omenti

lime jello marshmallow cottage cheese surprise

You'd see the differences during dinner.   Our neighbors the Eriksens had a mixed marriage.  Her ancestry was Swedish, his Danish. He liked sour cream on his jello, she went for whipped cream.  Not that jello was a Scandinavian food - they had been regionally Americanized like the rest of us.    In a generation rugbrød had become foreign, but everyone knew hot dish and jello formed around things like shredded carrots, Kraft brand miniature marshmallows, fruit cocktail or cottage cheese jiggled on our plates.  Even our notion of exotic had been Americanized. Once every few weeks we celebrated a South of the Border meal with "tacos" (pronounced tack-ohs) - toasted Wonder Bread folded in half holding sautéed hamburger, onions and some cheese.  Food from your ancestry had been relegated to holidays and properly done by the elderly.   The great melting pot included enormous dietary change.  

 

Thinking now ..  what were some of the major changes in food since the beginning of the last century?  Here's an incomplete list of the top of my head, not in any particular order

 

° enormous improvements in sanitation, sewage and clean water

° food safety (Upton Sinclair)

° cheap global transportation of fresh produce.  You can have greens every day of the year.

° a move away from home gardens for fresh produce

° a cheap and reliable cold chain... flash refrigeration near the harvest, refrigerated trucks, display cases and home refrigerators

° corn-based sweeteners

° obesity replaces malnutrition as a major health issue

° relative to average income food becomes much less expensive

° few people farm (from about half the country to about two percent)

° much less time is spent on food preparation - home cooked meals become a hobbyist activity for some

° restaurant meals become a regular experience for most people

° the introduction of ethic foods across cultures (sadly after I was growing up)

° The Haber-Bosch Process (fertilizer - this was one of the most important revolutions of the 20th century)

° Farmland being used to grow fuel for vehicles

 

Such lists are fun to think about.  Some of these changes are clearly positive, some not so much and others seem neutral.    Change is complex and frequently in the eye of the beholder.

 

A week and a half ago I spent the morning at an institute devoted to pure research - a mixture of physicists, mathematicians, social scientists and historians.  The focus of the breakfast was on change brought about by the iPhone.  No one argues it's importance as a product in terms of devices shipped and money generated.  No one argues that it defined the notion of a smartphone.  But there are a lot of interesting questions.  What does it mean culturally?  Our lives have changed, but what is the balance?  How do we meaningfully approach such questions as the history of our interaction with it is being made now.  Every generation believes they live in a period of maximum change and removing bias is tricky.

 

I won't go into details - the Chatham House Rule was in effect as usual during discussions like these - but there was a lot of comparison with television, the automobile and universal electrification.  Both of these had and continue to have enormous social impact.  The automobile physically changed architecture and cities.  Pollution has killed millions worldwide during the depression, but mobility has given us enormous freedoms to connect.   This is a very rich area to think about.

 

How do these rate if your window is two hundred and fifty years - to the early days of the United States?  The historians agreed the most impactful event in the US was the invention of the cotton gin.  We still are living with the fallout.  Oddly enough had it come about thirty years later other technologies would have been more neutral.  Of course the steam and electric components of the industrial revolution show up and you can get into interesting games like what would you rather have - electricity or your smartphone (assuming you had a communication technology that didn't require electricity)?  Of course the Haber-Bosch Process figures in as the planet's population would have been limited at something like two billion without it.   And sanitation and vaccinations extended life spans and generally increased wellness more than almost anything else. 

 

All of these have consequences and externalities.  Change is multi-dimensional and highly interdependent. Twenty years ago one of you (hi Karrie!) was in a group looking at, among other things,  change at Bell Labs.  I hung around with the group a bit simply because the questions were so interesting.  You might look at change brought by the automobile along a variety of axes ..  and I started to see it as a very large dimensioned space represented by a point that could move in time.¹ It gets tricky to think about as many of the measures are social and qualitative and many of the quantitative measures are difficult to nail down, but it's a nice mental model ..  it encourages you to think about multidimensional change that can gives different results for different people when they look at it.  If you're of African-American heritage, the cotton gin shows up more prominently for example.  

 

I've been trying to think through what happens with electrification, transportation and computation a bit more deeply these days.   Like the decade before the smartphone it's an exciting time.  Everyone knew there was going to be some sort of convergence of features driven by Moore's Law, but many of the details were hazy.  And now the impact isn't all that clear, but we know it's significant.  Today someone asked about the rumor of a laser on the iPhone 8 - a bit of thinking gives a very strong hint to something fundamentally huge.  

 

I'll quit here - one can spend a lot of time...

 

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Recipe Corner

 

I was inspired by the performances of a brilliant Canadian beach volleyball team: Sarah Pavan and Melissa Humana-Paredes.  They haven't had a lot of time together, but they're doing great things.  On Canada Day they took gold in Porec, Croatia  and a week later a bronze in another major tournament.  It seemed reasonable to toast their effort with homemade maple ice cream.   It isn't exactly safe in quantity, but for celebrations go ahead.

Extra points for using a liquid nitrogen freezing technique as smoothness is a function of ice crystal size (smaller is better) which is related to the rate of freezing (removing heat quickly is good).

Somewhat better than lime jello marshmallow surprise:-)

 

Maple Ice Cream

 

Ingredients

 

° 2 cups of heavy cream

° 2/3 cup of half and half

° 1/3 cup of whole (4% butterfat) milk

° 2 extra large pasteurized eggs  (they’re pretty easy to pasteurize and then completely safe)

° ¾ cup of white sugar

° ½ cup of Grade B dark amber maple syrup  (the original recipe calls for Grade C, but I can’t get it around here .  this gives a light maple flavor)

° * 1 teaspoon of Mapleine® imitation maple flavoring  (to get a richer maple flavor add this if you can’t get Grade C syrup)

° walnuts or pecans  (I tend to use pecans)

Technique

° Mix the eggs at medium speed in an electric mixer in a 4 or 6 quart mixing bowl. (I don’t recommend beating by hand!)

° When well mixed add the sugar and continue mixing for two minutes.  

° Add the heavy cream, half and half, and milk while continuing to mix for two minutes.

° Add the maple syrup  and mix throughly 

° Pour the ice cream mixture into an ice cream machine and churn freeze as per the manufacturer’s instructions

° When the mixture is fairly stiff add chopped walnuts and continue processing for a minute or so  (I like to place full nuts on top rather than chopped nuts inside)

 

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¹ OK - I'm a physicist..  it was screaming Hilbert Space and perhaps it makes sense to think of it like that.

 

optimism and doing something

On the bus ride home Friday night I found myself thinking about my renewed optimism that we have a chance to do something about global warming.   I was on my way back from  the New York City Open on Pier 26 in lower Manhattan.  The crowd and the people I talked to had me fired up.

 

Beach Volleyball is a great sport.  Trust me and go if a tournament shows up nearby.  A rich and interesting game, great athleticism (try running and jumping in the sand for awhile), and friendly people.  And for those who are into such things there's a lot of interesting science to think about...  

 

A ball flew out of the stadium landing the Hudson river.  Looking around it struck me how young the crowd was.   What would the pier look like in a few decades when they're my age?  What would their world be like?

 

The situation can seem hopeless.  Ten years ago I started into an education effort thinking better public knowledge of energy was important.  I'm not an exciting speaker, but over time and a dozen talks I found an approach. People seemed positive and there were a lot of questions at the end.   I started writing a book, but it became clear that minds weren't being changed.  At the same time well-funded merchants of doubt were hard at work spreading pseudoscience as an industry and political party became tightly linked.  By 2011 it had become clear that education alone wasn't the answer.  I gave up on my effort and started  to think about how humanity might adapt.  I don't recommend that line of thinking if you're prone to depression. 

