omenti

a covid-19 recovery story and psa

A departure from the norm - something worth the read and potentially useful.

 

This is from an old Bell Labs colleague .. the story of how they helped his 89yr old stepfather in Brooklyn. This is no substitute for real medical advise, but might give a sense of reasonable supporting steps. Pulse oximeters are cheap ($25 to $50) and a good way to check your blood oxygenation level. Finding an oxygen concentrator would be a big challenge these days. If you see low reading early on it may be possible to take early steps and this may be increasingly useful information as more is learned about treatment.

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Sharing a miracle! My 89 year old stepfather Richard, was saved by love, science, creativity, and courage. He tested COVID-19 positive on March 19, with fever, fatigue, and a cough, followed by weeks of extreme exhaustion, spiking fever, and bacterial pneumonia. Now he’s been fever free for ten+ days and is gaining strength daily.

This was a miracle not only because COVID-19 can be so dangerous for any of us but even more so based on his age (he is almost 90!) combined with multiple underlying conditions. We are so grateful to see Richard on a path to recovery now; our goal for this post is to share what we did and what we learned with a goal to help others battling COVID-19.

Below are more than a dozen actions that were taken as an extended family to help Richard fight the virus at home, avoiding the need to go to hospital:

1. Pulse oximeter: we purchased an inexpensive ($25) but essential device in the home to measure blood oxygen levels. Levels need to stay above 90 otherwise a doctor should be consulted; measurements are taken multiple times a day, in tandem with temperature checks.

2. Oxygen concentrator: Richard’s doctor prescribed an oxygen concentrator because his blood oxygen levels were in the 80s. A portable, lightweight, battery powered, multi flow oxygen concentrator (Inogen device) was acquired for him as a result. Think of this as an practical in-home option between normal breathing and a hospital ventilator; it can be used in conjunction with the oximeter for measurement and can be covered by insurance/Medicare, if prescribed by a doctor.

3. Respiratory therapist: A respiratory therapist came to the home to demonstrate how to use the oxygen concentrator; this visit was included as part of receiving the oxygen device.

4. Crowd sourced masks, gloves, and hand sanitizer: hitting roadblocks at pharmacies and online sites, we received a heartwarming response from family, friends, and extended networks sending home made masks, gloves, and hand sanitizer from all over the country.

5. Simulated hospital environment: knowing the severe challenges at NYC hospitals in COVID-19 wards, we did everything we could to keep Richard at home, effectively creating a simulated hospital environment but with the comfort and care of being at home with a loved one.

6. CDC home protocol: my mother followed CDC home protocols for disinfecting and mask usage, ensuring her own safety and physical health, critical for a sustained role operating 24 x 7.

7. Virus warrior mindset: the battle at times was as much psychological as it was physical, and my Mom and Richard were champs of the highest order, mustering extraordinary emotional strength at times to keep going when darkness was pervasive.

8. Breathing and movement exercises: Richard’s doctors recommended a set of breathing, stretching, and walking exercises which he did three times a day. In the beginning it was daunting; over time, he was able to steadily increase the number of repetitions.

9. Virtual Urgent Care: we arranged for my mother to have a virtual urgent care visit, using an iPhone app with video streaming to consult with a doctor on her own health.

10. Real World Urgent Care: we finally found an Urgent Care facility in Brooklyn that would treat COVID-19 patients and had an x-ray machine, after trying more than ten different options at the time; many facilities were closed or refused any one with COVID-19. They did a blood test and a chest x-ray using remote radiologists to read the scans, confirming the bacterial pneumonia diagnosis and prescribing antibiotics (see below); this was much easier than visiting an emergency room at a hospital and a key bridge towards recovery.

11. Nurse/home health aide: we worked with a firm that specializes in home care for COVID-19 patients to bring in an experienced nurse/home health aide at a critical time, to help out for three days in a row.

12. Food and pharmacy delivery, and car services: Family members brought chicken soup to the front door. Delivery services brought food to make it practical to stay in. We had to try more than a dozen car services until one was found that agreed to take COVID-19 patients. A local pharmacy delivered supplies to the home.

