water.
Peanutty Humus
Ingredients
° a 15 oz can of chickpeas rinsed and drained
° 3 tbl of peanut butter
° 1+ tbl Sriracha (1 is mild .. getting to 3+ gets very hot. I used 2)
° 2 medium garlic cloves minced
° 1/4 tsp ground ginger
° 1/2 tsp honey
° 1 tbl olive oil
° 3 tbl very cold water (maybe a bit more depending on consistency)
° a handful of roughly chopped peanuts - I used salted, but unsalted would be fine
° 2 chopped green onions chopped
° a handful of chopped
° lime juice - some zest if you like
Technique
° put the chickpeas, PB, Sriracha, ginger, garlic, honey and salt and pepper into the food processor and run until broken up
° with the processor running slowly add the olive oil and cold water until as smooth as you like. Move to a suitable bowl
Passing white light through a prism to break it into a range of colored light, Newton introduced the word spectrum into optics. The colored apparition was packed with information contained in the light - a mixture of frequencies and intensities. Eventually it was learned that studying these revealed important aspects of matter the light had interacted with. In the mid 1800s physicists reignited the sleepy field of astronomy by attached spectroscopes to telescopes allowing the study of what made the starlight. Among the discoveries was an unknown yellow line in the Sun's spectrum. It was proposed as a possible new element later called Helium in honor of the Sun. 25 years it was discovered on Earth.
The technical is powerful and commonly used in many areas of science, medicine with thousands of commercial applications. The caveat is you need to use the right technique and appropriate instrument.
The heart of many types of spectrometers is simple - a well characterized and calibrated light source, something to hold a sample, a prism or diffraction grating to break up the light into a spectrum and a way to measure the intensity of the spectrum as a function of its wavelength (color, sort of). A smartphone has enough processing power to perform serious analysis and a few companies have made low cost spectrometers for teaching purposes. A good example is this $400 unit from Pasco. It lacks the precision to do serious work, but its great fun and works with an iPhone or iPad.
Three times in the past two years people have sent descriptions and pitches of even more portable units using integrated spectrometer modules. While they might be fun, these usually do reflected light surface spectroscopy and appear to have poor resolution. Silly claims are frequently made - that you can determine what is in your medicine, do food safety and calculate the calories in a meal.
Nope - it isn't going to work like that. You can't use out of context uncalibrated data and somehow perform cloud magic with 'algorithms' ... Success during a Kickstarter funding period does not guarantee impossible magic. There will be a flood of interesting sensors and even serious instrumentation for smartphones and some of it will enable a density of information that is potentially transformative. Consider thousands of accurate pollution monitors per square kilometer in cities. China is ripe for a revolt from a data informed citizenry.
Data, even the simplest data, has context. What was the sample. how were the measurements made, what is the accuracy of the measuring tool, did the accuracy change over time, how was the data preprocessed, how was it postprocessed...?
A few years ago I came across a detailed description of a rope transmission from Bordeaux, France that moved mechanical power from a water wheel to several businesses hundreds of feet away. These contraptions sometimes often had mechanical efficiencies that still impress. My answer seemed far too low. I smugly came to the conclusion that the book must be in error.
The problem resurfaced recently when I was reading about the spread of the metric system in France. Standardization of weights and measures was of vital importance to commerce as hundreds of local systems were being used. The author noted rural Bordeaux defined a foot using a standard that was 35.7cm long - dramatically different from the now standard definition of about 30. 5cm. I had been doing my calculations based on a bad assumption. Using this definition a six foot tall person would be a bit over five foot one...
About three years ago a friend came to me with a question about a distribution of measurements. She's quite tall and was thinking about putting together a specialized shop for tall women. An important early question was to understand the potential market size. While there are many factors that go into clothing size, height is a reasonable proxy to get a rough idea. She knew there were tables showing height distributions, but it wasn't clear to her how to navigate the information. I had been involved in a large anthropometry survey in the nineties so one thing led to another...
You can make a histogram of heights - 100 people at 64 inches, 125 at 65 inches and so on. Increasing the number of people in your sample will make the distribution look smoother. With a very large population and very small measurement increments you'll get something like this:
It isn't exactly the bell-shaped curve you probably expected. The problem is it is the composite of two two curves. Men are about five inches taller than women on average and need to be considered a separate population. Plotting men and women separately gives two bell curves. Add them and the original distribution appears.
This type of curve is a Normal distribution - anyone with a STEM background has studied them in depth as they turn up almost everywhere. Human height turns out to approximately follow this type of distribution making it easy to calculate the distribution of potential customer heights assuming the published curve is relevant to your population. Measurements have been made in most countries and are repeated at regular intervals.1
My friend's target market was women who stand more than six feet tall. A small market, but she and her friends were underserved so it made sense to investigate. Perhaps the Internet would allow her to find enough customers to justify production runs greater than a few pieces. She chose a huge American survey and found wrote a simple program that calculated how many women were predicated to be at or about a height
from her email:
Something is broken Steve I just integrate a normal distribution with a mean of 64.3 and a standard deviation of 2.5 from a height through infinity to get the fraction at and above a height. Here are my numbers with a little rounding. Any ideas?!?