 

Times change and now I find myself  filled with hope and optimism thinking in terms of dozens of partial solutions that don't rely on new technologies.  Solutions that can be cost effective and don't degrade quality of life.  We won't get back to where were in the lifetimes of anyone now living.  There is a good deal of warming locked in as greenhouse gases have a long term impact, but we have the power to choose our path.  We can turn the knobs and keep things to a level we can adapt to. Life will be different, but it can be very good.

 

Most of the proposals you hear about are top-down requiring major investments by large (conservative) companies and governments.²   Fortunately there are other paths.   Doing some model based simulations you find that there's quite a bit that can happen at the personal, city and state level.  Some  industries will resist as the markets tend to be focused on the short term and exclude many externalities, but many others may find opportunity saving on their power bills for example.   Without a carbon tax, electric storage and fusion what might be possible?

 

Electric cars, at least as we know them today, won't have a huge impact.  They still need a lot of energy to make and run. They're still better than a car with an internal combustion engine.   If you're getting a new car and want one go for it, but it isn't the best use of money if you're interesting in impacting global warming.  And inside of 15 years they''ll probably be cost effective without subsidies in most market segments.  Here are a few suggestions:

  

° cut back on meat consumption - particularly beef.  If cattle were a country, it would be the world's third largest carbon emitter.  The US is already seeing a reduction in beef consumption.  Going vegetarian or vegan a few days a week can have a major impact if millions do it.  

° Use your car less even if it's electric.  Walk or bike when you can.   Electric bikes are an incredibly efficient way to get around in cities, towns and suburbs and very practical if your tip is five miles or less.  A regular bike can improve your health, but you may not use it as much.  

° If you are getting a new air conditioner or refrigerator make sure the refrigerant in the old one is disposed of properly.  The gases  have anywhere from 5,000 to 11,000 times the impact as the same amount of carbon dioxide and remain in the atmosphere longer.    The refrigerant in a home air conditioner has the greenhouse gas impact of several thousand miles of driving in the average family car. If you can, hold off getting a few AC or refrigerator until 2019 when much better refrigerants are mandated.¹ About 90% of these refrigerants are improperly vented worldwide so there's major room for improvement.

 

Here's an ordered list from a series of models that assume modest adoption of new paths that don't hurt standards of living. The order is how much greenhouse gas is prevented from being released - cost or externalities like politics are not represented.  

 

proper control of refrigerants

wind turbines

reduced food waste + a plant-rich diet (80% improvements over current levels by 2050)

tropical forest management

education and opportunity for women/family planning

photovoltaic farms

rooftop solar (home and industry)

silvopasture (trees + farm animals rather than pasture)

temperate forest management

peatland management

nuclear power

clean cookstoves

offshore wind turbines

concentrated solar

district heating

electric cars (downsized) - note that walkable cities and bikes/electric bikes can go even further

 many more items.  some that are technical, many aren't

 

Electric storage and smart grids don't show up at this scale.  Some, like nuclear power, are very expansive, some are overly political and even violate local religious norms, many are regional.  The point is there are no silver bullets, but rather lot of silver buckshot.  You don't have to use all of it and they don't have to be perfect.  All will have a positive impact.  There will be some new technologies, but we don't have to count on them.

 

We have been faced with a false divide between urgency and agency.  It has been too much us versus them and we talk in terms of goals like decarbonization and 2°C.  In fact both might be considered problem statements and then we can intelligently approach them.  We need to rethink communication - something that is happening in science and perhaps will take place here.  We can get started now.  

 

America has never been a leader on climate change.  Some of the best science and technology is American, but don't count on top-down leadership.  The Paris Accord wasn't that good and was just an agreement, but now many of the important players are pissed and will do things on their own.   Canada and Finland have banned coal. China's five year Ecological Civilization plan, California and other states are teaming for joint action,  companies like Apple have made enormous changes in the past few years and regular folks like you and me can make an impact.

 

By the time I was walking home from the bus stop I was thinking about volleyball again...  the curious ball trajectories that illustrate a certain bit of physics better than any other sport...  Hopefully the quality of our choices will improve and the beach game can still be enjoyed close to where it is now by people with a good standard of living.  And maybe a tournament in Moscow can even see a bit of late Spring snow as one did a few weeks ago.

__________

¹ If you thought last year was a disaster the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol is a counter-example.  The Montreal Protocol regulates gases that attack the ozone layer and has been an enormous success.  It has real teeth with trade sanctions against violators and companies that make the gases in question ended up doing well making replacements.  170 countries met in Kigali, Rwanda to create a path towards climate-safe refrigerants. In 2019 it begins to turn on in advanced countries and moves towards others over the following ten years.

² Largely variations on the Princeton slice model. 

 

40,000 apples on a table and an iPhone 7 plus

Imagine you wanted to power an iPhone or MacBook with apples.  You might drop the fruit from some height onto a generator that would stop the accelerating apple and turn it's kinetic energy into electricity -- sort of like a turbine does in a hydroelectric.  While not exactly practical, you could make it work and it's a nice way to think about power and energy.  

 

A joule one of many units of energy.  You tend to pick something appropriate for the task at hand and this turns out to be convenient for falling fruit among other things.  It's defined as the work done by a a force of one newton over a distance of a meter.  In the case of dropping something near the surface of the Earth this is just the product of the mass of the object being dropped, the acceleration due to Earth's gravitational pull and how far the object falls:  mgh.  If  the apple falls from a table (about 0.7 meters high),  a medium-size apple (145 grams or a bit over five ounces)  has one joule of potential energy turn into one joule of kinetic energy as it strikes the floor - or your generator.  

 

An iPhone 7 Plus has a 11 watt-hour battery.  A watt-hour is another unit of energy.  Here's how it works.  (Understand this and you're doing better than many online tech editors and writers).  Power is the rate at which energy is converted from one form to another - the kinetic energy of a falling apple into electricity for example.  A common unit is the watt.  A watt-second of energy can supply a watt of power for a second and is the same thing as one joule.  Supply a watt for an hour and you get 3600 joules or a watt-hour. So the iPhone battery can store 39,600 joules or 39.6 kilojoules( kJ).  There's nothing special about a watt-hour requiring an hour ..  it's just an amount of energy.  It could be 600 watts for 6 seconds.  (Normally I would stick with joules or watt-seconds, but I'll use both to stress their equivalence.)  A good analogy is your gas tank.  It may hold 20 gallons, but your accelerator determines the rate at which it is used,   Energy is an amount, power is a rate.  

 

Back to the task at hand.  An iPhone in normal use needs about a watt ..  run a video and you might need three watts.  Dropping apples takes an apple per second to supply a watt - a joule per second.   This gets inconvenient in a hurry.  An average of about 3600 apples falling from the table per hour rising to as high as 10,000 an hour when you're watching a video. You give the apples energy by picking them up from the floor and placing them on the table .. doing so each gains a joule of potential energy which converts into a joule of kinetic energy when they fall.

 

The laptop's power requirement is about six times that of the phone ..  six apples per second.  And it's worse than that as the generator is not going to be one hundred percent efficient.  Not to mention your body is only about 20% efficient picking up apples from the floor and putting them on a table.  It would take orchards. Or perhaps you could install a three story 10 meter  tower and run a 2,400 kg (nearly 5,280 pounds - a very large SUV) weight to the top.  That'd power your MacBook Pro for ten hours too...

