omenti

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. 

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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.

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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.

 

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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.

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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.

 

pathfinding and appropriate encouragement

Last night I caught a John Cleese interview.  In the US and UK, he complained, it's common to tell children how talented they are at something and that perhaps it is ok to not do well in something else because talent is the deciding factor.  In his experience that's entirely wrong.  Kids should be taught perseverance and to recognize that luck is extremely important.  

 

I mostly agree..  some things may come more easily to some people, but work and perseverance can get you a long way down the path.  Rather than pure luck I believe the act of paying attention and having the sagacity to notice when the new and interesting appears. Basically serendipity.  Cleese found himself in a serendipity generator of sorts when he joined a student comedy group at Cambridge. He immersed in comedy at the right level for learning the trade. Other than having timing he wasn't very good, but he stuck with it.  One thing led to another.. successes and failures, but it worked.

 

He made another point.  When he went to Cambridge he started into the sciences as he did well in tests.  Very quickly he discovered the other students actually enjoyed physics and chemistry and realized  that put him at a distinct disadvantage. He changed his major, but at least he tried and worked hard enough to recognize he didn't enjoy the science path.  When you get to a point where major focus is necessary it makes sense to take stock of what you like and take that path if there's a choice.  Of course this is at odds with current advice to get a degree in something that you can make a living at.  I'm afraid I have trouble with that as general advice.

 

The serendipity part is critical. My focus was initially far too narrow, but I managed to slowly branch out.  Sometimes, like John Cleese, you find yourself in a rich environment.  At other times you must concoct your own serendipity.  There are a variety of techniques - mine is tithing my time.  I devote ten or eleven hours a week to the projects of friends.  While it's not perfect, it's been an incredible education. 

 

Finally back to praise and perseverance.  I try to encourage others, but am parsimonious with praise.  Of course there are times when it's well deserved and it's always a wonderful example of perseverance. In that spirit I'll recognize one of you. Yesterday Sarah was named the best beach volleyball blocker for 2018-2019.   Here's a link to a short video compliation posted to Twitter.  Amazing Sarah!  Now on to Tokyo and a gold for Canada.

 

An update - today her teammate Melissa Humana-Paredes was named the best female defender in the world and together they are the best women's team in the world.

 

 

sending a message

My first week in grad school was disorienting.  It was the first time I had been East of the Denver, an introduction to serious heat and humidity,  and I didn't know anyone.  With all of this the letter in the department mailbox was welcome.  An invitation to have dinner with C.N. Yang - Stony Brook's only Nobel laureate .. and one of the really significant physics Nobels at that.  It said 7:00 PM sharp and noted nine others would be attend due to space limitations and asked us not to mention it as the other incoming students would be for dinners later in the semester. 

 

Another student and I had arrived early and rang the doorbell only to find a confused Professor Yang.  We had been set up.  As we apologized another student arrived.  He was probably busy, but he smiled and invited us in.  I didn't know what to expect. He was important as the chief liaison for Sino-American physics exchanges.  A few years earlier he had been tasked to lead the scientific exchange component of ping-pong diplomacy and now he was establishing a new center for theoretical physics and mathematics.  Add to that two graduate students and his own research and you wondered how he found the time for some lowly grad students.

 

He had a nice laugh and made us all at ease slipping out of the room to order several pizzas and beer.  He told us his childhood hero was Ben Franklin and we were to address him as Frank as that's what his friends called him.  The night was great.  We learned where everyone came from - only four of us were native-born Americans.  We learned some Chinese songs and a few of us stumbled through our own regionals pieces (I know you're wondering Jeri -- it was "I Ride and Old Paint").  We talked about simple physics that most of us hadn't thought about - like how does a train stay on the tracks. And I learned East Coast pizza was much better than anything I had in the West.

 

It was after ten when it was time to leave and he drove a few of us who didn't have cars back to the dorms.  We were asked to return the next week.   He sent a note around to all of the students telling them they would all be invited during the semester.   My little group went back a few more times and some of us had become friends.

 

The department was young.  He was setting the tone by example and had turned what was to have been a nasty prank into something that touched all of us.  He also showed us he was curious about nearly everything.  I had seen this in a few others, but he was so delightfully open.  

 

Some years later, when I was working at Bell Labs, a major earthquake struck an area of China where a visiting scholar my wife and I had become close with lived.  That evening Frank called us up to let us know he didn't know what had happened to Ge, but he knew we were close and would let us know as soon as he heard news.  A few days later the phone rang with happy news.

With all of the xenophobia and nastiness these days it is good to remember there are a lot of good people from everywhere.

 

 

vr

We experience the world as a smooth and constant stream of perception.  At least that is how we interpret it.  Reality is wildly different.  We only are able to perceive heavily filtered bits of the world around us through, depending how you count, about a dozen senses.  The resulting signals travel to the brain where they are woven into a reality even though they don't arrive at the moment we perceive them and they don't arrive at once.  Our present is a window about a second and a half wide that scrolls along seeming like an instant with some older bits of sensory information as old as fifteen seconds thrown in for good measure.  Our now is a fairly long now.  Interacting in real time, say catching a falling object, is limited by the faster perception components and give us our reaction time.  At the moment our muscles are commanded to act we don't have a complete picture of the moment as it is still under construction, but we don't realize it until later.  This can be troubling to some as it has implications about free will, but how the brain paints our version of reality - our personal virtual reality - is beautiful.

