omenti

it's personal

The other day I was using one of my slide rules while waiting for a train.  I was absorbed in calculations until someone interrupted me wanting to know what I was doing.  People tend to be mystified when they see an unfamiliar technology.

 

Slide rules are simple in concept. When you were a kid you may have learned to add by physically laying sticks of different lengths together.  A slide rule also adds lengths, but now they are in a logarithmic scale.  Now you can make use of the fact that log(xy) = log(x) + log(y) so adding these lengths multiplies and subtracting divides.  You end up with sliding rules that allow you to multiply and divide to a couple of digits accuracy - often much faster than keying them in on a laptop or calculator.¹ 

 

I bought my first rule in the eighth grade.  It wasn't of much use in school, but it was perfect for the types of calculations I needed in amateur radio and astronomy.  Not only did I learn blow through numbers quickly to get good enough answers, I developed a natural sense of what logarithms 'felt' like along with a good sense of playing with orders of magnitude in my head and mentally approximating ball park answers.  In short it was a tool for given a physical sense of approximate calculations - something of enormous value to anyone who goes into the physical sciences.

 

My best rule was a Pickett N4-ES.  I bought in the tenth grade for about $200 in today's money.  It went far beyond multiplication and division with special scales for better accuracy, trig functions and so on.  It was what real rocket scientists were using up until the point where Hewlett Packard killed the business with the HP-35 calculator.  Jet fighters, atomic weapons and moon rockets were designed with the help of slide rules.

 

I gave my Pickett to a young friend who has a love for calculation.  She would have it down the road, but I have a few other rules and this one is a special heirloom - the sort of thing you pass on to someone.  It was much more fun for me to tell her the stories and watch her delight as she mastered it to the point where she regularly puzzles coworkers.  There are movies with its fingerprints.

 

It is said that we are experiential beings - that we prefer experiences to stuff.  I'd agree to a point.  There are some things that are so important that they take on stories of their own. There is a slate blackboard, my father's dress watch, my grandfather's pocket-watch, and a few things I've built over the years. Not a lot, but more important than anything else I own.

 

Some people collect - my sister is into fountain pens.  She's an artist, but does writing and some ink sketches with them.  Both of us sketch and both of us give homemade as as important presents.  They may not be as nicely executed as commercial art, but they are very personal and carry a story.

 

Story or a potential story.  Personal items become even more personal as we use them and some become part of our style. My grandfather's pocket watch drifts more than a minute a day and is cumbersome.  But it feels good in the hand and reminds me of old family stories.  I didn't have enough time to know him while he was alive, but I'm getting to know him now - his punctuality and love of machines and precision.  It is a container for stories and, like the slide rule, has become part of my style.

 

Watches are personal items.  Consulting them is a movement of the wrist - a natural gesture.  They may be beautiful to look at, feel, and can signal others if we choose.  They represent a progression of technology as time keeping moved from experts to shared town clocks, to home clocks, and finally to a wearable.  

 

I've been thinking about the Apple Watch and what wearable means for a few weeks and am finding my views shifting.  I don't know if Apple's watch will be the first successful wearable, but I think it stands a good chance.

 

About twenty years ago we started to think about what would happen as Moore's Law progressed and computation moved into the fabric of our lives.  It raised a lot of interesting questions and generated a few interesting new questions and answers (a lot of bad answers - a few good ones).  The watch form factor seemed ideal for a computer if you could solve interface, communication and power problems.  Our belief was that successful watches would concentrate on bits of information and control that didn't require much of an interface, but were things you wanted to do all of the time.  A watch gives you the time, but not your full calendar - it is still a very useful tool even though the scope of its temporal information is limited.

 

I have not touched an Apple Watch and can't be a judge of its style or its price points.² It is striking that it is not a peripheral, but rather a full fledged computer.  Apple is good at design that integrates physical design and software, but they are also very good at chip design that optimizes physical space, task specific computations and power consumption.³   The core of the watch is computer called the S1 that is embedded in resin for durability.  Android smart-watches probably have higher power consumption and so far are used as peripherals.  This difference is fundamental and needs to be thought through carefully.  Apple has created a new platform that will take a few years to perfect, but it may become more important, more personal, to you than the smartphone in your pocket or purse or the laptop on your desk - even though you still have all of them.  Many other questions are raised that will be answered with time, but networking is very interesting and a key difference between Google and Apple.  It may be extremely important if privacy becomes a major issue.

 

What the watch will become is the stuff of story and heirloom, at least for some makes.⁴  I've been excited by a few technical revelations over the years - about five when I think about it.  I'm adding this as the sixth.

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 ¹ You can still buy used slide rules on eBay.  Here's an old manual from Pickett on the use of one. One of the readers of the blog caught the bug and is a collector. (I don't know if I was partly responsible for the affliction - if so, sorry Dave)

² I've had conversations with people in design and fashion who range from very impressed to 'a computer maker is incapable of understanding fashion'  The most enthusiastic were those who design rather than market fashion and two who were briefed by Apple.  There are biases that I can't sort out at this point.

³ The A8 system on a chip (SoC) is uses a bit more than half the power than similar silicon in ARM based Android smartphones.  A remarkable achievement that is at least as important as physical design.

⁴ Some guesses.  Watches have to last through the generations and that imposes constraints beyond style.

I'm guessing the price points of the three watches will be widely separated.  That 16 hours between charging for normal use is close to a target and that the battery is about a half watt-hour at best and capacity will improve slowly over the next ten years.  (Predication - watches are probably the first place rechargable metal-air batteries appear). The battery will have to be replaced every two years and some models may also get a S2, S3 or S* as part of normal maintenance - just like a mechanical watch has to have maintenance every few years.  If I had to guess I would say the low end aluminum watch only gets battery upgrades and the stainless steel and gold models get battery and module upgrades to make them 'timeless' as capabilities grow. If this is true it would be a fundamental shift in modularity in a tiny high volume device.  With careful design this could be done with a small robot - perhaps even in the back of an Apple Store.

Networking is fascinating - the intranet ground fogs I've described and asynchronous communication begin to make a lot of sense - particularly if battery life and privacy are important. Lots of ideas if you're interested ..  they were leaving many signals.

 

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Recipe Corner

 

There are a lot of fresh vegetables available at the moment.  Rather than let them go to waste it makes sense to make vegetable stock.  This is usually a long term event - restaurants frequently start the stock pot first thing in the morning and keep it going all day.  I'm a big fan of quick stocks when I run low.  Pressure cookers are great for this, but you can also through together something much better than any pre-made stock from a store in less than a half hour.  The recipe is only a guide - try it with almost anything!

 

Simple Twenty MinuteVeggie Stock

 

Ingredients (for about 8 cups of target stock)

 

° water for the amount of stock you want plus about a cup

° 1 tbl of peppercorns

° a quartered yellow onion 

° a few (say three) cloves of garlic, peal and smashed 

° 2 sprigs of thyme

 

Technique

 

° Add the above to the water and let it come to a boil. Reduce to a simmer

° as you prep your soup thrown in left over trimmings from carrots, tomatoes, onions, greens, mushroom bits etc.  Don't be too afraid of strong flavors as you won't boil for a long time.  This is all about flavor reinforcement.

° Let it simmer away about 10 or 15 minutes, strain and use.

 

 

 

calling something a watch

 

I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.

Wayne Gretzky sold himself short.  He had the experience to figure out where the puck was going, but sport at the highest level is much deeper.  He managed to skate where the puck would be, but he was working through where to put so as to impact the game more than a play ahead.   We take delight watching players of this caliber in sport - they are transcending athleticism and adding something special to the game.

 

I found myself thinking about that during the Apple event on Tuesday.  I don't know if Apple is creating a future path, but they are clearly thinking a few steps out.  I sent a quick note to a few people and have been thinking about it a bit more.¹  The watch is a watch in the sense the iPhone is a mobile phone - or perhaps the iPhone is a pocket watch.  In the beginning it will be misunderstood by those who frame the new in historical context in terms of what came before.  They watching a patch of ice they think is relevant based on the past move.  

 

At the end of the 90s a few of us were working on what seemed to be a likely future.  We knew we'd have portable computing devices, digital cameras, gps, and a wireless connection to the Internet.²  This turned into a project we called Air Graffiti.  A prototype was built that could geo and time locate messages.  The idea turned out to be rich with dozens of fascinating use cases emerging.  Demonstrations could best be described as fun.  The audience would become animated and inventive on their own - I've never been involved anything before or after that engaged an audience like that.

 

The problem was we were far too early on the hardware side.  Our prototype was put together with piano wire and chewing gum.  We knew what we needed, but getting there was going to take other groups and nearly a decade.

 

Horace Dediu noted the iPhone had there use propositions when it was first described - an iPod, a phone, and a Internet communicator.  These tentpoles are used to generally describe something even though it is likely to grow well beyond those uses.  Tim Cook introduced the watch as three things - an accurate watch, a very personal communicator, and a health and fitness device.  All are interesting and all enter a field of problematic existing solutions.  