13. Hydration and electrolytes: Throughout the height of the virus, Richard had little to no appetite. The doctor impressed upon us how critical it was to drink lots of fluids complemented by drinks with electrolytes such as Gatorade and Pedialyte. For nourishment, a drink such as Ensure can be helpful; for those with diabetes, Glucerna is an easy way to support nourishment.

14. Dual track antibiotics: A combination of Azithromycin and Cefdinir, running for ten days, was effective to battle his bacterial pneumonia. The use of these antibiotics was a key turning point in his recovery. However with viral pneumonia this approach may not be applicable. Note that early on hydroxychloroquine was ruled out due to cardiac risks and limited testing.

We hope that this summary of the approach that we took was useful and can help others battle COVID-19 in the broader war to fight this powerful virus and return to normalcy over time. It’s worth noting that love and care from immediate and extended family, along with friends and colleagues, played a critical role to aid recovery; although this can only go so far with respect to the real world ravages and harsh statistics of this disease, don’t underestimate the role love and care can play in this type of miracle, complemented by the application of science, creativity, and courage.

the great reset?

I've been on the lookout for signals in this wild storm and offer a few early comments.  They aren't terribly well thought-out, so take them with a grain of salt and in the spirit of encouraging those who are more observant of change. 

 

Society didn't screech to a complete halt when an army of workers and students went home.  Communication services on the Internet are providing connection for most of us, but perhaps the nature of what we're doing is shifting. People seem to be valuing voice or video one-to-one links over text messages and email.  We're spending more time talking to people we haven't connected with in awhile.   Synchronicity with the rich non-verbal communication that comes with vocal inflections and the visual physical mannerisms that we're wired to understand are suddenly valuable again.  It's not as good as real presence, but with the mistakes, pauses, silences,  emotion and even the electric excitement of authentic human conversation it's the best many of us have.

 

Unedited imperfect personas facilitated by a network connection.  Authentic communication rather than the heavily edited unauthentic asynchronous online personas of FaceBook and Instagram.  Apart, but not alone.  What an inefficient use of attention :-)

 

A belief I've held since I began to work with anthropologists and sociologists 25 years ago  is human relationships are necessarily inefficient.  Think about walking on on a sidewalk in the Winter covered with freezing rain and the same sidewalk in the Summer - enough friction is a feature.  The drive for efficiency in many social tools ignores the need for social friction.   We've been trained to be inauthentic online.

 

Are we witnessing a shift?  If so will it last?

 

We need to make choices and perhaps now we're getting an opportunity.  Zoom is clearly more efficient and may be preferable to normal meetings for some, but what is the balance and purpose of your connection?  We should think about that.  I worry that some will see online education as "better" - I won't go into it here, but consider that disastrous for many fields.   And then there are personal assistants - I'm in agreement with Sherry Turkle: we need to think carefully about their place and the tech community is intellectually underpowered to tackle the thorny questions.

 

One more thing.  Some of us are finding a bit more time on our hands.  Be on the lookout for serendipity and seize it appears.  I was lucky this week and will keep looking.

 

Stay well and stay safe!

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.

 

hacking creativity and collaboration

A recent Bell Labs reunion celebrating the 50^th anniversary of Unix gave me a chance to visit with old friends I hadn't seen in a long time.  Some of the people had moved into industry (Google was a popular landing place) and others found university posts.  I found myself thinking about the differences between the evaluation process of major research universities and the old Bell Laboratories.

 

In a run that lasted about five decades Bell Laboratories - call it Bell Labs Classic - was arguably the most applied research organization in the world.  There were certainly warts and missed opportunities and it effectively came to an end about five years after the mid 80s breakup of AT&T, but it was an astonishing place while it lasted.  I'm continually been struck by differences between that institution and almost everything else I've run into.

 

In universities hiring and promotion (tenure and beyond) is strongly connected to ten or so recommendation letters from leaders of the field in different universities. The authors are almost always experts in the same subspecialty as the junior researcher.  Bell Labs was different. There was an internal ranking that extended throughout the research organization. A department head would rank their people and the results were merged with the rankings from the other department heads in the same center. These rankings would then go through the same process for the next two levels up until a ranking of the entire institution existed. An expert in a field might receive fantastic marks inside their department, but do poorly further up in the process as others might be unaware of them. Interdisciplinary work would stand out and the highest ranked people tended to have one solid speciality along with work in centers far removed from their own.