 

It seems pretty stupid, but this is how the cheapest and one of the most practical forms of large scale energy storage works.  Pumped hydro is done in certain geographies where you can pump water up hill to a reservoir  when you have extra power and let it run back down to spin a generator when you need extra power.  The round trip efficiency can be as high as 80 percent - even higher if it rains (then you're just adding solar power).  The problem is you need a lot of water and a big drop to make it practical.  For a 100 meter drop the energy density is 980 joules per kilogram which works out to about 0.27 watt-hours per kilogram.¹

 

The pumped hydro facility - arguably the largest battery in the world - is the Bath County Pumped Storage Station. It can supply about 3,000 megawatts of power - about the same as three nuclear reactors.  The US has about an eighth of he world's total pumped water capacity of 168 gigawatts of power (updated - thanks David).  It's  much cheaper than other large scale forms of storage. Lithium-ion batteries would cost at least a hundred times as much.  Unfortunately there aren't many practical natural sites.  

 

For smaller applications you need much higher power densities.  Consider electro-chemical storage - electric batteries .. 

 

alkaline AAA non-rechargeable   118 Wh/kg    

alkaline C non-rechargeable         147 Wh/kg       

Li-ion 18650 rechargeable²             180 - 280 Wh/kg

 

An improvement, but what if your body ran on electricity?   You need about 100 watts of power on average around the clock.  That'd be about 10 kilograms of lithium-ion batteries for your daily energy supply. Not exactly practical. Fortunately life figured out how to use a much denser form of energy storage - the making and breaking of carbon-based chemical bonds.  

 

plain M&Ms     5,700 Wh/kg

beef hot dog      3,350 Wh/kg

 

People are often surprised when they learn a hot dog packs about three times energy of a similar sized stick of dynamite (1,150 Wh/kg).  Dynamite doesn't have a particularly high energy density, but it can develop a lot of power.  It's trick is the ability to undergo extremely fast combustion .. so fast the result is an explosion.  Too much power can be bad for your health.

 

Further up the hydrocarbon energy density scale are the oils..  vegetable oil has roughly the same energy density as petroleum based fuels.  All of these are really stored solar energy thanks to photosynthesis.

 

To get a sense of scale there are any number of games you can play.  A single plain M&M has about 3.5 nutritional calories of energy - about 14.7 kJ or 15,000 apples falling from the table.  Convert them to electricity at 100 percent efficiency and you could run your iPhone for ten hours.  This is one of the reasons why tiny fuel cells for electronic devices crop up every now and again.  So far they haven't been very practical.

 

Say you're an Olympic female volleyball player.  Blocking at the net you might jump high enough to raise you center of gravity by about 0.7 meters -- maybe a bit more. If your mass is 70kg you need a bit under 500 joules to get there.³  But the human body is only about 20 percent efficient for this kind of jumping, so you need more like 2500 joules (or watt-seconds).  The single M&M should be good for about six jumps.  By comparison a triple AAA alkaline battery stores about 5,000 watt-seconds - three AAA cells is about an M&M.  

 

A diversion, but one that's fun to think about, is what would sports be like on different bodies in the solar system.  The simple way is to just consider the effect of gravity, but that's not terribly interesting.  Balls interact with the air, so imagine a large open room with air at the equivalent of sea level.   The acceleration of gravity on the moon is about a sixth that of Earth so balls wouldn't drop as rapidly.  They'd go further, but how far would depend on air resistance.  Volleyballs have a lot of surface area and won't go as far as you might expect.  Putting spin on them, the Magnus effect is already important in volleyball,  would seem more dramatic than on Earth.  On very small bodies like asteroids and small moons you have the specter  of golf balls going into orbit (although the orbits wouldn't be very stable) - perhaps not the ideal spectator sport. There's also this matter of friction - something rather central to anyone who moves.  Most sports would require new rules to be interesting and practical.  Picking a sport or two you like and thinking about rules for Mars, the Moon or some other place is a nice form of daydreaming.   Or invent something new.  In both cases senses, reaction times, game play and beauty are involved.  How would things like balls, court or field size, net heights, etc change?  (computer simulations and real time visualizations are useful) Would your rules allow interesting competition?  Would it be fun to watch?  In the process maybe you'll develop a deeper insight for Earth-bound sport.  

 ___________

¹ Joules/kg is usually called energy density and watt-hrs/kilogram is specific energy.  Those historical conventions that can be confusing. 

² 18650 cells are a very common form factor.  The different energy densities represent different chemistries.  Picking a chemistry depends on the task at hand and they all involve tradeoffs.  Chemistries appropriate for cars tend to be on the lower end of the scale.

³ There's quite a bit more going on besides just raising your center of gravity, but the major component of work is the vertical jump. 

 

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Recipe Corner

 

Dairy-free "creamy" soups

 

The trick is to get the vegetable to stock ratio right, add some starch and and blend well.  I use about five cups of good veggie stock to two pounds (one kilogram) of veggies.

 

Cut the veggies into small bits for quick cooking. Start with an onion, a couple of leeks and a couple of cloves of garlic.  Sweat them in olive oil with salt until they soften. Add the starring veggies and sweat.  Add the stock, boil and then simmer.  Simmer 'til the veggies easily pierce with a fork.  Then use a blender or a stick blender to make the soup smooth.  Then finish with salt and pepper, lemon etc...

 

The big trick is the veggie to stock ratio and practice.

 

 

 

directional unfocusing

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.


We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

 

My tenth grade English teacher pointed out that The Chariot and many other Emily Dickinson lyric poems can be sung to the tune of  The Yellow Rose of Texas. (I think it was Ms Svobodny -- Jeri?  I can't remember)  Of course the thing to do during study hall was to go to the library and find other poems and sing them in your head.  Try it with the Marine Corp Hymn, Ghost Riders in the Sky, the Wasbash Cannonball and probably many more.  I didn't think about it for years until I found myself chatting with a poet who brought it up.  She had been to a writing camp where a practice called Halloweening was used.

 

I'm getting ahead of myself.

 

This morning the director of a small technology company in Cambridge, England wrote thanking me for an earlier post on creativity asking if I could write a bit more.  Here goes..

 

First read my old post making sparks - it's short.

 

Neuroscientists talk about the Default Mode Network - think about it as an active set of connections that operates when you're not focused. An unfocused network.  It turns out to be quiet active and is often the part of the brain that makes the unusual connections found in creative thinking.  Learning how to engage and control it is a trick many creative people use is to engage this part of the brain.  

 

Some of this may be wired in, but the brain can be very plastic and adaptable. I'm reasonably convinced some of this can be learned and this is where the fun comes in.  You want to turn off some of the orderly task-focused work the industrial revolution gave us  and bring in some play and certain types of day dreaming.  Setting aside some time for your own thoughts is important as is getting away from multitasking.  Finding instant "answers" without having to think (wikipedia and Google) have been shown to be counterproductive if creativity is the goal. The dominated group think that comes with most brainstorming is kills creativity.  You get the idea...  structure tends to be bad if used throughout the day.

 

What appears to be good is letting your mind wander after having worked hard on something.  Do something very different to shift focus. Often repetitive "mindless" tasks work..  Einstein played scales on his violin, Feynman learned to draw and a dozen other things, a friend with a Nobel Prize knits and plays with Legos.¹  It should go without saying that you need to be deeply immersed in your main task for this to be useful.

Some find adding a bit of unpredictability important.   This works for me.  I draw (poorly) a bit every morning with the subject being whatever comes to mind when I'm brushing my teeth.  It all gets thrown away, but it's an important part of my toolkit.  I also take walks in the woods and try to avoid the same path and taking time to notice something new each time.  Stay away from the phone unless you have a creative friend to take a share the walk. Walking in a city I'll pretend I'm a slalom skier and find a path around other pedestrians.  

 

Jheri is coming into her own as a designer and clears her mind with fast bike trips through the streets of Copenhagen and Paris picking out a color from a magazine page and then turning in some direction when she sees it and moving until she sees the next color.  She's dangerously fast with hair flying out behind her trying to catch up.  She sometimes takes walks with colored lenses in her glasses  or wears some comfortable flat shoes that add about four inches.  Different visual perspectives divert and unfocus her mind.

