omenti

happy thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving to my Canadian readers!  

 

It strikes me as a better day for the holiday.  I grew up close to the border and spent time with family friends in Lethbridge, so there's an excuse to celebrate two Thanksgivings in my family.  The Canadians we knew use the three day weekend for being in the mountains and finished with a semi-traditional meal on Monday night.  There was also story-telling and projects for the kids and some of the adults.  Most art, but I tried to offer a little science project.  I still do that on occasion.It made me think of a friend.

 

I've mention Dianna Cowern aka.Physics Girl before.  She has a BS in physics from MIT and got into explaining bits of physics on YouTube.  Her long form videos are seriously better in terms of education, content and enthusiasm than anything on TV. ¹ A bit more than two years ago she came down with Covid shortly after getting married.  She's been dealing with an extreme from of long Covid since to the point of not being able to get out of bed, having constant nausea and brain fog and almost no energy.  Talking with someone for more than a few minutes is too much and her system has responded by making her allergic to many foods. There's a Patreon to help offset the costs so her husband can take care of her full time.  I'm sure any level is appreciated and you'll get roughly monthly updates and a look into long Covid from medical experts.  She's a worthy cause. 

 

Back to Thanksgiving... here are a few simple demonstrations you and your kids can do for the holiday - either now or the American one or some other day if you live somewhere else.

 

 

and one with no explanations.. but it shows the remarkable energy she had.. this is how I remember her. I keep hoping she recovers.  She's an amazing resource and an example for kids - particularly girls. 

 

__________

¹ It's funny how out of the classroom education and inspiration for sciency kids has changed over time.  In my day it was The Amateur Scientist and Mathematical Games columns in Scientific American and Sky and Telescope magazine. Later on it was Cosmos with Carl Sagan, the Quirks and Quarks radio show (still around and still great!) and some books aimed at curious teens and adults.  Now there are a few excellent YouTubers:  Physics Girl, Three Blue One Brown, Veritasium, and Numberphile. It's still best to work things out for yourself, but these can light up curiosity.

 

 

the passing of a star

I first ran into Dewayne at a wireless community conference in Taos in 1994.  We hit it off and became good friends, sometimes conspiring on odd projects.  His mother is 103, sharp as a tack,  and something of an icon.  One of the first African Americans to integrate a section of Detroit after WWII.  We all figured Dewayne had at least three more decades. Dewayne built on that.  I've never met anyone with a deeper understanding of radio - something he combined with a deep social commitment. 

 

About a month ago he called from a hospital room in Detroit.  Jaundice - the doctors were trying to figure it out.  The next day there was an emergency operation to deal with a blocked bile duct.  Then it was discovered he had stage 4 cancer.  He flew to California for better medical treatment and passed yesterday. The various communities he touched are in shock.  I won't list his remarkable accomplishments other than a Wired article from 2002 (he's done a lot since) and noting he had a large impact on the technical side of the FCC.  He was a great friend.  The last conversation I had was last Monday.  He ended it as he always did when he wanted to make a point - a quote from Battlestar Galactica:  So say we all!

The Wired piece

 

 

 

 

auteur and other fine words and phrases

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

__________

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

Danish (I know three Danes well)

klap lige hesten   "pat the horse" means shut up

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

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

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

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

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

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

Italian

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

Greek

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

Tagalog

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

Malay

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

Swedish

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

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

Welsh

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

Japanese

komorebi the sunlight filtering through leaves on the trees

boketto gazing into the distance without thinking about anything

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

German

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

freudenfreude finding joy in the success of others

Yiddish and Yinglish

shlimazel someone who seems to only have bad luck

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

Bantu

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

French

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

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

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

I'll stop here..  

 

 

 

 

 

stalking breadth and serendipity

Randall Munroe has this wonderful way of stating depth. (via his wonderful xkcd)

 

It's been fashionable to talk about information overload for some time, but the amount of information we and our machines make is almost infinitesimally small next to the amount information in the natural world. We don't directly experience the world. Rather we rely on heavily filtered senses to feed models our mind creates.  Even the stand types of information we rely on - images and sound - represent only a tiny bit of what's out there. 

 

We've become adept in building models to understand what's going on.  In the late 19th century a few physicists developed statistical mechanics - a mathematical construction that allows you to consider enormous numbers of objects (say the air molecules in a room) and be able to accurately describe what's going on as well as well as what will happen.  It was an enormous leap in thought that directly led to the development of quantum mechanics a few decades later. Here's one of the best introductions to a field I've seen in a textbook: from States of Matter - a sophomore/junior level text by David Goodstein. (image grabbed from the ebook)

 

Science has given us tools and techniques to extend our vision beyond our senses.  The development of lenses for microscopes and telescopes, judged by the avalanche of knowledge they led to, may be the most important invention of the past millennia.

 

We have a difficult time sorting out information we and other people produce.  Generally we use a combination of active and passive filters. These filters change with both experience and technology.  We often find ourselves cutting out more than we should. We often live and work in 'echo chambers', surrounding ourselves with information from similars.  Some sociologists refer to this as cocooning,  a term I prefer. Machine learning produced cocooning is very real and an active area of study.