 

Apple has done something extraordinarily challenging.   I won't go into the fashion angle other than stating it is fascinating and requires very deep resources that are going to be difficult to duplicate.  I'm not the one to judge how successful that component is, but note they have developed a wearable radio enabled computational module.  A watch form factor is an obvious first step, but we're talking about something much richer than that. 

 

I found myself thinking about Air Graffiti

 

One of the more interesting use cases of Air Graffiti was machine to machine communication with a roving device.  We were worried about automation and worker knowledge on the factory floor.  Wiring old factories is enormously expensive and, even if you do that, getting at the social experience of workers is a daunting problem.  Battery power was going to be necessary for much of this and conventional wireless networks and direct Internet connections were too expensive and often undesirable for security reasons.  

 

What we came up with was using very low power radios that could run for years on a battery - or even by harvesting energy from light, radio waves or vibrations.  They would communicate with a roving device that had storage and perhaps some processing power.  Something like a smartphone.  That device could have a connection to a local network or perhaps to the Internet proper for future analysis.  I had been thinking about a similar radio network system a few years before and called these little ephemeral networks ground fogs.³  

 

The watch, or similar devices based on the module, can link to thousands of very inexpensive Internet of Things devices.  It becomes an enabler that solves issues related to the cost of powering these devices and communicating with them.  It might allow you to go from a few tens of billion devices to a trillion and do it explosively.  A smartphone could do it, but it isn't as convenient - you aren't always carrying it.  Jewelry or something you wear is much more natural.  It can do some local processing, store information and pass along time insensitive commands and then link with something like an iPhone for more involved processing and a link to the Internet if required.

 

The best camera is the one you have with you.  Smartphones have turned all of us into photographers.  The same is true of communications and video.  The best screen is the one you have with you.  Something over half of non-telephone smartphone use takes place in the home.  Most people probably have much better screens in the house, but the convenience of something you carry is too great.  The watch might play in this space.

 

I was somewhat frustrated with the unveiling - it wasn't a clear as the old Jobs presentations.  The three tentpoles Horace identified were there, but the communication wasn't as crisp as I would have liked and a number of other use cases were described - perhaps more to spark app builders than interest potential buyers.  I also had the feeling the visual part of the interface has not been properly honed at this point, but this is just a comment from the peanut section as I have never used one.  But the potential past the three early uses is enormous.  Executing on that will be challenging - much of the path will have to be made up on the fly.  But Apple has done that before.  I'd give them better than even odds.

 

In the meantime they can ramp up production and make something that won't add that much to their bottom line initially, but they'll be learning how to grow beyond the tentpoles.  In talking with some fashion people I have the sense that it should find a big enough niche to survive and even thrive a bit in the beginning.  I'm still learning much more about that area which is at least as fascinating as the tech side.

 

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¹ The note slightly with some of the personal bits edited out:

WWDC struck me as a much more dramatic event as it set forth foundational work that gave a pretty good view of the next 3 or more years. This was no slouch. The phones were the least newsworthy. I’m at my upgrade cycle and need to decide if I want the larger model and perhaps get rid of my lust for Sukie’s iPad mini. I would like to try reading a book on it and see if the size disadvantage disappears. There is this little issue of pocket size - I got in touch with Waterfield Designs to see what they have in mind:-) I’m sure 3x1 could come up with something that has appropriate pockets, but my pockets and sense of personal style are not deep enough.

The payment scheme struck me as something that may or may not take off - like some Apple products it will take a few years to find out. The identification aliasing is a neat feature, but I want to chat with Steve Bellovin or Bruce Schneier first. There may be a pony in there, but there are some externalities that muddy the water.

The iPhone rather than the watch is probably the fitness tracker killer - it just was improved (in theory - need to see tests) and disappeared into the phone.

The Apple Watch is most interesting for a variety of reasons. Over the years I’d had epiphanal experiences with solutions to vexing problem that seemed obvious in retrospect - in fact that is the nature of my field. In tech I’ve had that experience a few times over the years including a few small personal triumphs. But in retrospect they sometimes seem uninspiring as technology is sedimentary in nature. When Apple announced the iPod I saw a beautiful solution to an interface problem we had been picking away at for some time. I’ve seen that in other areas. People who haven’t been toiling away in the area often dismiss these solutions as useless - it takes time for them to be accepted. I led the line at one of two Apple Stores in NJ to buy an iPod - our store opened up at 6:30a, so I probably had one of the first production models on the East coast. Five of the first group at that store were people in my HCI department.

I haven’t been working on watch interfaces so I’m not an appropriate judge. People working with conventional devices will probably see it as laughable and a non-threat. The folks to talk to are those who are working on the same problem. This is is a tough one - you need serious resources to solve it as a usable product. I suspect a lot of wizard of oz work has been going on at Apple and many competitors.

Tomorrow I’m going to be talking to some fashion and tech fashion types. Some of these have been working at the tech and fashion intersection. It is going to be too easy for the conventional guys to dismiss this and one has to carefully balance what Horace would call the job(s) to be done with the aesthetics of personal taste and the out of band signaling that fashion and style communicates. The conversations should be fascinating - I’ll give a high level summary as I can as it is for a client - basically scenario construction.

I’m not a fashionista, but fashion is something that has been an increasing fascination over the past five or six years - more from an anthropological and social direction than business. There is a lot of segmentation and it is common to have successful and very orthogonal products in the same sector. There has been a huge shift over the past 20 years and there are many areas ripe for disruption. The connection of computation with apparel has been around for awhile - notably fitness trackers which are almost uniformly inadequate and inaccurate. It is possible to build a good one, but not at a reasonable price until possibly now. There are some very interesting health tracking issues to see how these are used and misused - no time to go into them deeply, but basically the science is not that well understood and people pick different heuristic models. But directional heuristics are probably good enough for some things - I’m very curious to see how Apple is dealing with that.

One comment on one dimension of scenarios that I find increasingly useful - namely to look where on ‘the stack’ a company focuses and products are aimed. Not that the stack (somewhat fluffy and an adaptation of the old OSI model) is solidly defined, but Apple tends to have low stack strengths and Google, FB and others are high stack. Each has their pluses and minuses and companies tend to explore away from their expertise, but I’ve noticed people with high stack views of the world discount low stack approaches and visa versa (there was something similar in the old AT&T and the phrase “bell shaped head’ comes to mind). Apple is clearly playing to its low stack advantage - although that was even more solidly defined during WWDC. 

Now if there were only more details on the inner workings of the phone. mWh/g and mWh/cm³ are battery drivers - most more than $/Wh. Any battery is a compromise of characteristics and this one probably uses a different chemistry than laptop and phone batteries. Factor of two or three improvements are possible in the next decade, but how they will be distributed is unclear. So many questions...

I asked Jheri to look at the watch video and comment. . She mentioned some segments that will go for it and suggested an interesting market to understand is the women’s handbag market which is trimodal plus that happens to be a functional piece of fashion that usually has a 2 to 4 year life for women. She suggested thinking about it as a watch is misleading and notes she carries a pocket watch with a clear back. She also notes that good fashion is marked by people who love a design while others (possibly a larger group) hate it. The trick is to make it part of your style - something she notes is better appreciated and executed in Europe - particularly France and Italy. And there is fashion that causes pain but is still off-scale desirable to some segments as other benefits dominate. ‘any woman who claims Louboutin shoes are comfortable for more than ten paces is lying’….

One final note - I’ve now heard from a couple of sources about extensions to the Ive lab that are fascinating. Since I don’t know how true they are I won’t go farther other than to note there may be a lot of hands-on experience going on to learn about materials and their properties - some of it far away from what Apple does, but cross disciplinary learning experiences. Apple has certainly been making mid-level and artist market hires in the past year or two. That is probably as significant as their high level hires.

interesting times…

² About five years ago I began to refer to such camera functionality as networked lenses - a better term than camera is needed as they have pushed the social boundaries of what photography means.  It didn't catch on, but we need a new term.

³ The use of the term cloud precedes the Internet.  As it emerged the Internet was called an IP cloud by some of us Bell Labs.  The notion of a fog seemed like a reasonable extension.  There are large advantages to not doing this in the cloud.

 

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Recipe Corner

 

Pure simplicity this time.  I found some amazing baby spinach and arugula.  After cleaning and drying it I came to the conclusion that a fancy salad would only detract, so I brought out the really good oil and balsamic vinegars.

When you are cooking something you don't need the best, although real extra virgin olive oils make a difference.  I only use the amazing stuff for finishing as it tends to be spendy.

For the dressing I start with three parts oil and one part vinegar.  This is estimated and I vary it a bit as each oil and vinegar are so different.  I used Frantoia EVOO and Villa Manodori Artigianale balsamic vinegar (extremely expensive by the standards of my wallet, but worth it for very special meals)

The simple little salad was brilliant and rendered the very good dinner that accompanied it almost forgettable.

