omenti

there's no cow on the ice

A close friend and I have been exchanging emails several times a week for nearly thirty years.  I hadn't heard from him in a week, so I asked if everything was alright.   He replied with a single line:

Der er ingen ko på isen.

He's very Danish and, although I'm barely read-only in that tongue, I knew immediately there was nothing to worry about.  The idiom means there's no cow on the ice.   Danes happen to be a practical people. If your cow was on the ice, you'd have something to worry about. 

 

Idioms mean more than the words that make them up are a wonderful window into a culture.  They can come from different periods, subcultures, age groups, common experiences and so on.   And they can hold on well past the time they were coined. 'Hun stikker ikke op for bollemælk' means 'she doesn't stick up for milk dumplings' and is still in use even though the farming references are lost on almost everyone.

 

Courtesy of a couple of Danish friends, I keep a list of Danish idioms and think I understand where they came from a bit more.¹  I'm sure they don't think about where they come from, just didn't think about 'it's raining cats and dogs', until I heard the Danish equivalent which translates to 'it's raining shoemaker's apprentices'.  We're like the fish who doesn't realize it's swimming in water. 

 

A few years ago I started wondering about quantum leap/quantum jump - the idiom that is entirely different from what quantum [anything] means in physics and chemistry. Of course it's so wired in popular culture that it's completely displaced the original meaning. 

 

Pulling out my tiny text two volume OED with its magnifying glass, I find an early use in 1649 referred to a share or allotment: “Poverty is her portion, and her quantum is but food and raiment.”  In about 1870 it was first used in physics to describe the the smallest quantity of electric fluid. At the turn of the century Planck and Einstein started using it in the sense that light consists of small and measurable pieces of energy.  Something very small. In the 20s as quantum mechanics developed the energy change in an atom or molecule was discrete - it was quantized.  In physics and chemistry a quantum jump or leap represents a tiny amount of energy.

 

Quantum mechanics is the study of this tiny world that has properties that are counter to what we're used to experiencing.  It includes particle/wave duality, superposition, entanglement and so on.  By the 50s a deeper understanding had emerged.  It was becoming clear the subatomic world could be more accurately described by fields rather than just particles and forces.   That's what I think about when I hear quantum.  To shift gears to  culture outside of physics I must 'at sluge en kamel' - swallow the camel.

 

According to the OED (I had to resort to the electronic version in the library as my copy is too old) the first use of 'quantum leap' to mean 'very large' came in a 1956 document describing the US-Soviet balance of power:

“The enormous multiplication of power, the ‘quantum leap’ to a new order of magnitude of destruction.”

 It had been used as its opposite and somehow it caught on.  This isn't uncommon with words and phrases..  smart, nice, awful, awesome and many others have been turned around.  There's probably a term for this.

 

I was going to write something the Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment as it has also become an idiom, but that can wait as it's fascinating for other reasons.

 

Så er den ged barberet

__________

¹ Note that I use English idioms to explain some of them

At stå op før fanden får sko på -- "get up before the devil puts on his shoes"

Spis lige brød til -- "have some bread with that" (telling someone to calm down)

Hold da helt ferie -- "take a whole holiday"  (no way!)

Lokummet brænder -- "the toilet is burning" (there are big problems)

Der er ugler i mosen -- "there are owls in the bog" (something suspicious is going on)

Man kan ikke både blæse og have mel i munden -- "you can't blow and have flour in your mouth at the same time" (you have to choose)

Skægget i postkassen "beard in the mailbox" (caught red handed)

At gå som katten om den varme grød "To walk like a cat around hot porridge" (to beat around the bush)

Så er den ged barberet "The goat is shaved"  (done with a big task .. big enough for a celebration)

 

 

manpo-kei, gold plated teaspoons and home runs

A friend had been struggling to find regular physical activity for a few years.  She complained enough about a lack of motivation that her brother gave her a low-end Fitbit for Christmas.  Somehow the pedometer function clicked for her.  Being able to see the numbers of steps was as motivating for her as filling in circles on an Apple Watch is for other people.  On top of this she'd heard about the magic 10,000 step number.  Initially the goal was beyond her, but she was motivated and within a couple of weeks she was there.  She's kept it up and regularly does 15,000 a day along with increasing her speed.  Her blood pressure is down from last year's number and she feels healthier.