 

I entered the Labs as an experimental particle physicist. There were a number of physics groups, but no particle physics. I was initially assigned to an applied physics group and found myself working with a number of other groups as I scrambled to find my way. In the process I made connections inside and outside the center and found some encouragement to trade help with others.   All researchers were given the title of  MTS  - member of the technical staff.  It resulted in a certain equality that made approaching others easy.  

 

Most researchers weren't interested in management, but there was one small step up.   If you were in the top ten percent or so for a number of years you became a distinguished member of the technical staff and given more freedom. In my case I was initially given a day a week and resources to do anything I wanted.  Those projects were all collaborations far from my home organization. 

 

Guaranteed funding for pure and applied research went away about five years after AT&T's breakup and folks had to attach their work to business units. It’s what killed Bell Labs, but realistically it was the only logical path for the company at the time. Bell Labs Classic could only exist as part of a regulated monopoly, but that’s another story.  

 

Some universities are playing around with this kind of ranking to stimulate interdisciplinary work. I don’t think it works in industrial applied research.. at least not at scale, but it might be worth considering.  Of course there are different mechanisms in other organizations - places like Pixar - but the difference between Bell Labs Classic and research universities is quite possibly the result of collaboration encouraged by a simple ranking process.

 

imperfect storms

It's sad and frightening watching the fires in California. With the likelihood that some fires were triggered by power lines in high winds there are massive precautionary power blackouts. The result is an enormous amount of blame aimed at the already troubled power utility. That's only part of the problem.

 

Globally fire seasons have grown in length along with fire size and frequency. Australia, Siberia, Alaska, and the Western US and Canada have been hard hit in recent years. Much of this is from changing climate patterns driven by global warming, but some is the result of mismanagement and a failure to adapt.. Summaries found in the scientific literature are very clear: we need to recognize fire is natural - forests and grasslands need to burn periodically. We have to adapt to fire rather than completely subdue it. We need to reduce fuel near our infrastructure and homes in the wildlife-urban boundary regions. Easy to state, but very political and difficult in practice.

 

Better practices will probably emerge for property owners and hopefully new construction won't take place in the wildlife-urban boundary regions. Getting political acceptance for prescribed burns and letting nature shift the types of forest to what would naturally occur is going to be difficult. One worries the focus will be on bandages like shifting management and ownership of electric utilities, building microgrids, undergrounding transmission lines, and so on. Some of these might have merit on their own, but they divert attention and resources from real solutions. In the meantime blackouts are about the only short term lever to pull.

 

I suspect this is a good example of the need for a regional adaptation to deal with global warming fueled climate change. Most parts of the world have some local dangers that bring death and damage to some and inconvenience to many more. This will be a growing trend, but mitigation and adaptation can make a difference. Dealing with fire has known solutions. Too bad they’re not socially popular.

 

And a final comment.. why has this become bad so suddenly.  It seems likely there's no single case, but some of the inputs have a good deal of natural variability and perhaps we're seeing just that - a resonance.  That would suggest the likelihood of near term repeats is probably low.  On the other hand maybe this is one of those sudden accelerations similar to what is occurring in the Arctic.  Either way the long term prognosis is not great so it makes sense to become more clever and take clueful action.

__________

 

I first sent this as an email and received a few angry replies.  Mostly along lines like: this isn't global warming, or it's an evil power company that needs to be taken over, or why do Easterners complain about little snowstorms when we have this...  In fact local climates are changing and that we have to adapt.  It will be messy, expensive and in some cases lives will be lost and there will be issues we haven't thought through. Mitigation efforts can reduce these adaptation expenses and are generally seen as cost effective although they're a bet on the future many aren't willing to take. Adaptation will be expensive, but if we're smart we can find clueful paths.  We need to be planning and building now.

 

giving time a hand

Hold out your palm and point it skyward.  Every second about one muon will strike it.  Muons are the most common remnant of cosmic ray collisions with the upper atmosphere that make it to sea level.  They're responsible for some genetic mutations and even cancers, but the levels are low enough that we really don't have to think or worry about them much.