 

 

 

 

elements of style

Thomas Jefferson had the reputation of an extreme bibliophile, but was forced to make choices 'only' reading about 7,000 books.    Ben Franklin had a similar information challenge and both men were unable to fully respond to their mail.  They lived at a time when it seemed like a powerful and well connected mind could have a deep understanding of general knowledge, but that was an illusion.  Information growth had become too great for single humans to manage and it had become necessary  to construct filters and trust the filters of others.

 

Today we have something of an information explosion.  Physics occupies a tiny percentage of humanity, but is sometimes citied as an extreme example of information processing.  Single particle physics experiments generate information at over 100,000 times the rate it can be stored.  A carefully designed hierarchy of filters known as triggers identify relevant information and throw away the rest.  

 

Although not as dramatic as a particle physics trigger, most organizations have developed a series of filters - some are carefully considered while others are poorly understood.  We might think of our social and work interactions to be well understood, but in reality they are poorly understood making it difficult to model.¹

 

Our senses are even more overloaded - we live at the bottom of an information well that our brain partially samples and heavily filters to create an illusion, albeit a rich one, of reality.  We tend to trust these personal filters, but careful science shows we are easily deluded and caution is necessary.

 

Filters are central to our relationship with the natural, cultural and machine worlds.  Companies like Google, FaceBook, and many others build filters that may not be aligned with the user interests and it is usually impossible to understand what these filters are.  Some focus on adding value to advertising and attempt to drive consumption and perceptions about our place in culture.  The difference between fashion and style presents an interesting example.  

 

Fashion is the relationship to the external.  It is how you mix and match predefined pieces to show you are part of a larger tribe that is constantly in motion.  It can be expensive or cheap, but is ephemeral.  It allows you to distance yourself from yourself and blend into a cultural tribe.  It is 100,000 people wearing the same jeans, shoes and a tshirt that proclaims 'I am an individual'.  

Style is the relationship to the internal. It is about your sense of self, your identity, your perception of who you are. It is a process of introspection where you ask what is in here and reflect that in what you wear.  The emphasis is on the person rathe rather than popular culture and social norms.  It requires a good sense of self.

 

Jheri and I have an ongoing conversation on the difference between style and fashion.²  With her permission I quoted her definitions from a very long letter describing her continuing journey finding her personal style.  Her body type is unusual enough that nothing fits off the rack.  She described her experimentation with fashion during her teenage years as learning about 'hats, scarves and cheap costume jewelry' as well as what looked good on her friend.  By the time I met her she was having clothing modified, but she was also searching out pieces that expressed her in one way or another.  Pieces that would last a long time.  Her closet is not deep, but her look can be striking and reflects her personality and image of herself.  The image is some out of season boots that were slightly damaged.  The calf width was too large, but she saw something and figured out an usual way to wear them.  She also made a great coat from an old horse blanket that gets  compliments in Paris and Milan.

 

Her definitions refer to clothing, but  could describe anything that becomes part of how we see ourselves culturally.  Recently some of us been talking about distinctions between fashion and style in mobile and wearable electronics down to their user experiences.  The social image you present using a mobile phone in public to the 'naturalness' of the user interface of a device.  There are interesting links to the increasingly divergent paths Google and Apple are taking.

 

Both companies have hired people associated with the fashion industry - Google for the Glass and Apple for a variety of positions.  Jheri works in the industry and is familiar with a few of the Apple hires by reputation.  She notes they deeply understand the difference between style and fashion.  A nimble company can add a fashion layer if they have a good control of design, but going deeper and focusing on style is more difficult.

 

An interesting emerging between the two companies is user privacy (not security, although that is related).³  Neither model is universally aligned with the needs of all users.  People say privacy is important, but most people don't place a high value on it and few understand its implications.⁴   The service they receive is sufficient compensation.  Apple is moving to a higher privacy model taking advantage of a natural alignment as their users are their customers.  The Apple ecosystem requires tight hardware and software integration and is perceived as valuable to many Apple customers - enough that they are willing to allow Apple to have high profit margins.  This division will become even more important as we connect to the things around us - it is just beginning to get interesting. 

 

Filters are a huge issue and are at the heart of our developing computer mediated interactions with each other, machines and information.  We are not having a robust public discussion on the filters stand between us and information and who controls them.  It isn't clear if we will have a discussion and if transparency and control will exist - even in small corners of our world.   This is a big thing - I don't know if it is the next big thing, but it has major implications.

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¹ Trying to understand social filters and develop new filters and even relevant replacement filters is the job Google, FaceBook, OKCupid and other social platforms attempt.

² Style and fashion are often assumed to be the same.  Jheri and others in the industry make the distinction that appears in her definitions.  It would be too diverting to launch into a deeper discussion than the sketch applied here, but the sociology and implications for consumption are fascinating.  

³ A long discussion that would be diverting.  It is important to understand the distinction between security and privacy and  social, hardware and software architectures associated with privacy.

 ⁴ It's Complicated by danah boyd is an excellent introduction to teenage privacy constructs.

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recipe corner

 

Bagel Topology

 

Topology is the study of shapes.  If you have a rubbery coffee mug, you can reform it into a doughnut.  A flexible sheet can't be made into a sphere...  lots of fun things.  

 

It turns out you can cut a bagel and make linked halves.  

 

I learned about this in grad school and have made more than a few over the years.  The trick is to find a very solid bagel and use a good knife.  Make sure you don't stab yourself! - A friend was going to have her cello master's recital, but managed to stab herself cutting bagels during the reception before the concert.  She couldn't play for over a month.

 

This video is much better than any drawings I could make.  

tools and the jobs they do

When I was a teenager consumer grade microwave ovens were beginning to appear.  They were very spendy - much more than a conventional oven - so there was a need to convince people there was a deep need.   They seemed to settle on the microwave as a cook-almost-everything, but do it fast, oven.  A neighbor bought one and ruined expensive cuts of meat and numerous other dishes.  The problem was no one looked into the physics and chemistry of cooking and specifically cooking with one of these beasts.  The worst offense was the fact you couldn't create the conditions for caramelization and the Maillard reaction, but there was a problem that different foods absorbed microwaves differently and they only penetrated an inch or so.  In the end it was a $500 (in 1970 money which works out to about $3,000 today) 700 watt water heater and food defroster.   

 

The trick was realizing what the microwave was good for - reheating food and cooking certain types of frozen food, popping popcorn, and measuring the speed of light - and dropping the price by riding the penetration curve.¹  They're nearly ubiquitous, but no one considers them a chef grade do-it-all tool.  In the end the microwave was just a tool and a very specialized one at that.  Curiously a new food industry was created just to support in and a good deal of food preparation has been outsourced in the name of convenience.   There are times when compromises are made when a tool becomes ubiquitous.  

 

A lot of people are excited by the prospect of 3d printing without much concern of what it is really useful for and how it might move past its present state.  Several articles have appeared comparing it to the sewing machine and suggesting companies should look at what is currently going on in the crafting world.  It probably makes sense to take a quick look at the history of the sewing machine.

 

Apparel and fashion are extremely interesting.  They came of age with the industrial revolution, have rich social and political components, are a huge industry - $240 a year for every person on the planet at this point.  It is also happens to be an industry undergoing enormous change with greater change yet to come.  

 

The sewing machine is  one of the prime enablers of mass produced apparel and it is the only major component that has resisted automation.² Like many innovations there was a long development period - about six decades - and  multiple inventions. The first practical machines offered dramatic improvements speeding up sewing from ten to one hundred times and making the process much more uniform. It became practical to make clothing in the home rather than just mend it.  Unlike the 3d printer, it arrived on the market with a killer job to be done.  Households realized they needed it.   The early Singers happened to be very expensive, but clever marketing and financing campaigns made them a fixture in American households.  

 

The sewing machine didn't appear in a vacuum.  The cotton gin was developed in the late 1790s making industrial scale cotton production practical. This brought slavery back in a huge way creating an enormous cotton production in the Southern states.  About the same time the English launched into the development and perfection of high quality fabric manufacture using power looms largely driven by water or steam power.  By the time the sewing machine arrived on the scene high quality and inexpensive fabric was within the reach of the people who bought sewing machines.

 

Taking a two dimension piece of fabric, cutting it into appropriate shapes in such a way that it will fit someone after the pieces are sewn together is anything but a trivial exercise.  The traditional process, something still used in the bespoke world, was only for extremely skilled people who taken years to learn the tricks of the trade.  As a result clothing for anyone but the wealthy didn't fit very well and tended to be expensive.   Around the mid 1860s  Ebenezer Butternick started selling cardboard patterns for children's and women's clothing.  The innovation that made his fortune was his use of grading - making the patterns in a variety of sizes that scaled from a base size. Using them average sewing machine users could make clothing that was close enough to fitting and skilled users could tailor the final result.  Several competitors appeared on the scene within a decade and women's fashion magazines with ordering information for the latest patterns began to appear.  By the early 1900s Butternick ran the largest publishing plant in the US.  In the 50s they bought a name you've probably heard of - Vogue.   