72" 1 in 966
73" 1 in 3,900
74" 1 in 19,150
75" 1 in 107,000
76" 1 in 697,200
77" 1 in 5,298,900
78" 1 in 47,022,800
This is SO WRONG! The number of girls in college basketball and volleyball are instant disproofs!
To produce a clean fit it standard practice to exclude the tails of a measured distribution and tell the reader where it is valid. It wasn't published in this case, at least not prominently, but the fit was only good to about 5'11. The tails on the real curve tend to be thicker, but making a large enough measurement to smooth them out is unrealistic. It is possible to get a good enough fit for all but a tiny fraction of the population with only 100,000 or so people.
Now I was curious. Would it be possible to find a better fit to the distribution? Over a period of a few months I found a few ways to build a more accurate distribution function. Rather than a simple normal distribution it is the sum of three separate distributions. The tricky part was calculating the errors.
I won't list all of the results, but I'm 95% confident that a 6'3" woman (my friend's height) is between 1 in 16,070 and 18,070 with 1 in 16,950 being the most likely.2 1 in 17,000 is probably a good enough starting point and better than any of the major surveys. My tall friend Colleen would be about 1 in 267,000, but the bound is much larger between 1 in 219,000 and 1 in 420,000. Another good friend is 6'8, the estimates are very sketchy at her level: 1 in 1.38 million with a range from 1 in .76 million to 1 in 2.79 million. Counting athletes as a lower bound is probably better:-)
The final plot looks identical to the second plot as the size of the change is only 0.02% of the regular normal curve. This is a feature as the densely populated portion of the distribution function is nearly identical to the original. To get a sense of the shape of the adjusted function, imagine a world where my corrections are 2,500 times larger making their contribution equal to that of the normal female height distribution.
The new female probability curve is red and the old uncorrected female curve is blue in the first plot and the uncorrected male curve is blue in the second.3 In this different world a quarter of the female population is six feet tall or more. One in one hundred and thirty would be at least Colleen's height. This alternate world could be fodder for social commentary fiction. Tall women certainly wouldn't have problems finding clothing and female sports would probably dominate. Perhaps height would be unimportant socially.
Continuous distribution functions derived from observed data are common and, when used correctly, powerful. It is all too easy to miss a fundamental assumption and come to the wrong result while feeling good about it. Separate sanity checks, like looking at the roster of college volleyball teams, need to be normal practice. Being playful and not be easily seduced is a requirement.
The clothing concept turned out to be impractical. Quality sources for reasonable costs simply don't exist for the necessary low volumes. It became clear that made to measure is necessary. Some is done for men's shirts in Asia and South Asia, but costs are currently high. In addition to height, there was too much variability in sizes to make the effort practical... at least for now. The trick is mass made-to-measure. Eventually it will be standard practice and fit will become nothing more than a memory. Until then some segments of the apparel market are tough sledding. Her advice for anyone dealt an usual body: learn to sew, find a good tailor and make enough money for a few quality custom pieces. Find your own style rather than following the trends.
__________
1 Health organizations usually take the measurements as they are a proxy for human health. Cheating I copy and paste from an email I sent on the subject:
We tend to pay a lot of attention to numbers without worrying about their accuracy. Height is a good example. If you measure a large number of adult males and females, their heights will distribute themselves along a bell shaped curve. Most people will be close to an average (a mean). The larger the sample the more the distribution will take the shape of a bell shaped curve called the normal distribution. Remarkably all you need to know is the average and a number that tells you something about how rapidly the curve changes shape. From this a designer will know the height distribution of potential customers and can adjust their manufacturing plans accordingly. You can do similar exercises for many measurements - shoe size for example.
The characteristic curves vary regionally. The US is very similar to England and can be taken as the same within the accuracy of most measurements. Northern Europe is taller, with Holland being the tallest. The North of Holland is particularly tall and is sometimes treated separately. Asia and South Asia are shorter than the US and South America is much shorter. Changes in mean and standard deviation are studied over time as height is a good proxy for health within a population. A tall person is not necessarily healthier than a short person, but for a child about 20% to 25% of the variation of their final height is influenced by health and nutrition rather than genetics. If the health of a nation changes, so will it’s average height. Holland has seen a dramatic change in the 20th century - particularly after WWII with Northern Holland being the tallest region in the World. For adults under 35 female height is only an inch less than mean male height in the US and mean male height approaches 6'2.
2 A quick comment - the curves are probability distribution functions. The horizontal axis is height, the the vertical axis is probability, so you get a sense of roughly what it is. The exact probability for a point is meaningless. The probability of someone being 73.0000001 is very nearly zero. Just integrate the function over the range you are interested in.
Measurement errors in the height studies and insufficient statistics are the major components that make up the errors. A trained person using a simple stadiometer - those vertical rulers with a sliding horizontal arm - can repeatedly measure height to about a half centimeter, but some surveys are self-reported.