 

In the 60s a Japanese company marketed a pedometer known as the Manpo-kei - which translates to the ten thousand step meter.  The pedometer became a fad and somehow the 10,000 step goal was enshrined in popular culture.  There's no reason why the number means anything other than being something like five miles of walking for most people.  That's over an hour of walking and good exercise. So people who aim for the number are getting a good benefit because the general direction of walking a lot is healthy rather than the number being the "right" target. 

 

The NY Times recently ran an article on some inaccuracies in smart watches.  It doesn't surprise me.  I've been around Olympic programs and athletes for a few years and know some horror stories about the over-reliance of data when you don't know it's accuracy or the context of the measurement or its use.  Like anything else with data, you need to know why, what and how you're measuring, manipulating, and finally interpreting and using the information.  In sport that turns out to be difficult.  There are a number of interesting approaches to deal with the issues, but that's another post. 

 

The NY Times piece and elite training experience suggest broad trends over time are much more important than local accuracy and precision  If you're trying to improve your fitness level or play amateur level sports, the motivation from a smartwatch can make a big difference.  If you're an elite athlete there are many other things to consider and it's likely you're taking advantage of them.

 

The notion of broad trend over local accuracy has utility in many areas.  One that frustrates me is building  carbon dioxide removal technology.  It's something of a delaying tactic being cheerleaded by the petrochemical and coal industries.  In reality it's extremely expensive, requires a large amount of energy and diverts funding from much more effective technologies and behaviors.  Currently four 1 million ton  class plants are on the drawing board.  With luck each could remove a million tons of carbon from the atmosphere by 2030 or so with a projected cost of about a billion dollars each.  So how much of an impact is that?

 

A million tons of carbon dioxide is about 1/40,000 of current yearly emissions.  That's roughly the same ratio as a teaspoon to a bathtub full of water.  Imagine running the tub and in the time it takes to fill it, you can remove a teaspoon of water.  The bathtub keeps running..  in the time another tub of water comes out of the spigot, you can remove a second teaspoon.  And then a third, forth and so on.  

 

We currently have many deployable technologies and behaviors that will turn the tap down much more than a teaspoon worth for far less money.  When we're finally down to the point where we're only putting a gallon or so of water into the tub each year, then it might make sense to deploy a number of teaspoons to make a difference for where it's difficult to turn the tap (aviation and shipping for example) 

 

Spend some money and talent learning how to improve the process, but don't count on it in the near term as it isn't, and will never be,  a silver bullet.  Nothing it.  all we can hope for is silver buckshot and using as much as we can possibly afford.  It makes sense to use the buckshot with the greatest cost/benefit ratio - things like wind, solar, better power grids, efficient transportation (full sized EVs don't count!), and any number of energy thrifty behaviors. 

 

And finally home runs and climate change.  Recently a paper made the major news outlets with projections that climate change will have an impact on Major League Baseball home runs: "Several hundred additional home runs per season are projected due to future warming."  The paper is poorly done .. basically a sensitivity analysis based on a single variable. I won't give it the credibility of a link.  Something that doesn't work in the real world with something as complex as baseball.  I have a some expertise in the fluid dynamics of balls flying through the air and would argue the effect is small.  In fact they note the same thing, but word the conclusion to make it appear there is an effect and climate change impacts everything.  This is pure clickbait for news organizations and probably has the impact of diverting attention from much more serious issues associated with global warming.  It's trivial to see the home run impact is insignificant, but a poorly done analysis can lead to fuzzy thinking and even harm.

 

a celebration of homophones

For those who use the American mm/dd/yyyy,  it suggests 3.14   With an error of about 0.05%, it’s a good enough approximation for many uses.  And those who use the more common dd/mm/yyyy notion can wait for the 22nd of July for 22/7. At  0.04% from the mark, this one's a slightly better approximation. 

 

But just how much Pi do you really need? Eight digits is overkill for most engineering tasks. NASA uses 16 digits .. 15 to the right of the decimal .. to navigate around the solar system going beyond Pluto. The most I can imagine would be to construct a high quality circle the radius of the known universe, about 46 billion light years, to the diameter of a hydrogen atom,. You’d need 38 significant digits for the task.