 

Three elements had come together - desirable and inexpensive materials, a home fabrication machine that could efficiently produce good results with modest skills, and the rapid growth of inexpensive design that could fit a wide range of human sizes and shapes.   Personalized home fabrication took off like wildfire. 

 

As the US emerged from depression and WWII homemade clothing began to drop in popularity.  Commercial clothing was dropping in price to the point where it usually wasn't worth the effort and marketing was improving.  Sewing as a hobby and home business continued on a reduced scale, but sewing skills were now largely used for mending.  Clothing prices started to drop dramatically in the 80s as shipping containers made it practical for third world production and fast low quality disposable fashion emerged.

 

Home sewing is largely a hobby at this point, but it has been making a modest comeback driven by the slow fashion movement that is appearing mostly among millennials.³  This growth has been cited as a model for 3d printing -- I think that is a mistaken notion.  The home sewing machine is a tool - a tool with a well understood purpose and enormous flexibility. It is becoming desirable in some leading edge parts of popular culture and is inexpensive.  Designs are easy to obtain and modify and advanced amateurs can make their own.  The notion of copyright on apparel in the US allows an enormous amount of unencumbered design flexibility.  Wonderful materials - those with the right sensoaesthetic qualities - are available from around the world.  It is possible for amateurs to make pieces that will delight.  

 

We're a  way's off from the delight level in 3d printing - unless you are into 3d action figures, making prototypes or other items where material quality and cost is not terribly important.  3d printing is a very important tool in some niches, but it is just that - nothing more than tool without a clear sense of a general purpose killer job to be done.

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¹ OK - maybe measuring the speed of light with a microwave is unusual.  I set up a demonstration for my physics for premeds course when I was a grad student.  I put chocolate in a microwave oven and ran it for about a minute to produce standing wave melt marks in the chocolate.  Look at the microwaves frequency on the back of the oven, measure the melt marks and calculate the speed of light:-)  They were happy - I had about two pounds of chocolate for twenty students.

² Automated sewing is fairly close after more than thirty years of development.  It may not be adopted quickly as third world sewing not far removed from slave labor is incredibly inexpensive.  

³ Slow fashion is an interesting development.  It is a complex reaction to the direction of commercial fast fashion largely driven by a desire for quality over quantity, environmental concerns, a rejection of uniform-like style dictated by marketing, and clothing that fits.  Over-Dressed by Elizabeth Cline is the best introduction to the subject I've seen.

An interesting weakness of commercial fashion is poor fit.  There is no such thing as an average person.  While we tend to find clothing that has a 'good enough' fit, studies suggest over 70% of women can't find dresses that fit to their size. (meaning there is some aspect of the clothing that would fit better in another size .. or possibly not in any size).  Some adjustments are made, but mostly people put up with the poor fit rather than visit a tailor or having custom fitted clothing made.  No one has cracked this yet - a glaring problem that will eventually be addressed.

There are several relevant posts in this blog - sort under fashion and skim if you like.  

 

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Music corner

 

I'm still recovering from the flu and making food hasn't been a central part of my life.  But while walking at dawn on a glorious Spring morning I thought about Mendelssohn's Overture to 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' op.20   When people think of Mendelssohn they tend to think of a certain piece of music used in weddings from a piece with a similar title.  It turns out that came nearly 20 years later.  Mendelssohn was 17 when he wrote the Overture.  

 

The quality isn't great with youtube's compression, but you get the idea.  If you like it and don't have a copy there are several excellent versions 

Seventeen - how many people do you know who had were up to their opus 21 with several serious pieces under their belt by then?

 

A bit over a decade ago I spent quite a bit of time at the Oberlin Conservatory.  One of the delights was dropping in on students and watching them play.  One of the all time fun pieces for string players is Mendelssohn's Octet.  

The performance is good here - I Musici is a quality ensemble - but the youtube quality leaves a lot to be desired.  Still - some pure joy lurks.

Oh - Mendelssohn was 16 when he wrote this one.

 

metastable states, richard milhous nixon and the apparel business

Curiosity about apparel and fashion have become something of a hobby and I'm putting together some thoughts for a talk to people with a lot of background knowledge.  In thinking about possible trajectories, I've been spending some time looking at how we got to where we are - not only has their been a dramatic move to mass produced apparel, but there has been a dramatic shift towards very low cost production, low quality clothing and shrinking delays between design and delivery.  I won't go into much of that, but something really interesting happened during the 70s - a period when several forces conspired to rapidly accelerate change in both the industry and the consumer.  But first a bit on metastable states.

 

Consider a landscape that is flat on the left moving towards some hills as you move to the right.  An object under the influence of gravity will move to the lowest point.  A ball that finds itself on the plain won't magically move up the hills.  If the ball is in the valley labeled b it won't move to the plain or the valley c unless you give it a kick.  Even though  being on the plain is theoretically more stable, it is stuck in  a stable stable.  If I get it a kick to the left it can roll up the little hill and then zip downward.  Likewise a harder kick to the right could land it in valley c.  a, b and c are all stable - the overall system has three metastable states.  The ball can only move from one to the other if some outside kick is applied.

 

In the early 70s Richard Nixon was faced with several trade issues.  Cheap imported clothing from Taiwan, Japan, Korea and a few other countries were on the radar screen as American apparel companies folded under intense competition.  Nixon had positioned himself as a hero of the American worker and ginned up multinational support with European countries that having similar problems and a massive trade agreement - the Multifiber Agreement or MFA - was signed.  

 

South Korea and the others suddenly had a big problem.  Enormous factories and production capacities far beyond the trade limits.  The MFA was killing their business.  But it was a very complex and targeted agreement and, in that focus, came a way out.

 

About this time a few people in Pakistan were frantically looking for new businesses to pull the country out of total poverty. A chance meeting took place with Daewoo in South Korea and an agreement was hammered out.  The MFA quota was specific to South Korea, but didn't say anything about Pakistan - after all - Pakistan was a basket case.  

 

Daewoo set up a facility in Pakistan and trained Pakistani managers.  Problem solved.  Similar agreements were made between other pairs of countries and the spiral to the lowest cost producer ramped up.  

 

Nixon, in trying to focus so tightly, had supplied just enough energy to kick the ball up the hill so it could roll into another valley.  The system had been perturbed and settled into a new metastable state. And other influenes were being felt.

 

Container shipping was emerging as as a way to move massive amounts of goods to ports around the world at very low costs.  It was often more expensive to ship clothing within the America than from Pakistan to an American port.  People began to get used to cheap apparel - it wasn't made very well, but cheap trumped all and closets began to fill.

 

The impact of the shift started to take its toll on American firms, but now Reagan President and he had little appetite for protecting union workers.  Buying patterns were changing.   Companies like Daewoo moved upscale, but did so with high production and lower quality.  What was being marketed as mid-quality wasn't built to the standards of a decade earlier.  Vintage boffin Jheri notes you don't find much that is newer than 1980 - the quality had dropped so much that little of it is worth repairing.  

 

Clothing had become an expendable.  There is an interesting connection between this and the notion of what fashion is.  Fashion was now being dictated more than assembled and marketing changed instep.¹  This continues to accelerate and now we are in the era of fast fashion - where a design can move to production in a few weeks and to the shelfs in six weeks by boat or almost immediately by air.  There are so many rich threads (pardon the pun) and now, with entry of a few new technologies and rich "word of eye" communications on the Internet, we may be on the edge of a new major change.  It will take time to move a $1.7T industry ($350 to $400B in the US), but there has been massive change in the recent past.  

 

Perhaps the industry will get excited to the point where a new metastable state (or states) will be found...

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¹ The history is much more complex and interesting than this - consider this a 100 mile view.  There are a number of fascinating books on the subject.  For the current state I recommend Overdressed by Elizabeth Cline and for the current state of production and a bit of history try The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy by Petra Rivoli.  Jheri thinks about this quite a bit and has a guest post here.

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Recipe corner

 

A winning pecan pie that isn't as supersweet as those made with karo syrup.  I realize good pecans are nearly unobtainum this year.  A friend sent me a nice supply, so I'm set for the season.  I love to bake, but tend to give things like this away as I don't want too much of this sort of indulgence.

 

Maple Pecan Pie

 

Ingredients

 

° an unbaked pie shell (use whatever technique you prefer.  I like a good graham cracker crust or a convention flour/butter crust for this one)

° 215 g (about 2 cups) of coarsely chopped pecans 

° 55 g dark brown sugar

° 25 g tapioca

° 3/4 tsp salt

° 240 g (about 1 cup) grade B high quality maple syrup (the dark brown grade)

° 60 g heavy cream

° 1 tsp vanilla extract

° 2 large eggs

 

Technique

 

° preheat oven to 425°F

° lay the pecans in the pie shell

° whisk together the sugar through salt in a medium sized bowl.  Then whisk in the maple syrup and cream.  Finally whisk in the eggs one at a time.