 

A trick is to create active filters that provide breadth.  The one I practice is regularly read and talk to interesting people outside my area.  There are a lot of smart people out there who are willing to share, but there are a couple of tricks.  First you need to describe what you do in a manner that they can get a good-enough understanding.  They have to do the same.  This can be very difficult - it's like teaching an introductory course or writing a book and often, as a by-product, sharpens your understanding of what you do.  Second you need to develop a working understanding.  I find offering whatever I can bring to work on their problem to be both fascinating and useful. It's one of the main reasons why I tithe my time to 'help' others.  In fact it's a type of homemade university I've created.

 

These conversations or library ramblings sometimes break down.  The secret weapon, should you be lucky enough to know one, is a human impedance match.¹  The rare ability to ensure a good-enough two way information transfer.  I know of two (there may be more) on this list and feel lucky to know them. 

 

Sometimes you can put together a serendipity machine.  I've been around two - possibly three - so far.  A small group of people with a very wide range of backgrounds who know, understand and respect each other and their differences.  Put them in a comfortable place - face to face is important as a good deal of out of channel communication goes on - and let them range. The topics may be concerned with an engineering issue, but somehow jump to 13th century Sicily and that jump, realized a few months later, was the productive insight.  That group was in the spirit of Ted Lasso's Diamond Dogs, although it usually met on Friday afternoons with meetings the ran from four to ten hours.  It isn't terribly efficient, but can be fun and produce very interesting ideas and understandings. 

__________

Finally Pip talked about the need to communicate something positive as a counterpoint to the negative news and social  media message we usually get.   So here goes - a short story of great fun and imagination. Chivalry by Neil Gaiman. It must be listened to rather than read from the page. Only a half hour, the performance I recommend is from the Selected Shorts series with Christina Pickles doing the honors. Simply wonderful! About $3 at the Apple Bookstore and probably the same at Amazon.

__________

¹ I first came across electronic impedance matches as a teenage amateur radio builder and operator. Without going into detail,  a signal in the form of an alternating current usually has different values in different "boxes".  If  a signal goes from one box to another of differing impedance, there is a loss of signal.  An impedance match minimizes the loss of signal.  The example I fought as a kid was making sure the impedance of my transmitter matched that of my antenna.   (the same analogy works for power transmission)

A human impedance match often probes the two people figuring out what questions to ask and clarifications to add to increase the level of understanding on both ends.  It's a skill I work on, but still lack after all these years.

 

 

 

beyond abracadabra

More than a few in my line of work, particularly those from the generation before me, are amateur musicians.  The first time it became clear to me was in Gale Dick's living room on Friday evenings. He loved to play the violin and had a nice homemade harpsichord as well as a piano.  Friends would come to play, or in my case just listen to, chamber music.  Regulars included a couple of physicists, a mathematician, a chemist, as well as some real musicians who seemed to enjoy themselves anyway.  It was great fun and the beginning of a life-long addiction to live music, even though I'm just a lurker. 

 

Years later I asked Gale if he understood the connection.  He paused and then replied Bach letting it sink in before elaborating.  Bach ... you see, so much of it has beautiful symmetries...   He recalled when he was coming to grips with group theory in grad school.  The year before he'd come across Noether's Theorem and was blown away.¹  Years later, deep into the thicket of a difficult problem,  he found himself playing a Bach violin sonata in his mind.  

Then magic crackled and the work I was doing connected rather profoundly to those other areas. 

Words came easily to him and new ones, or at least ones I couldn't find in the dictionary, would appear.  As he described the violin sonata sequence, one I hadn't heard before appeared:

You see, Bach's music is this abracadaptor that connects two different kinds of magic giving birth to something that is also magic.

 

That was a long time ago.  Years later I found myself giving a talk at Disney Animation.  After lunch I spent the afternoon chatting with a number of people.  Then it happened.  We were talking about the curious physics that often appears in cartoons.  He said that Walt Disney had a set of rules that defined how things moved in his world building.  The rules are good enough that most survive intact. 

They're the abracadaptor that connects the original story with the artwork.  When it's well done the resulting magic is better than what went into it. 

 

Today I found myself using it in a text message to Sarah.  The beach volleyball season that ultimately determines selection for the Paris Olympics begins in Doha tomorrow.  She and her new partner Sophie have only been playing together for a short time and are still working things out.  

You’re armed with some new knowledge and are likely making great progress putting your abracadaptor into regular operation.°

° abracadaptor. n. - A mechanism or technique that connects two different kinds of magic.

 

There are people who do this: that rare skill that allows them to connect the conversation of those with very different backgrounds creating a deep and wonderful communication.  It's a skill I lack and I'm in awe of the few who can do it.  I like to use some engineering terminology to describe these people - impudence matches.  At its highest level two different magics are connected creating something deeper and an abracadaptor is afoot.

 

__________

¹ Don't worry about either of these if they sound foreign.  Both are important tools in the study of symmetry and deeply connected with physics.

 

28 years!