3 Here I have plotted real probabilities for each inch of height and have connected them with a smooth curve - a similar to the density function, but a bit different. I'm just doing it to show there are different ways to interpret and display the data and drawing conclusions requires some understanding.
Here is the probability plot of just the correction in black scaled up to represent a full population next to a normal female plot in red. The shape isn't simple and has a much larger mean and width than the normal curve for women's height. Scaled down by a factor of 2,500 and added to the normal women's distribution it gives a "fat tail" that squares with other measurements.
Playing games like this make it easy to spot errors in your thinking or calculations. At some level this is just a game. A good thing as you can spend a lot of time getting everything to work.
__________
Recipe Corner
This is modified from an old recipe from a cooking club I was part of
Indian Cauliflower with Several Spices
Ingredients
° 1 large head cauliflower, trimmed and separated into florets
° 1 large yellow onion, thinly sliced
° 1 tbsp olive oil (you really should use coconut oil, but I didn't have any)
° 1 tsp mustard seeds
° 1 tsp cumin seeds
° 1 tsp nigella seeds (I didn't have so I skipped)
° 1 tsp fenugreek seeds
° 1 tsp fennel seeds
° 6 ounces tofu, stirred 'til smooth
° 1 tsp paprika
° ½ tsp cayenne
° ½ tsp turmeric
° juice of a half lemon
° kosher salt to taste
Technique
° heat the oil in a pan and add the seeds. When they dance and begin to darken, add the onions.
° sauté the onions until translucent.
° add the cayenne, paprika and salt.
° add the cauliflower florets and mix well.
° add the tofu, mix. Cover the pan and let the cauliflower cook until somewhat tender. Stir every few minutes
Since college I've had a practice of tithing my time. Its origins weren't particularly noble - mostly I was feeling guilty about my position as a middle class white male at a good school. My upbringing encouraged paying a tithe. It didn't make much sense to me. A wealthy person wouldn't suffer if they game a tenth of their income away while a poor person might be ruined. Money to an organization didn't make sense - particularly if it was seen as a bribe. Donating time was the great equalizer. How many CEO's donate four or six hours to some cause every week? How many churches would be able to accept the drop in funding?
Initially I found work in a soup kitchen. It was mind numblingly boring. I quit after a few minutes feeling that it was a failed experiment and a bit guilty. Then a friend asked for help with the instrumentation on his experiment. Learning about what he was doing and making my myself useful turned out to be fun. I felt I was getting more out of the deal than he was. It was grad school and I was completely hosed for time. Well - mostly - this was a vacation from my own work. For about a semester I'd spend about an hour a day helping and learning. The next semester came with a few smaller opportunities. I found myself hinting that I'd be willing to help out.
At Bell Labs there were tithing opportunities outside of science. The place had people from many walks of life - including musicians and artists. These were people - seriously talented people - who wanted to dip their toes in projects, but needed collaboration. The amount of learning went up dramatically. Tithing grew to about ten percent of my waking hours and external projects like working with a startup Black Women's fashion magazine came along. Long lasting threads were being generated. I found myself beginning to identify and connect widely separated fields bringing my background and abilities along for the ride.
Some threads tangled and led me to territories I hadn't imagined. A wild piece of serendipity occurred when someone from the fashion world told me there was someone I had to meet. Colleen was spending a bit of time in NYC looking for ideas, so we got together to see if any crazy projects presented themselves. If you were to look at our backgrounds, other than a sense we needed to do something about global warming, there was little overlap - something that proved to be a feature. At the time she was a pro beach volleyball player and I was in need of a project far from the norm. We got together and talked and listened and talked.
Dots began to connect, but like sausage making the process was messy and required quite a bit of effort. Threads began to emerge. I'll just mention one that came from observation.
She happens to be very tall - about five and a half standard deviations taller than the average woman and nearly three and a half more the average man. Interacting with man-made objects, particularly those that are mass produced, can be frustrating. The design world usually focus on the five to ninety five percent range. Colleen is at the 99.9998 percentile when it comes to height.
In physics you learn to focus on what appears to be broken - what doesn't match the models people have been working with. Colleen clearly isn't broken - the problem is with the products.
There were a few quick fixes. She had come up with many on her own. Jeans weren't long enough, so when a pair wears out you cut the bottom foot or so from each leg and use them to extend the legs of normal jeans. Others proved a bit more difficult and part of the problem is recognizing there is a design issue rather than just adapting. She loves to cook, but watching her wince with back pain after about 15 minutes of prep work was enough to spark a simple idea. Anthropometric studies suggested a work surface 49" from the ground. The standard American kitchen counter is 36", so the trick was a sturdy little 13" tall table with a high quality cutting surface.
It worked so well that a small company got involved in making them. She recorded and edited a YouTube promotion with her mother operating a Flip camera (remember that?). The outtakes video shows off her sense of humor.
There were several other modified products ideas that were basically appropriately sized or positioned, but the big game was apparel. Finding anything that remotely fits is a challenge. Made to measure is the best path to success, but it isn't cheap. This rekindled an interest in apparel design and manufacture - an interest that is still alive as disruption seems very likely.