° pour over the pecans and pop into the oven

° bake for 20 minutes and then drop the heat to 350°F for another 30 minutes.  

° let the pie cool on a rack for at least an hour before serving

° top with a good ice cream or whipped cream if you want something over the top

 

 

carpetland and west africa

Carpetland..

 

The other day I drove by Verizon's headquarters in Basking Ridge, NJ.  Before AT&T was sold to SBC, it was the palatial AT&T headquarters complex.  Several of us spent time there working with upper management in the business units as well as a few above that level.  In theory we were helping them understand the Internet and what it might mean, but we saw how that turned out.

 

One of the members of my human computer interface department was an anthropologist. I was a bit puzzled by the Basking Ridge dress standard, so she offered a bit of fashion guidance to sort out the power structure.  AT&T had 15 management salary grades and eight effective levels.  Dress standards were enforced by a common convention.  If someone was wearing a fitted Brooks Brothers suit you knew he (and it was almost always a he) was a E band executive or perhaps someone aspiring to that level.  It would be presumptuous for a D band to dress that well.  The BU chiefs and top corporate people were usually dressed a level above that - it was my introduction to noticing bespoke tailoring.  

 

Bonnie, our anthropologiest, noted all of this was "tribal".  The high level people were physically separate.  These were the people who used the helicopters and corporate jets.   Their lair was carpetland - the carpeting was so thick it was borderline difficult to walk across.

 

Subject matter experts from the Labs could get away with more casual clothing. Directors usually wore suits, but not particularly impressive cuts.  Department heads and below could be very casual and many of us dressed that way to differentiate ourselves.¹  

 

Over time I've come to see fashion as expression a person makes about themselves.  It can be personal, creative and even artistic, but it also is an interaction with the culture we are embedded in.  As culture is dynamic, fashion can be ephemeral.  As a personal statement it can be timeless.

 

Fashion has traditionally been created by designers, selected by buyers and promoted through advertising.  My Danish friend Jheri notes how boring most American fashion is.  Many of us, particularly the young, feel a necessity to be part of a current trend and are very susceptible to advertising and store displays.  We want to be individuals, but there seems to be a need to be part of a group.

 

Fast fashion is a direction the low end of the industry is taking.   Mostly a change to distribution that relies on very cheap third world labor and a hyped up promotion channel.  Clothing is no longer designed to be durable, but rather close to the moment.  It tends to follow a very uniform pattern.  It is still boring, but the clock cycle has been increased.

 

Signs of change are emerging.  Designers often relied on the muse of the street, but now street fashion is being communicated to everyone directly through blogs, Pinterest and a few other social mechanisms.  The quality of design varies, but the number of people participating is growing and it is having an impact on design.  Importantly a curious artifact of American copyright law is that most fashion is immune ..  we may have to think of a world where high end designers collaborate with people from the street.  

 

Johanna Blakley's (she is with the Norman Lear Center) TEDx talk is worth watching

 

Jheri and I have spent some time investigating possible trajectories for made to measure clothing - she has an interesting guest post here.  The bottom line is, at least for women, most off the shelf clothing has fit issues.  This can be addressed with money and/or technology and changes in technology combined with new distribution mechanisms may be very disruptive to a rather enormous industry.  Things get even more interesting when you consider customization and shared intellectual property from the street.  

 

When you are studying something this complex it helps to look into something similar but different...  I like to say that studying the weather on Jupiter and Saturn is a great way to gain insights into the Earth's weather.

 

Last Summer I because aware of some amazing looking wax print fabric displayed in the Fashion Institute of Technology's collection.  These are associated with West Africa with the best examples being from one of the more important companies in the area - Vlisco.  

 

I had no idea what a wax print was so it was time to investigate.  It turns out the Dutchman Pieter Fentener van Vlissingen sorted out how to product Indonesian batik fabric in the mid 1800s.  Batik is a cloth that is patterned with a dye resistant wax technique and it had a reputation for beauty and price at the time. Batik, modifying the technique for something much like a printing press, figured out he could manufacture it in Holland and export it to Indonesia at a profit.  Unfortunately the quality wasn't up to snuff and Vlissingen found himself with a ship full of surplus cloth and more coming from his factory.² He tried selling it in West Africa and it took hold.  Over the years it became popular, improving in quality adopting traditional African patterns.  Over time the catalog of patterns became huge.  They were the story of the people and, with revolution and independence, Vlisco wax print fabrics had become a central part of West and Central African culture.

 

Now it gets very interesting.  

 

West African women treasure Vlicso fabric.  Good clothing for the rich and emerging middle class is frequently made with using it. Labor is inexpensive and often has high quality - higher quality than most Western pieces.  Even small villages have a woman or two doing tailoring work.  Everything is made to measure.  Vlisco doesn't make finished pieces - they sponsor fashion shows and regularly put out pattens, but this is promotion. A woman buys the fabric, finds a tailor and uses an existing pattern, an of her's or the tailor's, or some combination.  The pieces fit perfectly and have the style the owner wants telling her story.³  

 

We may find ourselves going down a similar path, but there is an important cultural issue.  It turns out most people in West Africa identify with a tribe.  The identification has a big impact on their lives and one does not have to signal through clothing what they belong to.  It gives a great deal of freedom compared to what we see in the West.  A woman can show much more creativity that what is our social norm.  I'm wondering if the growing importance of street fashion and its global nature (a good deal of The Sartorialist blog is external to NYC) with trigger a greater degree of expression in the West as made to measure and its customization  - a mass customization becomes possible.

 

Culture - from the tribally reinforced conformity of carpetland to the freedom of West Africa - perhaps there are lessons that help us puzzle out some of the emerging threads in this story.

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¹ I used to take my slide rule for quick calculations.  These were back of the envelope estimates used in sessions that investigated ideas quickly.  My director told me to stop bringing it as it was intimidating the executives.

² There are several variations to the story - this is the most frequently quoted.  The companies production was in Holland for about a hundred years and then some shifted to Africa.  The finest cloth was, and is still, produced in Holland and is highly prized.  About ten years ago a British company bought Vlisco and is currently expanding.

³ I note that Western conventions are rapidly mixing with the culture and poorly fitting and cheap clothing from South Asia is becoming much more common among young women.  Some of this is tailored, but the quality is often the effort isn't justified.  Africa may be drifting to where were are now.  Their terrible transportation infrastructure is acting as a moderator.

 

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 Recipe Corner

 

This is not authentic, but is in the spirit of a Cameroonian peanut and sweet potato soup.  As with all soups the measurements aren't terribly important, but be sure to do the seasoning to your own taste.  

 

Cameroon Inspired Sweet Potato and Peanut Soup

 

Ingredients

 

° 2/3 cup of roasted peanuts (not dry roasted)

° 2 tsp oil

° 2 large onion chopped (about 2 cups?)

° about 800g vegetable broth (most in west africa would use a chicken broth) 

° 2 large sweet potatoes cut in inchish cubes (maybe 6 cups total)

° 1 tbl cumin

° 1/2 tsp ground black pepper

° salt to taste (not much if your peanuts were salty)

° 2 large cans (mine were about a pound) cans of garbanzo beans drained 

 

Technique

 

° process peanuts in a food processor for a few minutes until smooth

° heat the oil over medium-high heat and sauté the onions until lightly browned.  

° add all other ingredients and bring to a boil

° reduce heat and simmer uncovered for about 30 minutes until the sweet potato is tender.

 

 

those da*n glassholes are on my lawn! and cum hoc non propter hoc

As the year 2000 approached human computer interface labs all over the world were hot onto studying what comes after the desktop and handheld computer.  Some were doing tablets, but others were wondering what happens if you combine a phone that happens to talk to the Internet with a camera, what happens if you have a radio equipped watch with a display on it, what if a fairly powerful computer can be shoehorned into something handheld with a wireless Internet connection, what if that little powerful wireless computer knows where it is ....  My lab was involved in several of these as well as what happens as computing becomes more invisible and ubiquitous. 

 

A few like Steve Mann were doing leading edge work to sort out how a person may integrate with sensors and networks.  The stuff that excites technologists and science fiction writers.

 

You could make reasonable predictions based on Moore's Law and some educated guesses on mobile phone technology.  Designing interfaces was extremely difficult, but just as important was how acceptable to the public would it be.  Some of these devices would be worn.  What had good design and was fashionable?  Could the design be so good so as to be aspirational?

 

The social dimensions of the problem were, and still are, enormous.  We were making all kinds of observations and performing simple tests.  It wasn't science by any means even though some called it that.  People were learning bits and pieces of a larger problems.  We were learning more about the problems so as not to appear totally stupid.¹

 

Some of the trials produced location dependent results.  A lab in Cambridge using a located ID badge found its employees building any number of useful applications for themselves.  A sister lab in Palo Alto had a near revolt with the same devices even though they had similar backgrounds.  The culture of the two different labs rendered the badges aspirational in one location and a pox in the other.  Sorting out why was non-trivial.