 

When I was about thirteen I came across a cosmic ray experiment near the summit of Sulphur Mountain in the Canadian Rockies.  I've described the experience before - two young physicists had the patience to explain what they were doing to a kid. When comic rays collide with molecules in the upper atmosphere a lot of debris is produced - mostly in the form of subatomic particles.  Some have very short lifetimes and don't make it far.  Muons live long enough to make it down to sea level.  But there's a twist.  The half life of a muon is about two point two millionths of a second.  Even if it traveled at the speed of light it would have traveled about six hundred and sixty meters.  Most of these collisions take place a few tens of thousands of meters up. The trick is when we look at something moving very fast, time for it appears to run slowly.  The number of muons making it to your hand is a manifestation that time is relative. 

 

My mind was blown

People put up Stonehenge type markers in the prehistory to note seasons and other special dates.  Moving closer to historical times a variety of sundials were developed.  Clouds and night made them problematic and, depending on design and the skill of the observer, they were frequently only good to an hour or so.  Even so the some Romans had no trouble complaining about them forcing a structure on life.  The Romans moved a bit further  timing devices in the form of water clocks and hour glasses.  Water clocks were used to limit debate in the Roman Senate as well as arguments in legal proceedings.  But time was still mostly for special occasions and localized.  Most people relied on an approximate natural rhythm from cues from the sun and stars.

 

The thirteenth century saw the invention most associated with modern time. The mechanical escapement is a bit of cleverness that converts an oscillation into a ratcheted advancement in one direction.  In a clock a pendulum's swing causes a gear to turn one notch at a time.  The first use was in the church with pendulum driven bells to call the monks to prayer.  Several decades went by and dials appeared allowing the visual estimation of time and a key driver of the Industrial Revolution had appeared a few hundred years early.

 

Since then mechanical time managed to penetrate deeper and deeper into society.  The Industrial Revolution demanded workers at factories at certain hours.  Home clocks were affordable to some households, but reliable alarm clocks were still expensive enough that the profession of the knocker-upper - someone you would hire to wake you up by a certain time - persisted in England until the twentieth century.

 

Now we have accurate portable time and increasingly an expectation to make use of our time. And now if clocks were limited to an accuracy of a second every century, much of our modern technology would no longer work.  Sometimes it seems as if we're to be optimizing the time we have.  We're admonished - or we admonish ourselves - against "wasting" time.  For many being bored or having idle thoughts is somehow wrong.

 

Our sense time in our brain is very non-linear and irregular and an active area of study.  Almost certainly there is no master clock.  We seem to have individual interactions.   I find I require a fair amount of idle time to daydream, think and make associations that don't seem to happen when I'm filling my time "slots."  I can only be creative if I'm bored at some level.  

 

When I began to work out of the home I made it a point to take a walk in the woods across the street every day I was around.  You begin to notice the cycle of the seasons, and after a few years other patterns emerge.  It's been about fifteen years now and the experience grows richer with time. Some of this Summer seems to echo with one eleven years ago and other parts seem unique.   There are cycles for the trees, flowers, weeds, deer, wild turkeys, coyotes, bats, weasels and so much more.  You experience some visually, some with sound and some at time and audio scales we normally don't notice (I often take along a microscope or a box that allows me to listen to ultrasound.)

 

Hold your arms out side to side.  Imagine the distance from the furthest tips to be the age of the Earth - something like four point five billion years.  Now take an emery file and take a few swipes from the fingernail that is touching the present.   Now look at that fingernail.   You've completely eliminated the period of human civilization. 

 

I worry that humanity is failing the marshmallow test -  where you give a little kid a marshmallow and tell him there will be two if he can save the one he has for wait for your return.  Many key countries can't visualize the generation or two ahead to confront global warming.  Perhaps we'd be better off if more of us moved a bit away from the forced regulation of our clocks and allowed more opportunity to consider the broader world.

moonshine

"Land sakes"

 

A hot Sunday afternoon almost exactly fifty years ago.  My sister and I were on the couch next to my Grandma King.  Walter Cronkite was out connection to the small spacecraft as it slipped towards touchdown on the Sea of Tranquility.  I was just a kid, but I knew this might be one of the most dramatic moments I'd witness.  About then she said those two words and I had another realization.