She has been working on finding a path that will let her travel and write more - perhaps enough to make a living. A part on a five episode reality show that highlights very tall women presented itself and she jumped at it. The first episode of My Giant Life aired earlier this week on TLC and turned out to be more respectful of the women than these shows can be.1 It is an opportunity for her to become a bit more well known and have a better chance with some of her ideas. She's looking for her own set of points to connect and her own threads to weave.
The first episode shows a special bike that Trek made for her in recognition of her environmental efforts along with the cutting board and how she has hacked her 400 sq ft garden apartment to make use of the vertical space. When you can easily put your palm on the ceiling, high spaces become attractive. On the other hand a five foot tall refrigerator isn't very back friendly. At least she is no longer just adapts - she observes and is filing away ideas.
Connecting the dots and using these experiences to weave threads through time is a path to creativity and adaptation. The current focus of schools on STEM and the elimination of so many other subjects, particularly for the poor, strikes me as short sighted and perhaps dangerous. I was delighted when Horace Dediu's wife wrote and pointed out Finland takes a very broad approach. They're creating a very adaptable workforce.
My college education was far too narrow. In grad school I learned a bit more about my craft after several years of intense focus, effective rendering me more narrow. Somehow I lucked out with curiosity beyond my field and have been able to build a continuing education that is a little broader. Many of you do this and much more brilliantly.
Tell your stories and inspire others...
__________
1 It still had many annoying issues, but ... television. Height is over sensationalized with camera angles at times and is the main driver of the plots, but that's what the series is about. At least everyone is treated well so far and perhaps some people may realized how they treat those who are different needs to be changed.
[credits rolling, theme music fades and a conversation between a couple begins]
Hello. I'm sorry I'm late. I had some important police business to attend to, you know.
- Everything's all right?
Yes, absolutely fine. Allow me to let you in the car.
Please. - It's beautiful.
- It's rather neat, isn't it?
I call it the Silver Hornet.
Yes.
It's a little overdue for service, unfortunately.
Perhaps it's better to leave that there. It's a beautiful night. Why don't we walk?
What an excellent idea.
- L'm sorry about that.
- It's quite all right.
You look ravishing tonight.
- Yes, I know that.
- You know that?
I knew that you knew that.
You did? L knew you knew I knew that.
What made you decide to become a detective?
It's not something one decides every day of the week, you know. But in my case, it began when my great aunt was kidnapped... and held for ransom by an unlicensed Armenian phrenologist.
An Armenian phrenologist?
Yes, you know. A man who reads the "bimps" on the head.
- The "bimps"?
- What?
[conversation fades, music returns]
- from the credit section of The Revenge of the Pink Panther
Phrenology was rooted in the idea that the mind had a limited number of components that were regional in the brain and that the importance of each of these was determined by its size and shape. Somehow this was reflected in the shape of the skull. The phrenologist would feel the shape and bumps on a person's head and make judgement statements on the person's personality, mental capacity, and even their potential moral worth. It was a quick filter for information conveyed by a type of non-verbal communication and, like so many poorly thought-out filters, it was pseudoscience.
It was hugely popular until becoming discredited around the mid 1800s. Part of the public discrediting came in the form satire. Nasology (by George Jabet under the pseudonym Eden Warwick in 1848) claimed to judge character based on the size and shape of the human nose. The first printing of the book in England made its point, but a second printing years later somehow caught on in the US and was popular in some quarters as it appeared to justify racism. Thankfully modern America is sophisticated enough to not fall for the satire of The Onion and The Daily Show.
We have rich communications, often unconscious, with others outside of our speech. Non-verbal communication includes everything from body language, eye contact, physical distance, and much more. Fashion and clothing are a signal that communicate class, personal taste, mood, and more. Sometimes we make choices about the signals we send. Sometimes there are miscommunications based on social non-verbal visual filtering.
As part of learning about apparel I've become interested in these communications. The industry is beginning to undergo radical change and understanding filters as drivers of design is centrally important. Of course this goes beyond what we chose to wear. We make similar judgements about a person based on their body shape and appearance. Bodies are less malleable, but have a fashion of their own and that has driven dieting, physical fitness and body modification.
Dieting for weight loss was popularized William Banting with his publication of the Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public. Perhaps the fact he was an undertaker by trade tells us something his diet consisted of large amounts of meat, some wine, smoking (!), and very few carbohydrates. It became wildly popular in America establishing a model for the fad diets that followed up to the present. Dieting was recommended and advertised in men's publications becoming a component of the Muscular Christianity movement that was beginning to gain steam around the same time.
Muscular Christianity linked physical health and piety to perceived character. Self control through rigorous physical exercise supposedly conveyed purity. Christian men were to be ruggedly masculine and the image of the ideal Western male shifted beginning with the elites. Buff had become a desired state for the young, wealthy and white and casual clothing was developed to show it off.