 

Other tricks ..  if you're at a lecture you tend to retain more if you doodle rather than take notes.  Your friend is a piece of paper or a Field Notes book and a nice pen or pencil.  The class notes of prominent thinkers often turn out to be wild doodles with a few key words here and there. 

 

Halloweening.  The poet decided to try to get into Emily Dickinson's mind as much as possible.  She's not a lyric poet, so it was not exactly easy.  She wore white and stayed in the same rooms for a week not going outside communicating with others with a few physical letters as she wrote poetry trying for Dickinson's style..  She said it gave her a great breakthrough unrelated to Dickinson or herself - a different way of seeing the world.  Picasso's salon - la bande à Picasso - was very interested in geometry - specifically non-Euclidian geometry.  They studied Poincaré's  La Science et l'hypothèse and Picasso found inspiration and started into sketching the mathematical abstractions as well he could.   He tried to think like Poincare ... halloweening.  I suspect method actors are great at this. 

 

There is evidence physical play of the rough and tumble variety is important. And, for some, it's inverse.  Last Spring I found myself talking to a volleyball coach at Stanford.  He thought one of the reasons why some of his players were creative in their sport came from the fact they were actively engaged in mentally challenging majors.  Sport can be mentally challenging - it's just that math or biochemistry is challenging in a different way and can grant the gift of thinking differently.  We ended up having a fantastic talk about creativity in sport.

 

Find someone who is very different from you and smarter in many ways.  Hopefully you can bring  something to the table for them.  Playful conversation can fuel creative thinking.  This is where HR is critically important in any company that needs to be creative.  Sadly I see a lot of failure given what seems to be an increasing tendency to hyperfocus on THE task.

 

I'll end with a comment on thinking differently.  There is a tendency to conform to certain modes of thinking.   I've been told my hodgepodge of technique is unusual, but it works for me.  I certainly wouldn't suggest anyone else try it, but rather recommend they find their own.

 

__________

¹ I was lucky enough to have been around Feynman a bit.  People characterized his problem solving style as

1. write down a problem
2. think 
3. write down the answer

His thought pattern was just different from everyone else.  He played a lot and with considerable delight.  His mind seemed to be in a chaotic state between focus and play.  Listening to him you came away with the impression that physics was really easy.  Later you'd try and crash.,  His ability to distort reality made Steve Jobs look like an amateur.

__________

Recipe Corner

 

Peach-Peppermint ice cream (you can figure out the flavor name as Ben & Jerry's is unlikely to)

 

First make a simple peppermint ice cream.  I've made this one during the holiday season for years.

 

Ingredients

 

° 1 cup white sugar

° 2 cups heavy cream

° 2 cups half and half cream

° 1 tbl vanilla extract

° pinch of salt

° 1/4 c of good crushed peppermint candies  use 1/2 cup if just peppermint, but we're modifying it (I didn't say this was remotely healthy)

 

 

Technique

 

° hand whisk the creams, sugar, vanilla and salt until fully mixed

° refrigerate for a couple of hours

° churn-freeze 'til thick ... folks like Karrie may want to use the LN₂ technique:-)

° mix in the peppermint 

 

now go for ImPeachMint...

° swirl in 1/4 c chilled peach syrup - I use Torani 

° serve liberal portions

  

 

 

discovery and moving out of the cave

Mr Wolff was one of those special teachers you listened to.  Upon learning many of us had been assigned Fahrenheit 451 in our utopia and dystopias class, he saw an opening and got us to go to the source for later discussion.   We made the pilgrimage to Val's bookstore for a copy of The Republic and read the Allegory of the Cave.  I can't say much Plato stuck with me - but the Allegory led to an epiphany.

 

You probably know the story.  If you're a bit rusty, try the video. It's just the surface, but no need to worry about that -  how the prisoners see the world in 2d shadows is the point for now.

 

The image haunted me at first.  Rather than worry about what Plato was trying to teach all I could think about was a simple case - a ruler held up to the light.    All the prisoner would see is the shadow Rotate the ruler and the prisoner would see it's length change.  The concept of length would mean nothing - it was far too variable.

 

But what if one of the prisoners was exceptionally curious and a bit mathematical?  What if he imaged another dimension perpendicular to the only two he knew and worked out a three dimensional trigonometry.   The ruler could rotate in this new three dimensional space producing a two dimensional projection that changed in length.  It would have been a fundamental discovery for them - that the real world had three dimensions, but the they could only experience it as projections of two.  

 

Science is about moving out of the cave.

 

In the early 1800s a bookbinder's apprentice named Michael Faraday started down a path that fundamentally changed the world.  While Faraday had no formal education, he was insanely curious and inventive.  He sat in on the lectures of Humphrey Davy and presented the great man with a beautifully bound set of the notes he took.  Davy knew a good thing when he saw it and took on the young man.  It was a good choice.  He grew in his post and turned into the best experimentalist of the century - arguably one of the two or three best of all time.  

 

Physicists of the day had been working with magnets and electricity.  Bits and pieces were being learned but the underlying picture was elusive despite some tantalizing hints.  You probably did it in grade school -  run an electric current through a wire you get a magnet.  There seemed to be a connection between these two forces and dozens were on the case.   In one of the most important accidents in the history of science Faraday had two coils of wire near each other when he connected a battery to one and happened to notice a momentary current in the other.  Disconnecting the battery produced another current.  The light bulb came on before the invention of light bulbs (what was the representation for an idea back then?)  In other words a changing magnetic field produces an electric field.

 

Unschooled in math, Faraday created visual model.  He imaged lines of force connecting or repelling changes.  These lines bunched up where the field was high and thinned out where it was weak.  Like charges attracted (a) and unlike charges repelled (b). Lines didn't cross.   While it seems simple the intuition displayed is astonishing.  It turned out to be right - not only mathematically, but it hinted at a much deeper view into how Nature works .. one outside the cave.¹ 

 

There's an apocryphal story that Gladstone visited Faraday's lab and asked why his work should be funded - of what use is it?  Faraday was said to have replied  "Why, sir, there is every probability that you will soon be able to tax it"  What Faraday had discovered led to the invention of electric generators and motors.  Almost as soon as that happened people started working on electric motors and lamps - and this other invention called the telegraph which led to the multiplexed telegraph which became the telephone. You get the picture... Trillions of dollars and huge changes in nearly everything we do.  It also sparked James Clerk Maxwell.

 

Maxwell was the century's greatest theoretical physicist.  Trying to come up with something comprehensive, he built on Faraday's insight and added work by Gauss and Ampère.  In the process he realized electricity and magnetism weren't separate forces, but were really pieces of the same thing.  Depending on your frame of reference you might see one or the other.  They were manifestations of something deeper - he called the unified force electromagnetism.  

 

Maxwell didn't stop there.  Usually in the sophomore year a physics major learns what may be the first really beautiful thing she'll learn about physics.   Shake an electric charge.  Now you have a current starting and stopping. You do a bit of math and imagine in your mind what's going on.  The shaking produces a changing electric field that, in turn, creates a changing magnetic field, but that produces a changing electric field that produces a changing magnetic field that produces a changing electric field ... you get the idea - a disturbance in electric and magnetic fields moves out from the charge you had been shaking.  Now go into the lab and measure the the strength of electric forces between two changes and the strength of the magnetic force between two magnets.  You plug these experimentally determined values into the simple wave equation you found by using Maxwell's equations and the simple thought experiment and you get the speed of the disturbance moving through the electromagnetic field.