 

Spacings between the generations on my mother's side were large.  I never met my Grandfather - he died working as a telephone lineman for the Bell Telephone System in Utah, Idaho and Montana years before I was born.  He was born a few weeks before Custer's Last Stand.  Grandma was born in 1889 in the Territorial Utah theocracy.  She would tell stories of the first motor car she saw, of a Butch Cassidy-like thug who ran a small business protection racket, when she read about the Wright Brothers a few years after they flew, and why moving pictures were awful (the batteries emitted a stink).  They didn't have indoor plumbing until 1940, but the big event was getting electricity around 1930 .. bigger than indoor plumbing, bigger than their Ford.  We couldn't get her on an airplane.  Airfares from Great Falls to Salt Lake City were cheaper than riding the dog, but she heard about crashes for much of her adult life .. in fact real air safety didn't begin until the mid fifties, so she wasn't that far off. 

 

And here she was watching glowing phosphors on a piece of glass, listening to a human voices coming from thousands of miles away along with two that had traveled by radio requiring about one and a quarter seconds to find antennas on Earth..

 

What happened in the next few minute was breathtaking, but I found myself wondering if her life spanned greater fundamental change than any other time in history.  Would she see more fundamental change than I would?   You start thinking about what fundamental means,.  It still keeps me up at night.

 

Now there is talk about going back - sending people to the Moon and to Mars.  I'm afraid I don't see it as a big deal and consider it wasteful.

 

Others have articulated what Apollo did for America and the world.  So much was spent - nearly 4.5% of the federal budget was NASA in the mid 60s - that technologies advanced at a much more rapid pace than we'd normally see.   The computer and semiconductor industries were jumpstarted.   Secondary school science education changed and a large STEM pipeline to Universities was created.¹ There was a morale boost for a few years, but it faded against an awful war and dramatic social change on several fronts.  A moon landing, iconic as it was, faded to insignificance in a few years.  The last three Apollo missions were cancelled largely because the public lost interest and politicians responded. 

 

I'm a big proponent of space exploration and the unmanned space program has been brilliant.  Putting people into space is not only expensive, but probably wrong biologically.  We didn't evolve to live in such harsh environments.  Most of the people who have flown in space have orbited in a region where the Earth's magnetic field shields them (and us!) from radiation.   Without Earth's magnetic field it is unlikely life could have evoled on the surface or in shallow water.  Anyone who stays on the Moon or Mars will have to live underground or in elaborate radiation shields.  There are issues of water, air, food, human psychology, low gravity muscle and bone degradation and so on.   We're the wrong tool for the job.

 

People, life support systems and rockets didn't scale by Moore's Law, but computation has.  What a non-human kilogram in space or on another body in the Solar System can do has made leaps opening and now we have commercial businesses exploiting near Earth orbit and students orbiting satellites.  We can build increasingly intelligent probes that are space faring.  Plucky (I've wanted to use that word) robot explorers  are getting better and better and do almost all of the meaningful exploration of the Solar System.  We're really good at building and flying them as well as analyzing and wondering about what they tell us.  

 

There are those who sayt we have to leave Earth - that it's our destiny and we've ruined the Earth.  That strikes me as defeatist and driven by more by science fiction than logic and science.  A failure of the imagination.   Another explanation is adventure.  Adventure is fine, but you can't call it real exploration at this point.   My vote is for learning about the Solar System and beyond in a cost effective way as we work on repairing the damage we've done here.  

 

We can always look up and admire the Woman in the Moon.

 

 

I would be remiss if I didn't point out that Grandma King swore in Irish Gaelic.  Sadly I never learned.

__________

¹ I've written quite a bit about the good and bad of the approach.  Arguably it's created an over-supply of scientists at the cost of ignoring and even alienating the majority of students. It's sad it hasn't changed much since.

hunting serendipity through waylosing

I've been lucky at the art of getting lost just enough.  If you've walked with me while I'm thinking you've probably noticed my sense of direction and local awareness can be low.  If I'm by myself awareness comes into focus, but getting lost - just enough - is something I enjoy and can be a source of serendipity.   I should probably explain.

 

Alarm was the order of the day when Sputnik went up on October 4, 1957.  A big military threat from the USSR , satellites needed to be tracked. Some folks at MIT put together do-it yourself plans to enlist amateur satellite trackers across America.   All you needed was a knowledge of your latitude, a simple sighting device, a pivot and a clock.  Thousands of homemade sighting scopes were made overnight in home shops and within a month a factory was mass producing a kit that was set out to high school science classes around the county.  