Dieting and exercise were a path for the emerging middle class. They came from a lower class and were excluded from power - partly became they were considered vulgar and uneducated. Dieting and sport demonstrated they had self-control and worth. Being overweight was linked to weakness, greed and corruption. There was a worry that men had become too weak - too feminine. The YMCA was a product of the movement along with games like basketball and volleyball which were invented as gym based physical activities. This helped ignite an interest in sports like baseball and football in the US making them activities first at elite Eastern colleges and then at more aspirational institutions. At the peak of the movement the Olympic Games of the modern era were established.
Women were initially excluded from this new drive to be physically fit. A proper woman, at least in the US and England, wasn't to do physical labor. The desired body type had become - well - plump. Women's magazines told them losing weight would cause premature aging and a being unattractive for men. Lillian Russell represented the wealthy white feminine ideal of a fertile plumpness.
Change came from the women's rights movement. It was believed that if women could control their bodies in the same way that men did they can show they are rational beings of high self worth deserving of equal rights. Women began to diet and exercise as a means of liberation.
These new visual signals were meant for the white middle and upper class only. Those from the working class who didn't have the time and means to exercise were viewed as lazy and without worth as they can't control their bodies - and perhaps they should not be granted equal rights.
Youth fitness slowly emerged as an issue. During WWI it was noticed that some American draftees were rejected for being overweight. The numbers weren't huge, but it became an issue and lead to a study of the physical fitness of several thousand American and European children a few decades later. The Americans fared poorly triggering alarms about future security. President Eisenhower, something of a fitness junkie himself, established what later became the President's Counsel on Physical Fitness as a cold war effort. American children had to become fit, but they had to do it by choice as a counter to the film reals of Soviet children doing required mass calisthenics. That presented a problem. It was easy for the Godless communists to motivate a generation, how do you do it in America?
The solution was quintessentially American. Hire the guys who gave us Smokey the Bear, our great influencers - the admen of Madison Avenue. Physical fitness was pitched as being cool. Gym classes received more attention and producing athletes as ideals became more important. In Junior High I remember calisthenics to an old 45 record - the practice survived until the 70s.
It is useful to achieve some level of physical fitness, it is important not to judge. We have powerful social learned visual filters that often lead to character judgements based on someone's race, appearance, height, weight and physical shape. We may laugh at phrenology, but sometimes we use something equivalent. And there are other filters - some day perhaps I'll write about the phrenology of Google and Facebook...
__________
Recipe Corner
I've mostly been grilling veggies and various types of produce. Since so little work was done I tried someone else's recipe. A fun and delicious idea noted by David Lebovitz - vegetarian 'Faux Gras'. It is great on a hearty bread.
In the past week at least a dozen people have asked if I will buy an WATCH. I tell them probably not - at least not this iteration. Watching reactions is interesting so I try to remain passive and let them take the direction of any discussion that follows. The categories so far:
° the death-knell for Swiss watch makers and the meaning of luxury
° speculation that this is the inflection point where Apple is finally doomed
° new forms of computation (a single case)
I have no idea if the watch will succeed or not, but am drawn to the last conversation type.
During my life the notion of computation has taken a variety of forms across range of devices. In high school my personal computer was a beat-up mechanical adding machine and slide rule. Some organizations were using electronic analog computers to solve differential equations and digital computing had made its move from universities to the military and a few industries. The public perception of a computer had shifted from a person, usually female, employed to do calculations by hand to a machine operated by men in white coats carrying boxes of punched cards. The digital computer was magical - unobtainable magic unless you were an organization.
Two millennia earlier there was the Antikythera mechanism - the earliest known mechanical analog computer. Earlier still were computers of place to mark celestial events - the alignments of celestial bodies with fixed monuments. Computation for religion, calendars and possibly a toy for the rich.
Navigation sparked the development of any number of analog mechanical computers. Astrolabes, sectors and so on. By the 19th century saw tide predicting machines were built to solve complex differential equations and the earliest naval fire control systems were fitted to long range guns to revolutionize warfare. Computation was driven by the needs of emerging technologies. Analog electro mechanical systems were built to understand and run the power network in the 1930s and WWII saw crash programs to build computational bomb sights and early code cracking electronic machines.
People very rarely transitioned from one of these computation systems to something newer. These were largely purpose built and used by experts. By the 70s a change was underway - the emergence of general purpose digital computing.
My perception of computing went from my slide rule to an account on a UNIVAC something or other in the engineering building and a growing understanding of WATFIV - a dialect of FORTRAN. I would drop off my jobs when I got up at 4am to get the lowest rates. The huge change came in grad school when my department let students use its minicomputers. There was direct access through a terminal - for the first time you were touching the heart of the machine. I started to play with networks - it hadn't occurred to me until then that a terminal on a network and some storage was beyond useful.
Personal computers were for the very dedicated hobbyist. By the early 80s I had logins on several UNIX machines connected to the ARPANET (my bang path ended up on samwise) and root on a few. Computing was democratizing and I helped start rec.pets.ferrets on USENET to connect with a larger community and learn how to support the fury family members.