 

There were a lot of crazy leaps being made based on small amounts of work.  It was a real disease in labs that did not have a diverse range of skills.

 

Oh yeah - the post's title?  That's Latin for "with this, not because of this" and is found in statistics to emphasize that correlation does not imply causation.  It is one of the first things taught in any statistics class to warn about jumping to conclusions.  You run into nearly everywhere these days - except in science.  It turns out to be a phrase that almost guarantees the speaker isn't a scientist.

 

An explanation is one of degree.  People without a statistical background jump to conclusions - we're pattern recognition machines and historically have come to some very wrong conclusions.  Not only that, we're still doing it.  A good statistical background gives you some tools to calculate correlations, but caution is advised.  A scientist subjects their work to very elaborate testing measuring and taking into account errors along the way and producing a result in terms of how likely it is.  If they don't their competitors will do it for them and there is little tolerance for mistakes.

 

But back to the phrase ...

 

To a scientist correlation suggests causation.  It is an early clue that there is something worth pursuing.  You might quickly rule the linkage out or perhaps there is something wonderful to be learned that generates a shower of new questions.  You don't want to eliminate possibilities early out of hand..  Much of science is playing with any number of ideas seeing if they are worth going deeper.  As in many other fields you develop a talent for it.  

 

Too frequently it is invoked to dismiss something out of hand even though the person who uses it often has no sense of the depth of the statement they are dismissing.

 

All of that the device and interface/interaction exploration in the late 90s was probably good as it was creating a space of interesting questions.  Except for a few technologies like camera-phones, smartphones and high capacity mp3 players it wasn't essential that anyone understand them deeply right away.  Some of those who worked on the near horizon problems were richly rewarded. But now it is time to begin to understand issues associated with wearables. 

 

It seems daunting as we haven't yet worked out social conventions for the use of smartphones.  Technology often outruns the understanding of its consequences.

 

In the past few weeks at least a half dozen have been in touch to ask for my opinion on Google Glass.  A fascinating area, but they're well over their heads.  Not only does the user interaction model need considerable work, but the design and social issues are daunting.²  They aren't going to pull it off by having a designer put together a frame for them.

 

People may develop appropriate interaction and social conventions - that seems to be what Google is counting on - but the company that introduces a new social technology rarely has a change to ride the wave very long. Deeper thinking is required and it will be  more demanding than ever before as we're going well beyond conventional engineering and technology.  I suspect something approaching real science will need to be done and people from a wide range of fields will need to be involved.

 

A few years ago I tried to put together some one line descriptions for each component of STEM ..  it is far from perfect, but here's what I said:

 

° Science is the study of nature.  Some useful insight becomes available as a result, but that is not the driver

° Math is language of science and also of engineering.  It is beautiful by itself.  

° Engineering is the art of building tools and 

° Technology is the tools and their use

 

These four fields are now insufficient.  Social clue is necessary..

 

We need to understand fashion, design and aspirational design, human nature, local and global cultures, and several other areas. I've been trying to become a student of design and fashion and have been reaching out to people in these and several other areas, but am only getting to the point where my questions aren't completely foolish.  Hopefully one can get to the point where they can have useful connections with enough diverse people to make a dent in the problem.  I'll probably be writing much more on the subject as time goes on.   In the meantime I wish Google luck, but this is a really deep people and the Silicon Valley engineering notion of solving everything with technologies is insufficient and broken.

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¹ I look at my own record and find it mixed after 15 years.  There were some solid hits - particularly with location aware services and a large number of misses.  One tends to remember the hits and forget the misses. 

² from an email I sent last week

Google has a habit of asking designers to come in at the end of the process …  they have a reputation for driving HCI types and designers crazy ..  they like to just bolt it on at the end.  So this isn't surprising.  It will be essential to make the things look presentable.

Their approach appears to be taking a vocal command with a specific interrupt, but such approaches have failed in the research world (not for technical reasons). What is needed is a nice set of orthogonal out of channel communication commands - what linguists call phatic interactions (the communications we all use not to carry core information, but rather are meta commands that kept the channel open. If I say "you're breaking up" on a cellphone call, I'm giving a phatic vocalization. There are any number of phatic signalings that are non-verbal - your phone vibrating to let you know there is a text message for example)

They use verbal phatics like "ok glass", but that can be socially awkward and is fairly unnatural.They really need to crack that one - or find some work that has.They may be interested in having the public solve it for them. Just like hashtags on twitter.

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Recipe Corner 

 

Waldorf salads are delicious, but hardly healthy.  I threw together this one that was delicious and healthy.  I like to add some dried fruit like cranberries or cherrys

 

Heart Friendly Waldorf Salad

Ingredients

 

° 1 tbl white-wine vinegar

° 1 tbl walnut oil 

° sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

° 1 Granny Smith apple, cored, quartered, and thinly sliced

° 1 cup seedless red grapes, halved

° 2 celery stalks, thinly sliced, leaves for garnish if you like

° 50 grams coarsely chopped toasted pecans and or toasted walnuts 

 

Technique

 

° whisk together the vinegar, oil, some salt and pepper to taste

° add celery, grapes, apple, and nut to the bowl, and toss to coat with dressing.

 

beyond 3d printing

4:37 AM - a minute past nautical dawn and a pleasant breeze of negative pions continues from the South Southwest at 17 GeV/c ...

 

We tried to make at least one log entry per shift entertaining for the next shift.

 

This was from a particle physics experiment.  We were colliding negative pions into a target that was mostly protons (liquid hydrogen).  There were millions of tiny collisions that had enough energy that allowed the creation of new particles.  I was specifically interested in finding a few that would say something about the fundamental nature of the charm quark.  The problem was such events were very rare - there was an enormous amount of uninteresting information to sort through.

 

You get rid of most of this - about 99.99%) very quickly by knowing something about what the physics of the interaction you were looking for predicted.  This had to be done quickly as information was constantly flooding in.   Back then we built event triggers out of fast logic elements - literally AND, NOT, OR, and NOR gates.  It looks like a rat's nest as all of this had to be precisely timed.  A one foot long wire provided about a billionth of a second of delay.¹  We also had a more complicated trigger...

 

At the heart of two of our charm triggers was a then huge two megabyte memory array that allowed us to store the geometry of likely charm events directly.  If an event fell within some predicted position and energy boundaries, it was saved to tape - if not we dropped it on the floor. This was a new revolution in physics at the time - programmable triggers.

 

What made it possible was the rapidly falling price of memory and the emergence of cheap microprocessors.  There was a revolution underway with hobbyist computers fueled by eight bit chips like the Intel 8080 and  Motorola 6800.  We took advantage of it and I programmed the 6800 in assembly language to make it run as fast as possible.  We were surfing the microcomputer tsunami.  

 

A few years later I found myself at Bell Labs doing physics and applied physics.  I found myself doing lithography - one of the fundamental technologies of the past few hundred years - how finely can you draw lines and something at the heart of making integrated circuits.  The process was automated with computer aided design tools and the bits became atoms in the photomask.  The process was a form of custom manufacturing.  There were a couple of chemical processes for positive and negative image masks, several sizes of quartz plates, design rules and so on - but it was rare for the writing tool to write the same design unless it was a replacement.²

 

Somewhere along the way I did some work with a computer vision group.  There was an interest in building a 3d copy machine.  What would it take to scan an 3d image and recreate it in atoms rather than bits?  A hot topic in the late 1980s and it continues to be interesting.  Somewhere about 1990 I printed a crude 3d part taken that replicated a scanned model of the Star Wars death star.

 

My little death star wasn't very impressive, but it was an exercise you learn from.  I went on to other things, but periodically tried state of the art printing just to see how it had evolved.  By 2000 it started to make a dent in the prototyping world and, maybe 5 years ago, the hobbyist market began to explode.

 

There have been many predictions on how 3d printing is the next PC revolution or, a bit more conservatively, the next printer revolution.  While it is fundamentally important to some types of design, I don't buy those predictions for a variety of reasons.  Materials, physical limitations of existing and laboratory tools,  and the difficulty of design drive my belief.  But it is a great hobby and it is making a big impact on industrial design.  And for a few like Iris Van Herpen,  those who understand design and art, it is given access to new materials and shapes that influence their creative process.  

 

There is a larger revolution underway that 3d printing is often connected with...

 

The revolution is inexpensive computer assisted manufacturing in low quantities.  Mass customization and even single unit manufacturing.  The barriers to manufacturing anything used to be enormous, but now hobbyists can find a niche. Perhaps a niche that would allow them to quit their day job.  The hard piece -- going from a few dozen examples to thousands is now relatively easy.³  

 

There are still many tools to build and write and people need to be trained in design (STEM k12 education is not sufficient - you need to add the arts - STEAM eduction!).  Good design is approximately hard - most of us have no idea how difficult it really is.  There is great design in physical objects and services, but the best way to appreciate it is simply to get your hands dirty - most of us are functionally illiterate when it comes to articulating design, let alone creating it.⁴  

 

One can go on and on, but a recent interview of Chris Anderson by Glenn Fleishman (52 minute mp3) on his The New Disruptors podcast is a great tour of the new bits to atoms world of mass customization and scaleable manufacture

 

Highly recommended!