 

It turned out a good clock was centrally important.  Knowing the time of a position reading to a second or two was necessary.  Shortwave radios were common in the 50s and satellite trackers were asked to tune to WWV in Fort Collins, Colorado to listen to the reference time signal.

 

A couple of physicists considered about the inverse problem.  What if you had a lot of good clocks in well defined orbits and could read their times?  That's enough (well, sort of) to figure out your position on the globe.  You'd have a global positioning system.  

 

It seemed like an extremely hard problem at the time.  You'd need to orbit atomic clocks and there were any number of issues.  But navigation was a hard problem - a really hard problem.  DARPA eventually went to work on it and, armed with boatloads of money,  made it happen.   Mix in the revolution from Moore's Law, add a few dozen years and navigation had been democratized.

 

Many of us get around following instructions from our GPS systems not paying great attention to what's around us.   Kids in the backseat watch videos or play games.  While this may be ok for some types of travel I think a lot has been lost.

 

I like to pay attention to areas I visit regularly to see change that is otherwise invisible.  There's an undeveloped and heavily wooded swamp next to where I live and, assuming I'm home, I take spend an hour or so every day around noon.  Over the sixteen year I've been doing this a richness of change from year to year rather than season to season emerges.  You get to know about certain animals and plants.  Stop and listen. Let your mind take flight. Try it at night with the fireflies and crickets knowing a coywolf or two is watching.  It's here that a lot of ideas seem to present themselves.  

 

Cities are great too.  I live reasonably close to New York City. If I have the time I'll go somewhere very unfamiliar and learn something..  I'm not a terribly outgoing type unless I know someone, but curiosity can take the lead.  It's not so much being a flâneur as it is looking, listening and asking questions.  

 

The same for universities.  Some of the places I've gone to school and worked encouraged cross-disciplinary collaboration.  Sit in on a departmental lecture outside of your field, ask questions afterwards, walk into people's labs, ask them what excites them now.  And for sports - you can learn a lot about a sport if you spend a bit of time with a competitor.  

 

Waylosing (a wonderful term I heard a few year ago) is very efficient in its inefficiency if you're after more than getting from point A to B.  And normal travel is getting more and inefficiently efficient.    

 

As you get good at it you find yourself asking questions .. why are things the way they are.  Start out with simple things for practice. Why are stores arranged the way they are?   What about the open lots or failed businesses along a route you take?  How many types of ants can your find in Central Park?     How does someone react when you give them a harmonica or a balloon:-)  A lot of this is mental exercise that just comes in handy.  There's a certain pleasure to working out something yourself.  Of course you don't need to - and can't - do it all the time, but it's fun when you do.

 

I worry that the technologies that isolate us from our environment lead us to making poor use of our  travel time (and time in general).  They can be very useful, but use them appropriately.  Other technologies  like cameras, binoculars and microscopes can extend your question asking capabilities.  Choose appropriately.

 

The weather is good this time of year for most of the readers. If you're planning a trip try the classic road trip stopping randomly along the way - get lost, ask questions and look.  The journey can be where serendipity lurks.  

 

Many of you have developed deep waylosing skills.  I'm up for walks...

 

Finally it has been observed that very efficient operations tend to stifle creativity.  That doesn't mean that inefficiency guarantees creativity.. There are a lot of issues . clearly a lengthy subject for another time.

 

 

 

the barking dog catches the car ... what next?

The 19^th of October is a big day for me.  It marks the beginning of the only time I've been really depressed.  A depression triggered by something that should have been a celebration.   That afternoon I had just defended my Ph.D. thesis.

 

The audience,  while nothing like Harald Bohr's, was full of friends possibly lured by the cherry cheesecake I had baked to calm myself.¹ The committee - my advisor, a theorist and experimentalist from my department and a professor of surgery who was also a classically trained violinist.  The surgeon who took his duty seriously and I had spent many hours teaching him some particle physics.  He rewarded me with some of the more penetrating questions of the afternoon.  Years later I returned the favor serving as committee member for one of his students.