At Bell Labs the day before Christmas was the best holiday of the year. Families would come in and people would mill about seeing what others were doing. Kids went wild with games they couldn't access at home. They had to be kicked off the machines to make way for others as the killed grues in Zork and fought off space invaders. We took this as a sign that our work must be cool. We missed the fact that the kids could care less about our work. Those from families of means were steering their families towards Radio Shack TRS80s and Apple ][s... the future of education you know:-)
1984 arrived. I had seen Xerox Stars and Smalltalk and later the Apple Lisa. Internally we had Blit terminals giving us a mouse driven windowing graphical user interface on our Unix Vaxen. It was clear this was the future so I spent a pile of money on a Mac (128k) on day one. It wasn't terribly useful and programming it was difficult, but something seriously important was in the air. The practical personal computer had nearly arrived. People were dreaming about mostly the wrong uses as they lacked experience with emerging use cases. IBM blessed PCs for business and the vast majority of action for a decade went in that direction. The Mac's user interface was dismissed. Real computer users (we had moved beyond programmers) used a text interface. A mouse based windowing system for most meant Windows 95 - which arrived around the time home Internet access exploded. A multi-pronged fork in the road had arrived and computing took them.
Everyone is familiar with what happened next. The rapid acceptance of the Internet as a primary reason for owning a personal computer followed by the an evolution to laptops and smartphones. Each of these came with its own blue sky. Initially the transitions appeared as failures to those who had been used to earlier forms of interaction. Tasks from the last generation of devices were often more difficult on these smaller form factors. Advanced users were too involved in their own world to understand that a much larger group of new users would come in and define new paths.
In the late 1990s our Human Computing Interface department at AT&T Research spent a lot of time worrying about the intersection of handheld computers with enough memory to run real operating systems with wireless communication, geolocation and photography. It was clear these would come together into a single device. We built a prototype based on a Compaq PDA we had convinced to run Linux. It was connected to other modules making it about the size of a brick, but it let the imagination run and we were given a view of what the world might be like in ten or fifteen years. We thought computing would go into the woodwork and clothing. Fashion as a matrix for intimate computation (the iCane, iBelt, iWatch concepts and smart shirts) and smartdust.
The iPhone isn't a phone or a Macintosh. The WATCH isn't a watch or an iPhone. I don't have much experience with the paths wearable computation might take. I think in terms of a path of types computation driven by specialized use and later by Moore's law and an exponentially increasing connected user base. Looking back I can see a clear path - a geodesic of computation - that runs from the Antikythera mechanism through the slide rule followed by a progression of mainframes, minicomputers, a series of Macs and the iPhone. It's smoothness is an illusion that only appears in retrospect. At each junction an increasing number of possible paths emerged. I found my thread of low resistance that met my use case and pocketbook.
Unlike the smartphone which we had crudely prototyped in 1999, I don't have enough experience with wearable interfaces to have a sense of my use case. I have my doubts about Apple's vision, but admit it is based on naivety. I don't know if they have found the right starting point, but suggest their new device represents a huge potential change that will roll out over the next five years. The wrist seems like a natural place for this amount of computation. There are so many other issues involved, but at least we have the first serious run at intimate computation.
A few final thoughts.
People who wear watches that cost more than a thousand dollars these days use them primarily as a social signal - as an element of fashion. That is an enormously large and complex subject. Smartphones flirted with the edges, but now it is front and center. The only things that seem certain are is devices will come back to our wrists for the first time since the mobile phone largely vanquished them and STEM education and thinking is for an earlier time.
I still use my slide rule, but increasingly I'm interested in the science of the aesthetics of materials and the culture we call fashion...
__________
Recipe Corner
I haven't made anything interesting other than a bit of experimentation with cold brewed chocolate. Chocoholics may want to give this a try.
I brush the last of the snow from my coat and switch on the lights before taking my seat. A few minutes of silence and then a door opens and closes reverberating for about three seconds. The clicking of shoes echoes through Warner Hall as she makes her way to the bench. A minute of preparation and then the Praeludium in G by Bach fills her space and mine. I sit back and shut all but the Bach from my mind.
She is doing an excellent job until - rats. Bach derails and I sit up in my chair looking around. A female shout fills the space reverberating for about three seconds
sh*tttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt!
She goes back a few bars and dances through the problem smoothly. Now a piece I don't recognize, but it is still clearly Bach until about 6:55. Her shoes and coat go on and steps click to the door in the distance.
And a little magic as a female voice is softly singing Bach.
A door opens and closes. The reverberation is about three seconds and then silence. Time to switch off the amplifiers and make some hot chocolate before getting to work.