 

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¹ Rear Admiral and computer pioneer Grace Hopper used to carry around foot long wires and handed them out as "nanoseconds"  In the old charm experiment all of the fast signals were timed to within about a half nanosecond.  Colleen, who is exactly two meters tall, sometimes tells people she's six and two thirds of a nanosecond tall when people ask...

² The lithography tools of choice were electron beam writing machines.  We had a homebrew system called EBES - the Electron Beam Exposure System.  It could write half micron features to about a twentieth of a micron accuracy.  There have been enormous improvements since then.

³ I still regularly build 3d objects.  They are still temperamental and very restricted to design and material.  My larger interest lies in other types of mass customization.  In particular clothing.

For those who are interested in this revolution - even those who just track the state of technology - I  strongly encourage you to get your hands dirty.  You can learn an enormous amount trying to design and 3d print something on your own for example.

⁴ This notion of the learning of design is something that has been fascinating Jheri and I for the past few months.  How is design learned and articulated in apparel and how is that impacted by different types of community? There is a good deal of change taking place.

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Recipe Corner

 

Two recipes this time.  The first is so quick, easy and good.  And many variations with topping them.

 

Roasted Brussels sprouts

 

Ingredients

 

° a kilo or so of brussels sprouts

° 3 to 4 tbl olive oil

° sea salt

° ground pepper

° maple syrup or honey

° white wine vinegar

 

Technique

 

° set oven to 450°F 

° cut the brussels sprouts in half, coat in oil salt and pepper 

° arrange face down on a tray and roast for 25 minutes or so until beginning to caramelize

° flip over with a spatula and continue roasting for about 10 minutes

° plate and drizzle a mixture of maple syrup or honey and white wine vinegar

 

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The second is hardly a recipe, but is way better than store bought peanut/cashew/almond butters.

 

Peanut/Cashew/Almond Butter

 

Find some honey-roasted cashews, almonds or peanuts and throw them in a blender for 5 to 6 minutes, scraping down the sides of the blender as necessary, until you have a peanut butter consistency.  

That's it!

If you like you can roast the raw nuts yourself (7 - 10 minutes in a 350°F oven), but the honey-roasted nuts (or legumes in the case of peanuts) have a little sugar and sweet and work out very well without all of the stabilizer nasties you get in most commercial spreads.  If you roast your own you probably want to add a bit of salt and possibly some honey or maple syrup.

 

 

design, diy, boredom and creativity

As a first year grad student I was required to take a few shop classes to get my key to the department's shop - something necessary for any experimentalist.  People of my vintage were used to building projects - everyone was good at soldering as we were weaned on Heathkit projects and we mostly knew basic woodworking and drafting from home and shop classes, but I had never done any machining so I took a metal working class.  It was basic - learn how to use a lathe and milling machine.  

 

Of course it came in handy and I had to weld too (fortunately I learned how in high school), but it wasn't until after I cleared the preliminary exam before I worked on a project for fun.  

 

The inspiration came from old Popular Science magazines in the library.  There were a few engines of various types and I decided it would be neat to make a solar powered Stirling engine using a parabolic mirror's focus to provide the necessary heat.  I poured over some existing designs and came up with a simple two cylinder design, bought the steel, aluminum and brass stock I'd need and some neat ball bearings from the SKF company. I ruined one of the pistons, but everything else came together and I had something that generated about 30 watts at 1,500 rpm using a blowtorch flame.  I never got around to finding a nice parabolic mirror to turn it into a solar powered engine, but learned a lot in the process. It wasn't elegant or beautiful, but it worked.

 

About a month ago I found myself part of a group charged with trying to understand mass customization (extreme personalization and whatever you want to call it) a bit better.  There is the notion that 3d printing will become a major force changing the world in the near future.  I don't agree - at least not in the next decade, but there is so much more to mass customization and extreme personalization than 3d printing.¹

 

The successful companies to date, other than those specializing in prototype support, are those that offer multiple choice of already designed products - think of it as an extensive options list.  Manufacture is still conventional, but the process may have to be radically different.

 

 In theory one of the largest opportunities in this area is machine assisted bespoke.  Jheri and I have worried about this and have discussed it as it relates to clothing and I've mentioned bicycles.  The clothing piece is more interesting as it has seen much more attention and some automation - the largest benefit is probably getting away from sizing, but also to give a bit more freedom in fashion.

 

Jheri has been giving me a better sense of what fashion means as a personal expression of taste and even artistic sense.  She notes that women her age in the US are generally lacking in creativity compared to many of the major European cities and also notes the Americans tend to spend more money and buy many more pieces of clothing.  But the clothing is poorly made out of inferior materials, mostly in Southeast Asia under conditions approximating slavery.  This exists in Europe too, but apparently a middle ground of clothing that vanished from the American market still exists.  Workmanship, materials and fit are still important and the idea is to get pieces that will last and can be modified from year to year.

 

Jheri added something very interesting.  Young American women are no longer being taught how to sew whereas most of their European counterparts - particularly in France, Italy and Northern Europe - are. A bit of checking around shows the boys are also receiving shop training.  The continent has a larger percentage of young people who know how to build things.  This doesn't mean they will, although it happened on a large scale in Iceland a few years ago when their economy crumbled, but when you build things you get a better sense of what design is.  You won't become a master, but you'll appreciate it more.  This may translate into a different appetite for well designed objects - watches, clothing, furniture, cars, bicycles or whatever and, more interestingly, it may translate into different tool needs for personal involvement in mass customization.

 

The Do It Yourself movement is alive and well in the US, but is notable as it is such an enormous contrast with the rest of the country.  This type of activity is more common in many of the European countries where hobbies and crafting take up a larger percentage of time that is devoted to passive entertainment in the US.  Jheri follows street fashion and notes a few world class hotspots in America, but generally it is more interesting in European cities.²

 

The basics for beginning to appreciate fabrication and design were once taught in the school system.  A few people are doing it themselves, but is this something we should try and bring back?  What does it say about education?

 

The notion I'd like to have you think about is the power of free time and boredom and its relation to home fabrication and design.  Over the years I've become convinced that intense periods of single tasking followed by periods where you aren't doing much in particular and may even be a bit bored, are very important to creativity.  The interesting thoughts usually strike me out of the blue during those quiet periods, but they are rare or absent if I haven't been pushing myself.  I've noticed that tasks associated with building things and trying to sort through that intensely connect the dots world of design and fabrication can leave me completely puzzled where I just have to quit and think of other things - or just sit around being very bored with my lack of progress.  For whatever reason those have proven to be very rich moments.

 

If you are looking for something for your kids or yourself that is probably totally different and may expand your horizon and possibly provide new insight into your normal work I recommend learning a bit about building things and design. But this usually needs to be hands on and it is going to be much easier and more fun if you can find local people to learn from and with.³ 

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¹ It would take many pages to go into this, but basically there are some major roadblocks.  3d printing makes enormous sense for very low volume fabrication - prototypes, certain types of hobbyist kit, some medical apparatus and the like and it is revolutionizing those worlds.  The idea of having the spare parts for your washing machine or a new household device appear from your home or even community printer is off in the future.  If you are willing to compromise on material choice, fit and finish and price, you can do it - but those are major concessions.  On the other hand 2d printing is approximately here now.  Ping me for details if you want a discussion.

If you have the time and patience I do recommend playing with it.  You can even design objects and have them printed by someone else so you don't have to pay a few thousand bucks for an "ok" printer.  They've made great leaps since the early days - I first used one at Bell Labs in 1993 and most recently a few months ago.  An amazing difference, but we're still in the early days for home use - certainly not at the IBM PC or Macintosh level and not even at the Apple II or TRS-80 level.  But great fun for learning.

² She puts it a bit more starkly than I stated - "American women mostly dress only as they are told by advertising.  The streets are so predictable and boring with all of those poorly made outfits marching around with each similarly dressed wearer proclaiming 'I am an individual'  There is so little personal art involved."

I add that there is a lot of crafting in the US, but it is reduced from what it was mostly because it is done as a hobby rather than for making things we really need.  Now we just buy cheap imports.

³ Our school system used to offer inexpenise shop classes, but those vanished with the shop program.  The community college still offers them.  Some cities have clubs that share a well equiped workshop for a low fee - here is a neat one in Cambridge in the UK and you can find them in regions where people build things - Brooklyn, the East Bay, Silicon Valley, Cambridge, Mass, and so on....  Check out the local university- some of them do this sort of thing.  If you are into clothing there are any number of sewing, weaving and other forms of 2d fabrication with people who have deep expertise.  It often helps to live in an urban area, but see if you can find a good match.