 

The speed turns out to the the speed of light.  Maxwell had shown light was an electromagnetic wave.²  

 

These fields that Faraday imagined because he couldn't do the math turnout to be real.  Maxwell had created the first great unification in physics and something unexpected and totally wonderful fell out - the connection between light and electromagnetism.  Two decades later Hertz showed you could create and receive radio waves and physics departments in Europe and the US began to teach the theory of electromagnetism to physics and engineering students.

 

This electromagnetic field was real ... all we had to do was crawl a bit out of the cave.  Real and useful ..  trillions of dollars since then. 

 

Some of us are like that dog who has to chase the tennis ball all the time.  You ask the dog why and he looks at you like you just don't get it.  "It's the most thrilling and glorious thing!  How can you not do it?"  Scientists often  have difficultly communicating the beauty.   If I really know the subject I should be able to describe it with words and pictures rather than the math, although that is beautiful too.   I continue struggling as I work on improving.  For me one on one is better - stop me and take a walk some time.  Better yet is letting someone discover on their own.

 

I'm torn on the upcoming science marches.  I'll write something addressing it directly soon, but experience with protests tells me my time is better spent communicating locally and not lecturing.   Maybe if you can shake someone's imagination ...  In the meantime I'll try on neat things you can observe or do - amateur science on a personal level from bats to a sport like volleyball to a number of things.  stay tuned.

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¹ This addressed one of the fundamental problems Newton had with gravity - how did one mass manage to communicate with another?  It turns out something even deeper was at work, but fields are how much of Nature works at a fundamental level.  It seems a little weird, but you're made up of field disturbances.

² From the chalkboard during one of Feynman's freshman lectures.  If it isn't clear consider the conceptual model from shaking a charge.  I worry that too many of us find representations like this so beautiful that we stop there and assume people have the background to appreciate what's going on.  Although the special case of the shaking charge doesn't allow you to calculate anything , it does give insight to the non-physicist.  

 

Recipe Corner

 

Spring is here.  Asparagus!  Rather than offer a recipe I suggest you go out and experiment.  It is great steamed, roasted, pan fried, blanched, grilled and even raw.  Roasted nuts go well and, if you can find good early blackberries....

  

it's not easy being green

The lovely little cherry in front of our place says Spring is finally here.  It's beginning to leaf and currently is generating a bit north of a watt per square meter.  In a few weeks it will  throttle up to max cherry tree power.

 

Photosynthesis generates about three times as much energy per year as humanity uses. All of our food and most of the energy we purchase comes from it, but we usually don't walk by a tree and think - oh what a lovely oak and such a sunny day.  It's probably up to three or four hundred watts at the moment.¹   Photosynthesis never had to be extremely efficient, and it never evolved to anything close to the theoretical maximum.²   SciFi films sometimes show green skinned aliens who do photosynthesis, but it would be barely enough to charge their phones - if you were close to nude you'd be lucky to present a square meter  If you spent your time outside every day  might average about 25 watt-hours a day -- maybe a watt of power.  But throw on clothes and go inside and it falls apart quickly.  Anything that moves around and has a brain can't easily harvest power passively -- storage key to our existence.

 

For an idea of scale you need about a hundred watts of power to run your body - that's close to 2,000 nutrition calories a day.  If you could plug into a tree with perfect efficiency, you'd need a good sized one to keep going.  We do this by eating green plants or things that green plants eat, but you begin to get an idea of scale. 

 

Systems of all flavors and change radically with scale and purpose.   A car is a wasteful means of moving a person around ... payload to gross vehicle weight is often under five percent while something like a bicycle  is usually above eighty five percent.  Since most of us are unwilling and unable to spend more than an hour a day commuting and we like traveling by ourselves,  a car gives convenient range and energy costs have been low enough to justify enormous growth of the transportation mode.    

 

Now everyone is talking about autonomous vehicles.  Many assume we'll see something like Teslas or other conventional electric vehicles with the appropriate sort of computation.  I've written about such things - get in touch or check out Horace Dediu and Jim Zelmer's excellent Asymcar podcast.  Moving people in cities doesn't scale with payload to GVW ratios below a third or so.  Rethinking the vehicle is essential and there are reasons to think something like it could happen. 

 

I've done some work looking at single and two passenger vehicles with GVWs under 500 kg - sometimes much smaller.  If you keep the speed under about 40 km/h you're fine for most cities with good crash survivability and less expensive autonomy. Electrics and regenerative braking are a must in this regime, but aerodynamics are unimportant. Parking is a much smaller issue and navigation is easier.  Hybrid navigation schemes involving buried cables can happen.  With modest engineering thirty plus year life cycles outside of batteries and tires is possible, so you would probably wouldn't own one.   Not that this would happen, but it is probably much more practical than the Uber/autonomous schemes.   There are still some rather large social, data ownership, security and privacy challenges and none of this is going to happen overnight - the timescale of fleet replacement is about an order of magnitude longer than smartphones.  Along the way we're likely to see much of what we have now with much more computation for safety.  

 

Rather than write a book on the subject I'll stop here, but if you're interested there are reasons why the future could be different from the popular vision - in fact historically it almost always is.

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¹ There are a couple of ways of getting at this.  The quickest is to consider the surface area of the tree covered by leaves - the two dimensional cross section normal to the solar direction is a good first approximation, multiply that by the solar power per square meter at the time.  On a clear day at altitude with the Sun perfectly overhead it's about a kilowatt per square meter, but usually it's 500 watts per square meter or so in the Summer on a clear day at mid latitudes...  averaging for clouds and night and solar scatter gives you 150 to 300 watts per square meter in mid latitudes... about 240 world average.   Now plug in the photosynthetic efficiency of the tree..  generally 0.2 to 0.5 percent for deciduous trees.

Another way is to look at the biomass tree produces in a year and recognize the metabolic needs of a tree aren't huge.  It isn't moving around or thinking. 

° the average solar energy per day for this part of the country for April through September is about 4 kWh/m² per day and trees are in leaf about 220 days a year.  

° an average mature oak is about 50 feet tall.  I approximate the leaf area by a disk with a radius of 6 meters or an area of about 100 m²

this → 88,000 kWh for the oak per leaf season

° a 50 foot oak has a dry mass of about a ton - I'll call it a metric tonne.  It produces about 100 kg of new dry wood a year

° dry wood has an energy content of about 16 MJ/kg or about 4.4 kWh/kg

this → 440 kWh of energy from the dry wood and an efficiency of 440/88,000 or 0.5%

440 kWh/leaf season → 440kWh/(220 d * 24h/d) or a bit over 80 watts average

² Caltech is working on that one

 

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Vegan Meringue

 

I'm not kidding...  I tested the claim that you can substitute the brine from chickpeas.  Here's what worked .. better is probably possible.  I've had a couple of edible disasters and a couple of successes .. the trick on the oven door is important!

 

Ingredients 

 

° 6 Tbl of brine from canned chick peas 

° 1/2 tsp cream of tartar

° 3/4 cup of fine sugar (the finer the better)

° bit of salt

° 1 tsp vanilla extract

 

Technique

 

° oven to 250°F

° in a mixing bowl wisk the brine and cream of tartar with an electric mixer for a few minutes until it foams.  Add the sugar a bit at a time and keep wisking, when the sugar is mixed in add a pinch of salt

° as peaks begin to form mix in the vanilla after an eternity - over ten minutes for me - stiff peaks formed. 

° pipe it to a cookie sheet and bake about 45 minutes.  You need to do the meringue trick of not opening the door - just turn off the heat - for an hour or so to let them dry.  

 

the invention of the future machine

mauve

 

I found myself walking by the Fashion Institute of Technology on a very warm February day last week.   Even for me fashion and design students are easy to spot, but three sported solid mauve outfits which triggered a few neurons.  