 

xkcd has a piece on approximations that’s painfully true. For some back of the envelope calculations in astrophysics and cosmology you can get by with crude approximations.

 

 

It’s also Einstein’s birthday. Pie, being a homophone of Pi, seems to the a good bet for the day. I have it on good authority he loved cherry pie and ice cream, so there you go.

 

He’s one of a dozen or so people who have quotes improperly ascribed to them.  He was a joker and much of what he did say is often taken out of context.  But here's a real one I love. Shortly before his death he was asked to offer advice to young people.  His reply was published in Life Magazine.

"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day."   A. Einstein 1955

 

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.

 

types of stupidity

Recently Pip Coburn circulated a note on the importance of finding the right balance of challenge for your skill level to avoid boredom and frustration.  He noted the linkage to Csikszentmihalyi's work on flow, something that's fascinated me for some time as finding states of flow is important to me.¹  

The note made me think about levels of frustration and feelings of 'stupidity' one can have.  For some time I've identified types of stupidity with one being very useful and perhaps necessary in science.  Here's my response:

 

It’s fascinating to think about these things. Your comment on loving the work - “absolutely loving” it - is so important.

I think it’s important finding a field that no one can possibly master but, at the same time, know parts of it well enough to find where you may have a bit of success in if you apply yourself. As a beginning grad student I had no idea how hard it is to do research. It’s much more difficult than the most demanding courses as it’s an immersion into the unknown. Some people just give up and find easier paths. I find it useful to think about how to be productively stupid.

’Stupid’ is an unfortunate word, but I haven’t found anything better. Productive stupidity isn’t the relative stupidity you may feel in a a class where the other students are doing very well. It’s also not where someone who happens to be very bright is working in an area that doesn’t use their talents. (Stephen Hawking would have been a terrible point guard in the NBA even though the position demands strategic and tactical thinking.) Rather it’s a kind of existential fact .. an absolute stupidity. It puts you in the position of being ignorant by choice (here I use 'ignorant' in the 19^th century sense - realizing there's an area you don't know much about and choosing to pursue it). So it’s fine to have failures here and there as you try to find your way. And sometimes, something wonderful is found. The process can generate serendipity. Of course you end up doing many less challenging things as part of the process. They’re often rewarding, but it’s amazing when you find something totally new. It’s what drives a lot of people.

I’ve had some great conversations with people who push their fields and hear the same thing with different words. Yo-Yo Ma, Sarah Pavan (beach volleyball Olympian), a number of physicists and mathematicians as well as several artists.²  The words were different, but the paths were very familiar.

There’s another piece to this.  Bringing together a very diverse set of people who excel at productive stupidity is something of an amplifier. Often there are interesting hints and even keys that you never would have thought of. That and it’s often a lot of fun.

__________

¹ Years ago I attended a talk by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.  Afterwards I had a few questions including "how do you pronounce your name?  He said this is good enough for Americans:

Me-high Cheek-sent-me-high

² There are many others who probably do something like this .. these are just the people I've talked about it with.

 

 

a delightful word

Mr Gross was my high school German teacher.   He was big on learning language through song and would regularly point out a German word or phrase that might be more appropriate than American English. I wasn't a good student of the language, but he made an impact on me.  I still remember and use some of his offerings.  Today I saw one of my favorites used in the New York Times - the first time I've seen it used in America.  

freudenfreude

Mr Gross described it as the opposite of schadenfreude. It's the joy and delight we feel when someone else finds success - even when, particularly when,  their success doesn't involve us.  He used to describe the joy he felt when a blind student from our school won a state piano competition.   It's an important social glue - a gift to be aware of and take delight in.  Mr Gross has been gone for a long time, but thinking about this word turned out to be one of the best things I learned in high school.

 

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

 

 

an almost lost word from the dictionary

Reading an obscure paper from the 1880s a word stopped me - apricity.  It seemed like I had come across it before and there were hints from the context, but it was time for the OED.¹  I pulled out the first volume of my old compact edition - the one with the magnifying glass - and found it.  An obscure word dating to 1623 meaning the warmth of the Sun in the Winter.