 

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Recipe Corner

 

Tree nuts are good for you in moderation.  As a vegetarian I'm supposed to have 30 to 50 grams a day of almonds, cashews, pecans or walnuts.  All great things in my book. Here's a neat little salad for pecans

 

Apple-Pecan Broccoli Salad

 

Ingredients

 

Salad

 

° 6 ounces brocoli slaw or one cup shredded broccoli stems, one cup shredded carrots, and one cup shredded red cabbage  (I cheated and used a 6 ounce commerical bag which was on sale for $2)

° one tart apple cut into matchsticks

° a handfull or so of pecan halves

 

Dressing

 

° 2 tbl plain Greek yogurt (I used 2% Fage)

° 2 tsp mauonnaise

° 1 tbl honey 

° 1/2 tsp sweet curry powder

° 1/2 tsp fresh black pepper

° 1 tsp rice vinegar

 

Technique

 

° toast the pecans over medium heat in a dry frying pan until you can smell them.  Don't brown them!!

° In a mixing bowl whisk the dressing ingredients.  Add the salad ingredients except for the pecans and toss 

 

 

why lift and separation is important

I was struck by this Louis Vuitton ad with Michael Phelps and Larisa Latynina - two remarkable athletes in the service of formal clothing and quite a shift from the standard attire as well as depiction of athletes from the original ancient games.  

 

Modern athletes wear a wide range of clothing appropriate to the sport.  Some is protective, some only has minor functionality other than basic modest and offering sponsors billboard space for television, but some athletic clothing offers competitive advantage.

 

Running offers interesting examples.  Run fast enough and you will feel a considerable amount of wind resistance.  You want to reduce that force against you as much as possible.  Basically you are moving the air in front of you as you run.  About a year ago I wrote a post with a quick derivation of the power you have to develop to deal with that force.  The force turns out to be  half of the coefficient of drag for your body * the area you present as you run * the density of the air *  the square of your velocity relative to the air.¹  The important bits that you can control are your velocity, your frontal cross sectional area, and your coefficient of drag.  A cyclist can adapt a posture to minimize her frontal area while running generally makes that impossible.  Cyclists use a lot of aerodynamic tricks with bikes, wheels, riding position and even helmets.  And even runners can play with their clothing.  

 

To understand running attire it is useful to consider golf.

 

Sports balls are fascinating objects.  Apart from ping pong balls, few are smooth and spherical.  The shape gives them unusual properties that makes playing with them more interesting.  Balls tend to evolve with a sport and then, at some point, standardize so everyone can play on even terms.  

 

Early golf balls were mostly spherical hardwood.  It was noticed at the time that some balls were better than others, specifically some that we beaten up a bit would go further on a drive, but other beaten up balls performed worse.  Progression eventually led to a realization that small surface imperfections were important for good performance and the modern dimpled ball emerged.

 

The physics is pretty neat.  Two things are going on - one is caused by the spin on the ball and the other is related to the airstream immediately around it.²  The second is the larger effect, so I'll only consider it for the time being.

 

There are two basic types of airflow - laminar and turbulent.  Laminar flow is smooth (think of laminations), while turbulent flow is rough and choppy.  Laminar flow tends to take place at "low" speeds and turbulence becomes dominant as airspeed increases. 

A smooth ball generates a large wake as it pushes air molecules aside. Immediately behind the ball the air molecules are further apart compared to the air around and in front of the ball. A region of low pressure forms just behind the ball sucking it backwards and slowing it in the process. The air immediately around the ball is the boundary layer and one worries about where it separates from the ball - having it separate further behind the ball produces a smaller amount of total separation and the pressure drop behind the ball is smaller.  

. The dimpled ball separates the air less and has a smaller wake. The air behind the ball does not differ in air pressure as much as with the smooth ball so the dimpled ball has a smaller pressure drag and can travel further.

 

If you look at the airflow very close to the dimpled ball you notice they are roughing up the flow a bit and generating a bit of turbulence.  This makes the air stick a bit more to the ball.  It generate a bit of drag, but that turns out to be completely washed out by the fact the boundary layer sticks around a bit longer.  

 

Sweet   Dimpled balls are just better and have been around for a long time, but the effort was mostly trial and error - these days it has been possible to show what is taking place.  

 

But what does this have to do with running?

 

As it happens we create boundary layers when we run.  Our size and speed mean that if we're wearing something smooth - like a lycra bodysuit - the airflow is mostly laminar and there is an early and largish boundary separation that creates a low pressure area behind us.  One can imagine a diet of beans might help, but only for brief moments and the impact wouldn't be that great anyway, so it makes much more sense to make sure the boundary layer doesn't detach as quickly.

 

It turns out the trick is a tight fitting almost smooth body suit (you don't want a loose fit as the flapping fabric would present extra area creating even more drag) covered with a thin ribbing - about a half millimeter high and just enough to rough up the air and get the boundary layer to hang around a bit longer.  The C_d drops and the runner can put more of her power into moving herself rather than wasting it on moving air.  The effect can be dramatic.  The effect is more important as the airspeed goes up and at the very high speeds seen in the 100 meter event such suits are worth as much as a tenth of a second.³  At slower speeds air resistance is much less important (remember the force goes as the square of the relative airspeed and therefore the necessary power required to overcome it goes as the cube).

 

Hair, it turns out, is less of a problem than you might think.  There was a period when sprinters wore hoods, but the heat generated around their heads became excessive.  The head is only about 7% of your total body area and the impact of air resistance is about 3% of the total effort a sprinter must create at top speed.  Seven percent of three percent is under a hundredth of a second and the impact of heat buildup renders that counterproductive.

 

Talk of the Olympics and specialized suits brings up the Speedo LRZ swimsuits see prior to the 2008 competition.  Of all of Olympic sport, more science has probably been devoted to swimming than anything else.  Lowering the drag from moving through water is a big thing - after all - water is nearly 800 times denser than air and the underlying physics is well understood (although the calculations can be very difficult).  Speedo came up with a seamless and wrinkle-free shell of a suit and its shape stayed smooth throughout the swimming stroke. There was also a thin layer of a foamy material that had very small gas pockets that made the swimmer more buoyant.  They rode higher in the water and produced less drag.  

 

The overall effect was pretty dramatic - a 5% to 8% reduction in overall drag - but the cost was high.  The suits were very expensive ($500), took a half hour to put on and only lasted a race or two.  Since their impact was about the same on the top swimmers the decision was made to ban them and records set using them are noted separately.

 

There are many more examples - it turns out shoes are a fascinating area, but it would take pages and pages to describe the current understanding of shoes vs no barefoot as well as the difference between shoes.  So that's it for today.

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¹ The area for this is what only what the oncoming air sees and is often called the frontal cross sectional area.  Also note that the relative velocity is important.  If you are running at 10 mph with a 10 mph tailwind, the effective velocity is 0 - you don't have to move the air that is in your path.  Tailwinds are even better and records have strict limit on how big they can be.

The coefficient of drag, or C_d, is a quantity that represents how easily a shape moves through a fluid.  At a given speed the frontal area times the C_d will tell you the force you have to generate to move the air column before you aside - double the area or C_d and you need twice the force (or power).  C_d range from well under 0.1 for a sailplane, about 0.20 to 0.30 for many sports cars,  0.7 for a cyclist, 1.0 for a runner, 1.4 for the Empire State Building, 1.9 for the Eiffel Tower, and 2.1 for a brick.

² A spinning ball produces lift through the Magnus effect.  I won't go into it, but ping me if you are interested.  I've worked it out for volleyballs and found an interesting result that explains part of the ball's trajectory ..,

³ In his world record 100 meter run Usain Bolt was moving at 12.27 meters per second at the 65 meter point - about 27.3 mph!  He was producing about 3,000 watts of power at the time - about twice what a stove top electric burner consumes.  This is near the human limit for burst power production and can only be maintained for a short amount of time. The body can't sweat out this extra heat immediately and the core body temperature of a sprinter increases rapidly.  If their muscles could be powered a bit longer the increase in body temperature would kill them.

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Recipe corner.

First a technique from shesimmers for making sticky rice that doesn't require much kit.  I just tried it and had excellent results.  recommended!

 

There are a variety of tiger salads.  I don't know where this one originated, but we tried it last night and found it deliciousSim as well as easy to make.

 

Simple Tiger Salad 

 

Ingredients

 

° 1 large bunch cilantro, with the thick stems removed, cut into 3-inch lengths (about 5 cups, loosely packed)

° 1 green bell pepper stemmed, seeded and slivered (cucumber would do nicely too)

° 1 fresh chili pepper, stemmed, seeded and slivered

° 2 scallions, slivered

° 2 tsp vegetable oil

° 1/4 teaspoon salt

° sesame oil and white vinegar, to taste

° a handful of chopped peanuts (optional)

 

Technique

 

° In a bowl, combine cilantro, green pepper, chili pepper and scallions. Add vegetable oil and salt; toss lightly.

° Add peanuts if you like and a few drops of sesame oil, vinegar and more salt to taste; toss again. Pile on a plate and serve immediately as it wilts quickly