 

The cheesecake vanished and I was supposed to be preparing for the big celebration with friends.  Instead I just sat in a quiet room.  I felt directionless and a sense of despair  built.  It made no sense.  This had been a goal for years and I had done a good job.  I had a post lined up.  The feeling darkened and I didn't feel like celebrating, eating or even moving.  I just sat there with a piece of cheesecake next to me.

 

People found me and tried to pull me out.  I walked back to my room and didn't come out. The big celebration never happened.  People kept checking on me.  It went on for nearly three days.

 

The path began when I was about a month shy of turning twelve..

 

The structure was small but, despite the amazing view, there was only one small window.  A curtain kept out sunlight. A cluster of electric cables connected the building to the cable car building a thousand feet distant.  Eleven or twelve is an age when most of us are still curious and society is still encourages it.  I knocked on the door.

 

My family spent a few weeks each Summer anywhere from the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area in Montana up to Jasper in Alberta.  That year it was Banff.  We had taken the Sulphur Mountain cable car to the viewing platform.  On a clear day the view was nearly a hundred miles.  The observation deck was crowded to capacity with tourists from all over the world.  My parents and sister were talking to a couple from England when I left for the unusual building along the mountain's North ridge.

 

Physicists have a primal need to explain things as deeply as time and their audience's patience and curiosity permit.  Almost immediately I was learning a bit about cosmic rays, muon showers, scintillators, photomultiplier tubes and so on until my father showed up.  He had been looking for me for a few hours and happy wouldn't be the right word to describe his mood.  

 

The ride down the mountain and back to our camp was quiet - I knew better than to say anything.  Nothing else seemed to matter at the time.  I was completely engaged in what I had seem.  Most of it was over my head, but seeing the existence of the remnants of a cosmic ray shower on a simple detector someone put together solely to explain what they were doing hit me deeply.   I saw the beginnings of how people ask questions of Nature and it had nothing to do with looking up things in a book.  By the time Lyra was overhead I feel asleep knowing I would be either a physicist or an astronomer.  It was my calling. 

 

A month later I tagged along with my Dad on a trip to Los Angeles.  He was taking a ten day workshop for a certification and I was seeing California for the first time.  Friends and family lined up trips to Disneyland, Knott's Berry Farm, Hollywood, and the beaches - the things kids are supposed to see in Southern California.  To Dad's dismay I wasn't interested and somehow managed to get my way.  Instead I visited JPL, had a professor explain something about stellar explosions on his blackboard at Caltech, and visited the Griffith Park planetarium..  Gateway drugs all..

 

By the time I entered college I was focused on the narrow path of math and physics not letting much else get in the way.  I wasn't aimed at a career as much as it was wanting to learn more.  Somehow the title of doctor had become a goal.  And all of a sudden I had it.  All that work for something and it felt so hollow. 

 

What finally worked came from a Scottish friend.  Jack is a quiet and deep thinker.  He said something like "So you've managed to catch the hubcap you were barking at for so long.  Rest assured there are an infinite number of hubcaps of types you haven't imagined.  May you find a few."²  I didn't realize I was just at the threshold of the always new.

 

Some of you are working towards greatness.  Some are arguably there, not that the distinction matters.   It's just part of your path ..  a visible point where we take stock of things.  Once important and (hopefully) a just a happy memory as new hubcaps begin to glow.

 

 

One of these days perhaps I'll celebrate mine and I'm thrilled to celebrate those visible points along the paths of friends.

 

note:  Some of you have struggled with serious depression.  I don't discount those experiences.  My modest skirmish was a profound experience to me and continues to make me think.  I can't imagine the impact of deeper experiences.

__________

¹ Harald was the brother of the great physicist Niels Bohr.   He was an elite footballer representing Denmark in the 1908 London Olympics as they took they the silver medal.  He became a national hero and his PhD thesis defense in math was so packed with football fans that it had to be held in a large auditorium.

² I translate  roughly - he suggested a proper Hilbert space of hubcap types.

 

 

x marks the spot

That's a really stupid idea Steve.

 

It was somewhere around 1992 and wasn't the first or last time I heard something it.  In fact it's part of the process of doing science -  I just was applying it somewhere else.  The PR people and business units of AT&T were for looking futuristic communicatons ideas in the labs that could change it's user's lives as the company moved beyond telephony.