She was an organ student in Oberlin and I was in a special room in New Jersey where we were working on the reconstruction sound fields. A special seven microphone array had been installed in the hall with a computer handling compression mixing and compression in realtime. The bitstream made traveled Eastward to our room where a reasonably convincing illusion of the Hall's sound space was created. We had created a virtual acoustic reality.1
Pipe organs - the old mechanical 'tracker action' organs - may have been the most sophisticated technology of the middle ages. Oberlin's Warner Hall organ is a wonderful Flentrop that is ideally suited for Bach - a fact that partially determined where the array went. Listen to a performance.2
The construction of modern tracker action organs hasn't changed much in a half millennia. Each make has its own special alloys for pipes and techniques that are specific to each company and even to a master builder. The sounds from the metals and woods of the pipes have distinctive signatures that come from voicing by golden eared experts who reason with the material in quest of perfection.
I have a habit of taking a few weeks at the beginning of each year to learn a bit about something new. The idea is to get to the point where I can ask questions that aren't completely foolish. By the end of the two weeks I always feel I know much less about the subject than when I started, but this is sign of progress. It is a bit like learning a few phrases in the language of a country you're visiting. Even if people speak perfect English they appreciate that you've tried. That becomes a starting point if you want to learn.
Several of these mini sabbaticals have been guided by designers and craftspeople. Those who know fabrics, metals and woods at an intimate level. There are amazing properties that we usually don't think about. How can you put an edge on a knife, how does concrete work, what happens when you bend metal, how do metals influence flavor? How do you tune the exhaust note of a sports car? How do you build flexibility and stretch into denim? Some of this is well studied. Much of it isn't.
There is an effort to move beyond STEM education by adding the arts - STEAM or STE[A]M education. It often involves sensors, lights and some computing power with a few companies appearing to supply and inspire experimenters. A few brilliant bits have emerged from people like Iris van Herpen and Björk, but most of it is - well - learning and part of a transition Design languages will emerge and now is probably an exciting time to get involved. The beauty is that it encourages people to acquire the skills it takes to make things - something that is missing from most K12 programs.3
The Maker community is a starting point if you're interested in the intersection of the physical world and technology (mostly computing). While a great hobby and even a business opportunity for some, I see a path to something deeper. Most of us are idiot savants with the technology and stuff that surrounds us. Perhaps this is a path to an evolution of our education that embraces the past and the future and recognizes art and science as active partners with engineering. Computing and networks are important, but so is the material world and understanding how we relate to it.
A goal is to bring together people with a wide range of expertise and create new classes of materials and designs. Clothing that adjusts itself to local temperature and humidity while remaining comfortable and perhaps even having a wonderful 'feel' and movement. New ways to make proteins in during cooking to create entirely new flavors. Building materials that repair themselves. Fabrication processes that allow individual expression while being inexpensive enough for average people. Tools and designs that encourage people to add to the design rather than just consume.
The sky is the limit. The problem is finding the right spark with enough constraints that collaborations begin to reverberate. But that is another story...
__________
1 There were a number of other experiments in shared acoustic VRs and sound field reconstruction for conferences.
2 The Oberlin Conservatory site has a link to an organ concert in Warner Hall that was covered by the public radio program Pipe Dreams. Worth a listen!
3Make: magazine is a good resource. They're mostly focused on male-centric STEM (mostly T and E) projects, but Make: Volume 43 Feb/Mar 2015 has sections on clothing and wearables. Adafruit is very woman friendly with supplies and projects to get someone going.
Making It by Chris Lefteri is a brief but excellent book detailing a few dozen techniques and an introduction to the different technques used at a variety of production scales. Get the 2nd edition!
__________
Recipe Corner
What happens when you have a can of plum tomatoes and some coconut milk. Very easy and a nice area for experimentation
Tomato Soup with Coconut Milk
Ingredients
° 2 tbl olive oil
° 1 large yellow onion - chopped
° 1 celery stalk - chopped
° 1 carrot -chopped
° 2 garlic cloves- minced
° 28 oz can peeled plum tomatoes - real San Marzanos are a bonus!
° 2 cups vegetable broth, unsalted preferred
° coconut milk (the stuff in the cans, not the dairylike drink)
° salt and pepper to taste
Technique
° heat the oil in a pot to a medium heat
° add onions and reduce the heat a bit. Add some salt and reduce the onions until soft.
° add the carrot and celery stirring every now and again for about five minutes. Add the garlic and cook for another minute.
° pour in the stock and tomatoes, bring to a boil and then cut to a simmer and cover. Cook for about a half hour
° salt and pepper to taste
° stir in about a half cup of the coconut milk. (a full cup may be even better)
perceptual filters for non-verbal communication
[credits rolling, theme music fades and a conversation between a couple begins]
Hello.
I'm sorry I'm late.
I had some important police business to attend to, you know.
- Everything's all right?
Yes, absolutely fine.
Allow me to let you in the car.
Please.
- It's beautiful.
- It's rather neat, isn't it?
I call it the Silver Hornet.
Yes.
It's a little overdue for service, unfortunately.
Perhaps it's better to leave that there.
It's a beautiful night. Why don't we walk?
What an excellent idea.
- L'm sorry about that.
- It's quite all right.
You look ravishing tonight.
- Yes, I know that.
- You know that?
I knew that you knew that.
You did? L knew you knew I knew that.
What made you decide to become a detective?