 

If you've had organic chemistry, you've probably heard about mauveine.  William Perkins had been challenged by his professor to do something useful - namely synthesize quinine.  There were failures. In one the teenager noticed some purple bits of something when he washed the gunky blackish failure with alcohol.   He played around with it and found it to be an excellent dye.  Soon the first synthetic chemical dye was patented and entered volume production.   Mauveine was everywhere.   England's emerging middle class could afford color and fashion changed to reflect the new choices. 

 

Before the 1800s most of what we'd call science was done was done by solitary or small groups of usually wealthy enthusiasts.   In the early 1800s Germany chemistry in the support of consumer goods emerged becoming a big thing by mid century and spreading to England and France.  The product was any number of chemical "improvements" on hard to get or low quality natural products -  food products like beef extract, dyes, paints, and so on.  It became clear that a functioning industrial laboratory using the scientific method could be profitable - very profitable.

 

Around the time of the American Civil War England began to worry about it's place in innovation.  The 1851 Exposition was something of a triumph, but progress since then had slowed with Germany and France catching up and even surpassing them in many areas.  Something had to be done and the trigger was telegraphy.

 

First used as a signaling mechanism for railroads, telegraphy rapidly spread as business recognized its value as a general communication tool.  A transatlantic cable was a major goal in the 1850s, but early attempts failed with great financial losses.  Physicists identified the problem -  there was enough of a  basic understanding of signal transmission, but they didn't know how to scale it properly.  Also the people designing and building the cables had only the sketchiest notion of signal transmission and were making design decisions that were known to be bad.  The cure was to study the problem in a laboratory setting.  There it was possible to strip the problem down to its bare essentials and experiment at a practical scale away from the messiness of real world conditions.  It was possible to watch how it behaved varying one variable at a time.  A deeper understanding emerged with results that could be carried back into the real world where, mirabile dictu, transcontinental telegraphy finally worked.  More than a few businessmen profited handsomely not so much from the cable, but from the more agile business it enabled.

 

As scientists and engineers were learning about telegraphy in these university labs, a sizable group of young men (sadly women were rare) were being training.  Kings College and University College were major centers, but Cambridge resisted.  The maths department believed the function of a university was teaching subservience to your tutor.  An experimentalist is all about rebellion.  You were to take your tutor's word.   

 

Remember England worrying about it's place in science and innovation?  A Royal Commission on Scientific Instruction and the Advancement of Science was established.  It was chaired by William Cavendish Duke of Devonshire, a Cambridge trained mathematician who had become a successful businessman. Cavendish pushed a radical solution. Science education was to be made compulsory in secondary schools, new laboratories would be built using public rather than private money and laboratory science would take a seat advising public policy.  It was implemented in the mid 1870s with a scientific curriculum established in secondary schools along with professorships in science at the universities.  Students going to Cambridge began to demand laboratory science courses and degrees.  Resistance was futile.

 

Cavendish gave Cambridge a new laboratory named in honor of his physicist brother Henry Cavendish.   Perhaps his most brilliant move was attracting James Clerk Maxwell as the laboratory head.  

 

About a decade earlier Maxwell had created the first unification of physical forces and established field theory as way to look at Nature.  Enthusiastic about Nature in general, he worked on color vision among dozens of other things.¹  He had a belief that someone  intensely curious was better suited for physics than someone with pedigree.  Anyone was welcome, sadly as long as they were male - he had trouble being around women, and the natural sciences took off at the school.  To say it was a success would be understatement in the extreme.

 

In under a hundred years the way science was done had changed dramatically.  Originally it was accessible to untrained people who had an interest in the Natural world.  It was small and poorly organized.  It had become a sport where rigorous training - six to eight years of post secondary education at a minimum -  was necessary.  Laboratories had groups  of scientists and centralized apparatus.  A class of technician who knew the apparatus deeply emerged.  Serendipitous communication became common and it was relatively easy to perform experiments with apparatus that was closely matched to what you wanted to do.  The flexibility was astonishing.  

 

Having this specialized space was of central importance.  A great example is the X-ray.  J.J. Thomson of Cambridge heard about the German discovery and within two weeks he was able to create his own X-rays and, building on existing work he had done on charged gases, managed to discover the electron.   

 

The labs had directors with a vision for where the future might lurk, a community of local experts with a mix of skills, the flexibility to change direction quickly and a community of support staff who build, run and extend the experimental apparatus. 

 

These groups created the underpinnings for most of the technology we know today.  I would claim the emergence of these great university and later government and a few pure research laboratories was one of the defining developments of the 19^th century.

 

Sometimes discoveries takes decades to gel or unite with other discoveries before they make the leap into technology, sometimes it is very rapid and often it is the stuff of knowledge and beauty.  There is little way of knowing this upfront.  Unfortunately the move to make research more productive is shifting its focus from pure to applied research.   Both are important, but both are essential. 

 

There has been a cost.  Science developed it's own language.  It became so specialized that it took expertise to communicate results to the public.  Something was lost.  People are working on re-establishing communication.  Unfortunately that hasn't been very effective - at least in the US.  

 

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¹ It was tempting to title this post something like a color purple, but purple isn't a color in the sense of colors having a certain wavelength.  Rather it is an artifact of your mind created by two or more wavelengths striking your eyes,

Recipe corner

 

I'm still working on non-dairy "ice cream".  This is almost there and I can recommend it as a starting point.

 

Creamless Banana Ice Cream

 

Ingredients

 

° 5 ripe bananas -- like almost oozing ripe

° 2 tsp cinnamon

° 1/2 cup coconut milk (full fat)

° 1-1/2 cup almond milk

° 1 tsp vanilla extract

° 1/2 cup crushed chocolate..  anywhere from bitter to semisweet depending on your taste

° some maple syrup or brown sugar .. optional

 

Technique

 

° oven to about 350° F

° cut bananas into 1 inch pieces and put them on a baking sheet (you may want to line it)

° sprinkle cinnamon over the bananas, turn at about 15 minutes and go until they are brown and soft - about a half hour

° throw the bananas and all remaining ingredients except the chocolate into a blender or use an immersion blender.

° add cinnamon or a bit of maple syrup if not flavored or sweet enough

° stir in chocolate bits

° chill in the fridge

° churn freeze with an ice cream machine

 

 

 

 

the crystal palace's new expansion wing

 

What is a ruby and why is it red?  Why is the friction so low on a sled? On a plot of P versus T, plot out the the phases of helium-three....

 

A favorite professor loved to craft simply stated preliminary exam questions  that happened rhyme.  Parts were often difficult - here the second question is still not fully answered.  The ruby question is good as there are layers of depth to show how much you have thought about it.

 

 Sapphire, ruby and corundum are all very stable crystalline forms of Al₂O_{3 -} aluminum oxide.¹ In ruby and sapphire a percent or so of the aluminum atoms are replaced by something else - chromium in the case of ruby.  Chromium is a bit larger  and has a different shape than aluminum.  The result is a small distortion of the arrangement of oxygens around the chromiums.  The most obvious visual difference is how the  two crystals absorb light.  The distortions change how visual light is absorbed.  Pure corundum doesn't strongly absorb, ruby absorbs in the violet and yellow-green making it appear red.² 

 

Structure is one of the features used to categorize solids.  A crystal is a solid with a structure of atoms or molecules that repeat in three dimensions with a regular pattern called a lattice - single crystal snowflakes, table salt, diamonds... Groupings of smaller crystals form polycrystals - most metals, large snowflakes, ice and ceramics are polycrystals.   Amorphous solids lack such order .. glass and almost anything organic for example.