 

I didn't start out as a technologist and still wonder why some people think of me that way.  After some post-doc work in physics I joined the Bell Telephone Laboratories when it was still the best place this planet for certain types.  A wide range of technologies were not just represented, but were invented there.  My work was a bit to the side of the hardcore technologists and developers. My background going in was narrow -  I'd get lost in many of the talks.   But if you're curious, read and ask questions,  anyone can learn.  They gave me first-hand tours explaining  their ideas in languages  I could understand and, if they couldn't,  or if they couldn't, they'd find an interpreter.  That was considered part of my job.  You could see the trajectory of some of the technologies -- threads moving moving forward in time and in some space. Threads that had a history that allowed you to compare your projections with what went on before.   They had characteristics like cost, rate of development and dependencies on other technologies.  It became a game to look for threads that could weave together in a history of the future.  And every  now and again a fabric began to emerge.  

 

The rejection I began with was the most beautiful and poetic of the ideas I wrote down.  

 

Maybe in fifteen or twenty years you'll hold a piece of glass in your hand and watch a friend's face on the other side of the world as you wish them happy birthday.  The glass will be wireless and buttonless and the service will be too cheap to meter.

 

It was a weaving of wireless, battery technology, displays, silicon, image compression, and some things that were happen with user interfaces.  The need was there.  I had learned it paid to create an experience people craved.  AT&T had been after the videophone since 1928 with numerous failed attempts, but they kept hammering away at it.   It was clear that video over the Internet was possible - heck, I was doing it then -  and the other curves looked attractive.  The weaving was there, but there were these pesky questions..  How could you get that much bandwidth over a cellular connection.  Who would built out a wireless network?  

 

When, How, Why, Who ...?

 

These were all temporal questions that deserved attention if you were looking into the future.   You just need an excuse and the company arguably gave me too much freedom.  There were a few ideas they liked.  I started thinking about that distant point in technology space.  

 

In math and physics when you're solving for something you often call it X.

 

Five years later and I was involved in a group specializing in computer mediated human interactions.  About a dozen really bright people who knew things I had never thought about.  People with patience and their curiosity beyond their own backgrounds.   I brought my own background to the group.  We did a few neat things.  

 

My favorite was a project a few of you were involved with - Air Graffiti.  I won't go into it deeply other than saying it was a realization that phones would become location aware computers with cameras.   We hacked together a few computational bricks that gave us a rather clear view into  a few things that happened ten to fifteen years later.  We thought the basic technology of a location-aware computerphone with a camera would start to mature around 2005 - about the time cellular networks could begin to support links a few tenths of a megabit per second.  That'd be a start. There were all kinds of objections, but we learned the trick was to not say much in demos and just give someone the test brick and let them imagine and invent on their own.   These were the most amazing demos I had seen and the folks in the group were just amazing...  Wayzen, Jessica, Gregg, Dave, Nancy and Steve (yes - we had two Steves).  We all developed a healthy respect for user interface and user experience and we had dreams of special hardware.  I began to think Apple was going to be the future, but had no idea it would be a phone .. 

 

 

The fundamental technologies are silicon and radio.  The 1992 piece of glass looked very do-able computationally.  The requirements were lower than a first generation iPhone and it was just a simple Moore's Law extension.  Batteries were more difficult.  I was sure GPS would get there with some military funding.  The camera and display were certainly possible - it was just a question of picture quality.  The big IF was the buildout of the wireless network.  I had been playing with folks building community networks in isolated areas in the West.   The technology was there .. and the need was there.  It was a question of buildout and price.  Several of us thought it would happen, but we had no idea what the path and timetable would be.  

 

 Today Apple showed me the spot ...  that point I called X.  It took twenty five years, but the implementation is so much richer than I had imagined.  Radio turned out to be an enabler, but in Apple's case amazing specialized hardware has been a driver.  It is coupled with software, but that ability to do both is what makes them special.  

 

But the fabric continues to move with new threads weaving their way in.  That's what makes it so fascinating and keeps it so rich.

 

Oh yeah ..  and hindsight is at least 20:20 ..  I get a lot of things wrong too. But that's how you learn.