This is the original holiday card I sketched back in 1994 along with a bit of midi. I borrowed a Wacom tablet and made a few strokes with the pen - a minute's worth of work.  The music took longer.  The web was new so I posted it on a server under my desk at work.  I didn’t have enough time or imagination to make some new the next year so it returned unchanged.  The third year rolled about and I would have forgotten about it, but there were a few dozen requests.  From then on it went up every year on or soon after Thanksgiving in honor of the Winter Solstice holidays.  It’s a survivor having been hosted on five different servers over the years.  For the silver anniversary I though about drawing something new and held a vote.  The old card stays - it was unanimous.

Now it’s 28 years old.

the original holiday card

Autoplay didn’t exist then so you’ll have to start the music yourself.

Happy Holidays! - peace, friendship, and health to all.

Steve

 

 

five years past a mentor

Nancy White is someone who knows a thing or two about the dynamics and information flow in meetings and collaborations.  She recently reposted a bit on the value of the clown in a meeting.   I was fortunate enough to work with a magnificent clown who also happened to be a mathematician and the most joyfully playful person I've met.  

 

In a few weeks five years will have passed since Norm's sudden death.  I wrote a short remembrance of what he meant to me that evening.  I'm always been a believer in the value of playfulness in what you do, but he helped me realize the sky didn't  begin to touch the limit.  

 

Here it is.  

(yes - he often wore curious hats)

May you be so lucky as to have the powerful magic of a joyful and brilliant clown in your midst.

 

 

celebrating a friend

Sarah Pavan is a good friend who happens to be a world-class professional beach volleyball player.  In 2019 she and teammate Melissa Humana-Paredes were the world champions.  The video is of the semi-final match against Tokyo gold medalists April Ross and Alix Klineman.  Very high level volleyball in torrential rain for part of the time.  The ball behaves very differently went wet and there were more errors than normal, but also some terrific plays. Melissa injured her left shoulder early in the match, but was able to continue play.  Amazing volleyball from the best players.  There are video dropouts in the first few minutes, but that's before the match is underway.

 

The Canadians went on to silver and the Americans bronze the following day.

__________

 

Sport are an excellent vehicle for getting people engaged in science.  There's also a good deal of serious science involved and some open areas for work.

 

 

lightning in a bottle

Last week I had my first face to face group meeting since early March. Seven of us set up lawn chairs in a distanced circle on a beautiful lawn.  Apart from not being able to hear each other without speaking up and needing something better to draw on, it was wonderful.  I could talk about the out of band signals that face ot face conversation has, but something else struck me.  Our group tells stories and listens.  We have a real dialog - our group is smarter than the smartest individual. 

 

Dialog was one of the terms the social science group I was associated with banned.  Many people equate dialog with debate.  My favorite way to communicate with small groups (often one other person) is to have a dialog.  We tell stories and listen to each other discovering and learning about each other and ourselves along the way. Both of us can be smarter than each of us as individuals.   Debate - where one person says something and the other challenges  - is the opposite of dialog.  It attempts to convince.  When people with different strongly held opinions engage in debate both parties are dragged into the mud.  Debate fuels emotion and happens to be easy to jump into and highly addictive.   It's a form of communication that is easily weaponized with the aid of machine learning to promote engagement and sell advertising. 

 

Social media platforms focus on social comparison, competition, competition, unsupervised debate and so on. Some allow isolated groups where learning and dialog can place, but tools rarely support that and these groups depend on excellent moderation to survive. 

 

Zoom and other conversation tools have a lot of warts, but allow open conversation that can be turned into dialog. They tend to use subscription models.  People have speculated on the design of real dialog platforms, but I suspect much of the magic is in the same category of picking the perfect members of a team.  My friends tend to be those I can have interesting dialogs with - those who I can learn from.  i only hope our conversations are half as useful to them.

 

There's a special kind of dialog.  The face to face meeting I mentioned had little breadth in educational background.  We get things done, but I've found a lot of creativity seems to happen after talking to or working with someone who is smart, but in a very different field.  The process of learning from them seems to populate and connect parts of your mind that had never connected. Two weeks ago I had a long conversation - a dialog - with someone who is very different.  Over the next week new thoughts came almost daily and one gave me insight into something I've been thinking about for over a decade.  Lightning in a bottle dialogs.  Are there ways to support them?  I suspect the answer won't come from technology.

 

 

 

 

 

a 33 year old olympian writes a letter to her younger self

Sarah's letter is excellent - even if you're not a sports fan. 

It seems like a good exercise in self-reflection and I briefly considered writing one to myself.  Of course if I received a letter I'd think: "OMG! time travel exists!" which, of course, it doesn't, but..   I'd probably tell myself not to focus on a goal, but rather pay attention to the path.  Next would be to recognize serendipity in the sense it was originally intended - to have the sagacity to recognize and opportunity and act on it. Listen more and finally become more well-rounded - to have more range.  In the end my life has played out very differently than I expected and has been much more interesting.

Quarantine or not, many of us will have a bit more time to reflect.  Writing a letter to your teenage self might be a good way to spend some of it.