 

Impurities in crystals lead to changes in physical properties like the colors of gem stones. But there are many ways to disrupt a pure crystal lattice.  Some locations can be empty, filled with some impurity or dislocations to the pattern of the crystal can lead to strong steel. Impurities create different electrical properties that allow semiconductors to exist - without ongoing theoretical and experimental work from the 40s, the integrated circuit wouldn't exist.  

 

Steel is largely iron with a few other things thrown in. Carbon turned out to be a big winner, but you have to get the recipe right and there are tens of thousands of variations giving a wide range of properties.  Successful recipes were carefully guarded secrets .. the special steels used in Japanese swords, steels from Toledo and Damascus became legendary.  Sometimes there was a bit of odd baggage - one recipe involved adding the urine from red-haired boys.  Serious progress had to wait for real science.  

 

It is possible to have two dimensional structures with regular repeating patterns - graphene is a single layer of hexagonally packed carbon atoms. Amazing properties that lead in a recent Nobel prize in physics.  You can easily make some yourself with a pencil and a bit of scotch tape.³

 

But it gets stranger...

 

It is natural for a physicist to think in more than three dimensions.  Space-time, the structure of space and time  we live in, has four dimensions.  Other more abstract  hypotheses have eight, nine, eleven, twenty six. Calculations can have large numbers of dimensions. Sometimes this is practical in the real world - cryptology and cellphone modulation schemes both make use of higher dimensionalities.

 

So it is natural to think of a four dimensional crystal -- one in space and time.  And usually, for a variety of reasons, you quickly rule it out as non-physical.  Afew years ago Frank Wilczek didn't throw it away and presented the idea of a time crystal that exists in four dimensions.  The physical pattern is be stable, but a property of it repeats in time. Instead of regularly repeating atoms there would be a regularly repeating internal motion.

 

It was very controversial - it looked like a perpetual motion machine, but  loophole was spotted.  Properties like electron spin might  bunch up in direction at regular intervals in time ..  a repeating lattice in time.  As crazy as it sounds a few groups tried to make their own time crystals and two appear to have succeeded with papers passing peer review and due out in the near future.   Here's one of the early papers and a high level  description.  Much more is likely to emerge in the next few months.

 

Apart from being beautiful it has the potential to be incredibly useful.  Quantum computing has the fundamental challenge of maintaining entanglement over time in a macroscopic object.  It could be that time crystals are a mechanism to successfully address the problem and who knows what else... perhaps years, perhaps decades, perhaps never...

 

ah the frontier

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¹ In pure corundum three electrons from each aluminum join with six O^2- ions in an octahedral group.  The aluminums are left without unpaired electrons and their energy levels are filled.  This configuration is exceptionally stable and strong and is also colorless.

² There is also a fluorescent emission in the red making the crystals beautifully red.  This emission property is central to making lasers out of rubies.  

³ rather than tell you, just watch this:)

 

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Recipe Corner

 

Not a recipe, but a bit of technique.  It's Winter and that means reasoning with hard Winter squashes.  I find it's much easier if you par-cook (not boil) them for a few minutes.  Find a big enough pot and let it simmer for two or three minutes.  If the squash is larger than the pot, just turn it over.

That's it.  Now it should slice easily.  Something frustrating becomes easy.

degrees of separation

Some years ago I found myself at West Point talking about the sort of things a pacifist and a group of Colonels and Generals might find interesting.  It was near the holiday break and staff members had brought in a huge feast.  I mentioned to a Colonel that it struck me as unusual to see a number of dishes labeled vegetarian or vegan.  The next half hour turned out to be fascinating.

 

He was a professor of military history.  He said most people don't think of the military as progressive or inclusive, but often it leads the rest of society.  Historically men and women enlisted for a variety of reasons.  You can categorize the reasons, but there were reasons for young people from most areas of society.  The most difficult task in modern times, according to him, has been building trust among often very different groups that don't mix in society in general.  The task is costly and has a long record of failure mixed in with success, but it led to a heterogeneous force - a good thing when you're trusting your life to the next person whose sexual orientation, skin, or a dozen other things color violates the "truths" you were taught growing up.   

 

You rarely see this in companies where people look for good social fits - pre-trained people who can hit the ground running and mesh with existing teams.  Some of the great companies have been singled out for their ability to do great HR.  Being given a random assortment would be costly - too costly - and potentially lead to failure.   But, the Colonel said, society is best served when we move towards inclusiveness.  

 

The military has been failing for about twenty years.  Private contractors have replaced regular military for non-combat posts.  These are for-profit companies not tasked with the burden of getting people to learn how to get along with each other.  New recruits find themselves trained for nonexistent jobs (another problem) and, as the rewards of the military shrink, the recruit pool is becoming more homogeneous.  He made the case, for a variety of reasons, to return to the draft.

 

In the early and mid-90s some of us were trying to create interesting online education platforms -- MOOs, various forms of chat, video links and the like.  We had some success and tended to dwell on the great links across barriers ... ten year olds in Inuvik showing ten year olds in Costa Rica what happens when you throw boiling water into -40° air and the response the Costa Ricans made, children in New Jersey interacting and building digital creations with kids from France and India.  Native Americans in Northwest Montana learning story telling from language experts at Stanford.  We thought we could build tools and use the connectivity of the Internet to build bridges where none were imagined.

 

We were so naive.

 

When we looked at what was really happening dispassionately we found something very different.  The systems were being used heavily, not for connecting people of different cultures, but for kids chatting amongst themselves with those they physically knew. The good and bad of normal kid life was evident - including online bullying.  

 

At the time I was interested in the Victorian Internet ... the 19th century telegraphy system.  The 1860s had the equivalent of Byte magazine.  Skimming  twenty years at the New York Public Library was fascinating.  What started out as a technical how-to publication morphed into something describing the social uses, and abuses, of telegraphy.  Unauthorized chat was common among operators.  They devised use patterns very similar to early IM use.  The telegraph, where costs were artificially zero, became a tool that supported casual, always on, communication rather than being a tool of business.

 

For years we kept looking at students.  It was clear usenet, MUDS, MOOs and the like were very self-segregating.  We started seeing it in MySpace, but the real drama came with FaceBook.  At first you had to be associated with a university.  As soon as high school seniors got their acceptance letters many applied for a .edu email address and got their FaceBook login.  From here they found their friends and, well, kept in touch.  They self-selected roommates and did their part to reduce the diversity that a college offers.  Not because they were anti-diversity, but because it was easier to have an established set of friends in this new environment.  If they didn't know people, they'd listen and ask questions.  By September they arrive on campus and physically reunite with the members of their new clique.   They've routed about the serendipity of sudden change and recreated high school.   Smartphones have only made this easier.  I've heard Ivy League administrators bemoan this - their belief is one of the most valuable things they offer is the diversity they've created through their admissions process.

 

We know that diversity is good.  Diverse work groups tend to outperform homogeneous groups and diversity lowers the probability of serious conflict.  But in practice it can be, and often is, difficult.  We have a tendency to seek the same.  We create systems that are highly personalized giving us the chance to self segregate.  We renew drivers licenses online, unfriend those with different views, tune to channels that offer the entertainment and point of view we like.  We're getting very good at removing friction.

 

We may blame the googely googles the algorithms of Google, Facebook and others make us see corners of the online world through, but the first order effect is not that, but rather the path we choose. Most of us believe in diversity, but social science tells us we avoid challenge and self-segregate where possible without thinking about it.  

 

We're removing fiction from interaction systems. Some of this is a good thing - a very good thing - but there's a balance.  Consider the physical world as an analogy.  You may want to reduce fiction to move faster but try to have a basketball game or just run on a perfectly flat sheet of wet ice.  In the social sphere friction can have the serendipitous benefit of creating unexpected human interaction with people who are different.  Some of my richest experiences and dearest friends are the result of this sort of friction.