 

This ability to weave a reality in our mind makes reading a great author a powerful experience.  The vision from the pages can be incredibly rich - sometimes richer than the immediate reality we experience.  The same is true for music, but the images are more abstract. It is the enabling foundation of our love of storytelling.

 

Several types of systems referred to as virtual reality that have been in the news these days.  Most display computer generated stereo images to give the illusion of three dimensions along with some form of  located sound.  The user can move around and interact in these environments, although that tends to be restricted.  They're a far cry from how we sense where we are in space and how we perceive and move around in a real 3d space.  Stereo vision is only a component and there can be disturbing cross-talk from your other senses (like your inner ear) that can make the experience confusing and even nauseating.  A good deal of clever hackery has been done to minimize the bad effects, but we're a long way off from simulating location and movement - let alone sound and interaction.  What exists now is may be very good for certain classes of games and perhaps some forms of mostly passive storytelling where you do little more than look around.  Understanding how we use a new media has historically required a generation or two of artists to get to the point where good storytelling happens.

 

There are many other types of systems that use the sometimes use the label - augmented reality (Google Glass) where information is overlaid on a sense (typically vision) , enhanced reality - where senses are extended beyond what we normally can sense (extend your vision into the infrared or ultraviolet .. or add a magnetic field sense), simple multi-camera recording systems that capture 360° video and allow you to choose your view naturally by simply looking around, and so on.  I would argue that books should be on the list as an example of old technology and along with lucid storytelling.

 

How this develops and how it is used is up in the air.  Augmented reality has been used for years in industry and computer generated virtual reality dates back to the late 1960s at Evans & Sutherland.¹  Simple 3d stitchings like QTVR have been called VR when viewed through stereo displays.  There are some really interesting social science questions that have been difficult to tease out that are now doable as it is possible to put someone in another person's shoes for things like height and physical challenges.   

Everyone jumps to the remote workplace and conferencing, but I suspect we'll see a succession of niches.  Right now remotely piloted drones are used halfway around the world, robots that give presence in failed Japanese reactor buildings and Mars rovers, so we have a few good use examples.  It isn't clear how important the technology will be for conferencing and calling as people are highly adaptable to limits.  I was startled to learn that although people can detect the difference between 20 kHz stereo audio and 7 kHz mono, they often prefer the later and low fidelity, but intelligible audio on mobile phones is preferred to high quality audio by people under 25.  People also seem to be happy with low quality web images with poor and uncalibrated color fidelity.  A huge learning to me over the years is for many applications quality measured by engineering metrics doesn't matter much in the real world.

 

Another set of questions is who makes and who finds the standard uses of the developing technologies (these are often different groups).  The people who create the foundational technologies have historically been fairly clueless about projecting final use cases.  A few years ago I was compelled to write a post as a reaction to a danah boyd piece on sexism and VR. (the second half of the piece - I start out with Cosmos 2.0 and wander into sexual dimorphism).

And which senses are important for which applications?  How will we communicate forces -- touch, g forces.  How good does sound have to be? We're often more sensitive to that than to images and general sound field reconstruction is a hard problem. What about the gyro and accelerometer of the inner ear?  The list goes on and on.  Since the late 80s (a 25 pound helmet display, pulleys and a counterweight tethered to a half million dollars of computer) I've tried a dozen or so approaches to 3d vision VR and am always left feeling disoriented and nauseous.  This is true even with the latest Oculus kit paired with a $6k fairly exotic PC (that kept crashing) and content authored for the device.  I'm fairly convinced the approach doesn't play well with the neural wiring of my synesthesia.

 

But with all of the challenges at this point it is easy to identify a few bits of low hanging fruit as well as major obstacles.  We'll probably see a continuation of the gradual rollout of the technology that has been taking place for nearly fifty years.  I'd give it some time before it becomes a general displacing technology.  An observation is we place great value in 'being there' - a business meeting, conference, sporting event or vacation location may cost thousands of dollars to attend in person plus a good deal of time and inconvenience when a video and audio link of the same event is free.  Of course we know why now .. but what does it take to close the gap?

 

In the meantime there are some simple steps you can take to make video conferencing much better as well as a few that, while more difficult, would vastly improve the experience and even remove some embedded sexism.  And be sure and enjoy your own personal virtual reality.  It is far better than anything you're likely to experience in your lifetime and comes as a free feature of being a human.

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¹ Evans & Sutherland was something of an offshoot of the University of Utah.  It is interesting to look at schools that were visionary in hindsight.  The U of U had an outsized importance.  Pixar and Adobe have their roots there, computer generated art became real at the place - some people jokingly call the Utah teapot the sixth Platonic solid - the Teapotahedron:-)  The U of U was also one of the four original ARPANET nodes at the birth of what later became known as the Internet. And of course there was the dynabook - which has now been realized with the iPad.

 

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I played with an oil based garlic bread. Use one of those long crunchy rustic loaves .. like what garlic bread is made with.  I used a garlic infused oil as it was sitting around.  You could smash a few cloves and let them soak in oil for a few hours and brush the oil and what is left of the cloves onto the bread directly.

 

'Healthy' Garlic Bread

 

Ingredients 

 

° about 3 tbl of a garlic infused olive oil

° 1 tbl honey

° the of a half lemon

° some sea salt (about a tsp)

° a loaf of your favorite rustic bread

 

Technique

 

° put the olive oil, honey, lemon juice and salt in a small bowl and wisk

° slice the bread into good sized (3/4" for me) slices

° brush the liquid onto the bread and let it sit for a few minutes

° broil the bread until it browns and the edges get crispy

° let it cool a bit before service.