It's not something one decides every day of the week, you know. But in my case, it began when my great aunt was kidnapped... and held for ransom
by an unlicensed Armenian phrenologist.
An Armenian phrenologist?
Yes, you know. A man who reads the "bimps" on the head.
- The "bimps"?
- What?
[conversation fades, music returns]
- from the credit section of The Revenge of the Pink Panther
Phrenology was rooted in the idea that the mind had a limited number of components that were regional in the brain and that the importance of each of these was determined by its size and shape. Somehow this was reflected in the shape of the skull. The phrenologist would feel the shape and bumps on a person's head and make judgement statements on the person's personality, mental capacity, and even their potential moral worth. It was a quick filter for information conveyed by a type of non-verbal communication and, like so many poorly thought-out filters, it was pseudoscience.
It was hugely popular until becoming discredited around the mid 1800s. Part of the public discrediting came in the form satire. Nasology (by George Jabet under the pseudonym Eden Warwick in 1848) claimed to judge character based on the size and shape of the human nose. The first printing of the book in England made its point, but a second printing years later somehow caught on in the US and was popular in some quarters as it appeared to justify racism. Thankfully modern America is sophisticated enough to not fall for the satire of The Onion and The Daily Show.
We have rich communications, often unconscious, with others outside of our speech. Non-verbal communication includes everything from body language, eye contact, physical distance, and much more. Fashion and clothing are a signal that communicate class, personal taste, mood, and more. Sometimes we make choices about the signals we send. Sometimes there are miscommunications based on social non-verbal visual filtering.
As part of learning about apparel I've become interested in these communications. The industry is beginning to undergo radical change and understanding filters as drivers of design is centrally important. Of course this goes beyond what we chose to wear. We make similar judgements about a person based on their body shape and appearance. Bodies are less malleable, but have a fashion of their own and that has driven dieting, physical fitness and body modification.
Dieting for weight loss was popularized William Banting with his publication of the Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public. Perhaps the fact he was an undertaker by trade tells us something his diet consisted of large amounts of meat, some wine, smoking (!), and very few carbohydrates. It became wildly popular in America establishing a model for the fad diets that followed up to the present. Dieting was recommended and advertised in men's publications becoming a component of the Muscular Christianity movement that was beginning to gain steam around the same time.
Muscular Christianity linked physical health and piety to perceived character. Self control through rigorous physical exercise supposedly conveyed purity. Christian men were to be ruggedly masculine and the image of the ideal Western male shifted beginning with the elites. Buff had become a desired state for the young, wealthy and white and casual clothing was developed to show it off.
Dieting and exercise were a path for the emerging middle class. They came from a lower class and were excluded from power - partly became they were considered vulgar and uneducated. Dieting and sport demonstrated they had self-control and worth. Being overweight was linked to weakness, greed and corruption. There was a worry that men had become too weak - too feminine. The YMCA was a product of the movement along with games like basketball and volleyball which were invented as gym based physical activities. This helped ignite an interest in sports like baseball and football in the US making them activities first at elite Eastern colleges and then at more aspirational institutions. At the peak of the movement the Olympic Games of the modern era were established.
Change came from the women's rights movement. It was believed that if women could control their bodies in the same way that men did they can show they are rational beings of high self worth deserving of equal rights. Women began to diet and exercise as a means of liberation.
These new visual signals were meant for the white middle and upper class only. Those from the working class who didn't have the time and means to exercise were viewed as lazy and without worth as they can't control their bodies - and perhaps they should not be granted equal rights.
Youth fitness slowly emerged as an issue. During WWI it was noticed that some American draftees were rejected for being overweight. The numbers weren't huge, but it became an issue and lead to a study of the physical fitness of several thousand American and European children a few decades later. The Americans fared poorly triggering alarms about future security. President Eisenhower, something of a fitness junkie himself, established what later became the President's Counsel on Physical Fitness as a cold war effort. American children had to become fit, but they had to do it by choice as a counter to the film reals of Soviet children doing required mass calisthenics. That presented a problem. It was easy for the Godless communists to motivate a generation, how do you do it in America?
The solution was quintessentially American. Hire the guys who gave us Smokey the Bear, our great influencers - the admen of Madison Avenue. Physical fitness was pitched as being cool. Gym classes received more attention and producing athletes as ideals became more important. In Junior High I remember calisthenics to an old 45 record - the practice survived until the 70s.
It is useful to achieve some level of physical fitness, it is important not to judge. We have powerful social learned visual filters that often lead to character judgements based on someone's race, appearance, height, weight and physical shape. We may laugh at phrenology, but sometimes we use something equivalent. And there are other filters - some day perhaps I'll write about the phrenology of Google and Facebook...
__________
Recipe Corner
I've mostly been grilling veggies and various types of produce. Since so little work was done I tried someone else's recipe. A fun and delicious idea noted by David Lebovitz - vegetarian 'Faux Gras'. It is great on a hearty bread.
Posted at 10:21 AM in change, fashion, food, general comments, sports | Permalink | Comments (1)
| Reblog (0)