It has been proposed that social media can mix up the people you listen to and make your experience more diverse. Unfortunately just giving people challenging content doesn't increase empathy and compassion, but often decreases it. The only viable technique is to know and trust real people who have very different world-views. It is a lean-forward process.

 

We have some very powerful but imperfect social tools.  It is easy for us to use them to self-segregate and we may be doing this naturally without thinking about it.    How many of your friends vote the same as you, have roughly the same religious beliefs, are of the same ethnicity, culture, sex, age and so on..?    There's probably a distribution of challenge people accept, but we should be aware of our natural tendency to self-segregate and avoid challenge.  

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Recipe Corner

 

Oranges and Chocolate 

 

Ingredients

 

° 6 oranges 

° 3 or 4 tbl extra virgin olive oil

° 2 oz of good dark chocolate, 70 - 80%

° flakey finishing salt like Malden

 

Technique

 

° remove the peel and white pith and membrane from the oranges. Cut one end off each so the exposed end is 1-1/2 to 2 inches in diameter and reserve the ends. de-seed if seeded. 

° slice the oranges thinly and arrange on a serving platter partly overlapping

° squeeze the juice from one or two of the orange ends over the slices and eat the others

° drizzle the EVOO, grate the chocolate over the oranges and sprinkle on the salt 

 

 

 

Technique

 

 

moving into the post-cloud world

A few years ago my refrigerator crashed.  Some poorly written code put it in an unfortunate condition that forced a failure and the loss of quite a bit of food, and days without refrigeration.  . The product was out of warranty by a few months and I had to cough up $600.  The explanation was the computer controllers had a bug.  The current version of the product can connect to the Internet via Wifi.  Hopefully the code is tighter, but I have my doubts.

 

My 16 year old Audi has four wheels, an engine and about a dozen mostly isolated computers. These days new cars are networks of about one hundred computers that happen to include an engine and four wheels.   Thermostats are computers that regulate your indoor climate, TVs are computers that show video, refrigerators are computers that cool your food, ATMs are computers with money inside ... you get the idea.  

 

We're moving towards computers with deeper communications where commands to do something physical are sent back and in some cases towards autonomy based on local information from other machines.  We have sensing devices connected to some kind of "intelligence" that sends commands to do something in the physical world.   The world is becoming a robot of sorts.   One with a distributed intelligence working on distributed tasks and it happens to be evolving rather quickly.   

 

This is a fundamental change...  the notion of software eating the world is out of date.. it's much more complex. Some of the computation will occur in the cloud, but where realtime interactions are necessary - think autonomous vehicles - a good deal will take place locally.  Beyond the current notions of the web and the cloud.   This is the greatest change we've seen in the Internet and it comes with enormous challenges along with it's rewards.

 

Pick up your smartphone.  Although far from perfect, it's probably the most secure (particularly if it's an iPhone) network connected device you own.  Microsoft, Google and Apple spend an enormous amount of effort and money attempting to make these things secure and robust, but it's difficult.  In the early days software was enormously expensive to develop, but it often was very high quality.  The current model of software development is to develop rapidly with semi-skilled programmers and fix the bugs that turn up later.  Certain core elements may be high quality, but they're generally smallish in scale and very expensive.  The current known bugs list in OS X is in the thousands.  Windows is said to be in the tens of thousands.  Those are known bugs and many are too difficult to justify fixing.  They're often obscure and only turn up in unusual circumstances, but they can be exploited by smart people and, thanks to the scaling available on the Internet, major impacts can occur.  The big guys address this with regular software updates, but that's largely for modern operating systems on PCs and smartphones.  

 

How often have you updated the software on your router?  I've done it at least a dozen times in the past ten years.  The patches are not well publicized and tricky for inexperienced people to deal with.  Moving down to other objects... how about your DVR?  Many of them can't be patched by users yet they can become security risks.  You may own a DVR that was part of the Mirai botnet attack against the DNS provider DYN last October.  There is no market incentive for a device manufacturer like XiongMai to spend the money designing quality software and maintaining it when no one else is. Typically these guys have some semi-skilled person take some code they found on a server and hammer it into the required configuration for the device.  The malware will be online until the devices are physically replaced - ten years maybe.  You're not responsible for your part in the attack ... each individual bit is small and makes no difference on your connection and isn't degrading the performance of your DVR.  No one is responsible for providing a convenient platform that can cause serious damage and we're moving towards a world where damage takes on a new meaning. 

 

Imagine this on devices that physically manipulate the world around you.  Some, like cars, are moving towards autonomy a bit at a time.  In theory this should save a lot of lives.  Even if they are only half as good as human drivers, at scale they'd save about 15,000 lives a year and a huge number of injuries (although it isn't clear how the legal system is going to assign fault .. the automakers want a no-fault determination).  But what happens if someone or some organization decides to have a few hundred cars throttle up to 100 mph and point themselves at each other, pedestrians and bridges?  What about drones?  Or shutting off a million heating systems in the Winter while demanding ransom in Bitcoin? It would be nice to imagine you can design around this, but we're talking about complex systems far beyond anything we've built and our ability to test hasn't exactly kept pace.  

 

The security folks talk about three components of security - confidentiality, integrity and availability.  We worry mostly about the first one these days.  With scale and direct connection to the real world the later two become even more important.  Think about the implanted medical device metering out insulin when it comes to integrity and availability when it comes to directed kinetic energy devices otherwise know as cars...

 

There are two models of how to deal with this... the first is conventional certification and testing .. what cars, aircraft, medical devices - anything that can physically effect you - go through.  The operating system on the MRI machine I used last time is Windows 98 -- no security patches at this point, but it can't be upgraded as that would change the configuration of the machine when it was certified and the process of certification is long and expensive.   The second is the patch it quick model, but that has big holes in it too and small/cheap devices - those that add less than ten cents to the cost of a device - will probably be left out.  Furthermore the patches aren't exactly robust...  it is a game of wack a mole. Both of these models are inadequate.

 

On September 11, 2001 three airplanes successfully flew into buildings.  A shrink-the-government administration was motivated by fear and hacked together a huge new piece of government in under two months.  It was haphazard kludge, but fear is a huge motivator for the political class and voters.  At some point we'll see attacks on this emerging robotic computational layer that covers the globe.  Ideally something smart needs to be done.  This is a great opportunity space.

 

Notice that I've largely avoided talking about the confidentiality piece.  It's still huge but demands a long separate discussion.  We're learning that data can be a toxic asset.  If we're smart we'll be much more careful about what we store and what we connect. This isn't something that can be fixed with just technology.   Perhaps we'll see peak connection in the next decade or so - peak connection  in the sense that every new thing is not necessarily connected even though it could be. 

 

In short we're moving beyond software is eating the world to our computational objects are becoming part of our physical world.  Perhaps we're beginning to understand the purpose of data rather than just believing in it 'because'..    There are great possibilities, but also lurking dragons.

 

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Recipe Corner

 

Making cream soups without cream - or any dairy 

No recipe ... this is experimentation

Something I've sampled in a few vegetarian restaurants and have been trying to recreate...  The trick is to get the stock to vegetable ratio right - about five cups of stock per two pounds of veggies (carrots, celeriac, sweet potatoes, ...).  Cut the veggies into small pieces for quick cooking.  Heat with aromatics (onion, leeks, and garlic) in olive oil.  Add the veggies sweat for a few minutes.  Add the stock, bring to a boil then cut the heat and simmer until veggies are tender.   Now puree ..  I use a stick blender... you could transfer to a blender if you like.   If that's not creamy enough add some rice or oats .. about a quarter cup .. to the veggies when you add the stock.  

At least it's a jumping off point for experimentation.  I've had a few really nice successes and cooking soup in the Winter is approximately the right thing to do.