 

The warmth of a bright Sun in on a clear cold Winter day.  That's something that captures most of us know - the radiant heat of the Sun isn't isn't perturbed by the cold air and can be quite comfortable.  Then it hit me I heard the word in a John McPhee lecture in Princeton.² A few decades had passed since he wrote Coming into the Country, but it was about three Alaskas including a look at the Winter.  A perfect word for some of the days.

 

A day of apricity can make snow melt in subzero air temperatures on  Southern-facing roofs only to freeze into beautifully clear long icicles at the edge.  This type of ice formation is often free of bubbles producing beautifully clear ice.  If you have wide enough icicles you might try making an ice lens and starting a fire.

 

Such days are made for outdoor recreation if there isn't any wind.  Perhaps more importantly the basic principle - heat transfer by radiation - can keep heating expenses down.  Heating and moving air to fill rooms is enormously inefficient. If you aren't moving around much you might try a small radiant heater and point it at the area where you are. Heat what you need to heat with infrared light. Direct sunlight is the same...  sit in the Sun.  These measures, plus wearing warm indoor clothing and being somewhat active lets you get away with low thermostat settings.  And be on the lookout for aprocity as that can give a big psychological boost!

 

Another Winter word I like is tingilinde. It's a constructed word based on J.R.R. Tolkien's elfin language Quenya meaning the sparkle of the starlight reflecting on the snow on a dark moonless Winter night.  Such sights could be spectacular in Montana away from town when it was really cold and a bit of new snow had fallen as tiny ice crystals. Another great spot is Yellowstone .. super cold air forms the right kind of ice crystal snow near the hot springs and geysers.   Once it was magical - the cold starlight reflecting from millions of tiny diamonds along with the greens and reds of a bright aurora dancing overhead.   On such nights you don't notice that it's really cold.

__________

¹ The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is the 1928 edition.  Devilishly small print that requires a magnifying glass, but the real OED and only about $80 (still a lot back then!) rather than the fortune the full dictionary went for.  There's a lovely bit of historical fiction on the dictionary and the people who made it happen:  The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams.  It's set in the time and place with many of the characters, but focuses on what was left out..  those who weren't white, male and of a certain class.  Recommended!

² McPhee is a great writer - a master of the creative non-fiction genre.   

 

 

 

beyond 88

Yesterday Om pointed out that it was piano day - the 88th day of the year honoring the 88 keys of most pianos.  I read his post a day late, but there's still hope for another celebration with the same name. An obvious choice might involve the Bösendorfer grand where options include 92 and 97 keys in addition to the normal 88.  Music has been written for these beautiful instruments, but why stop there? 

 

Press a key on the piano and a hammer strikes one or more strings which begin to vibrate producing a sound.  The frequency of the vibration depends on the length of the string with longer strings vibrating at lower frequencies.¹  The left most key causes the longest string to oscillate 27 times per second - 27 Hertz (Hz) - while the right most key produces a 4,186 Hz frequency.  In between the keys are divided into 7 octaves, each composed of 12 keys.  Each octave doubles the frequency so the C above middle C has a frequency twice as high. The notes are evenly divided so each key has a frequency 2^1/12 times - just under six percent higher than the preceding key. 

 

Now we're ready.

 

Let's say you wanted a piano with the range of human hearing - usually given as 20 to 20,000 Hz in young children.   Going from 4,186 to 20,000 Hz, after a bit of arithmetic, requires 27 extra keys on the right.  Five keys on the left will get you to 20 Hz..   One hundred and twenty keys and some long arms would be sufficient to entertain young children to the limit of their range.

 

But what about dogs?  Canine hearing goes up to about 40,000 Hz.   All  we need to do is add an octave, or 12 keys, to cover their range.   Other mammals can hear even higher pitches.  Bats top out around 160,000 Hz so we add two more octaves giving us a 156 key instrument.  We don't have to go much higher as the atmosphere strongly attenuates higher frequencies. A bat can produce a very loud noise, but even their sensitive ears are only good for a 20 meter range.²

 

We've left out elephants which go down to about 12 Hz - that works out to 9 keys on the left. We've grown the beastmaster piano to 165 keys.   I won't cover whales because pianos don't work underwater. 

 

The game can go on.  There are any number of natural sounds of lower frequency (infrasound), but we'll leave it at that..  

 

Well - almost.  There are very faint sounds in the universe - ripples that move compress and expand space-time itself.  They come across a wide range of frequencies, but exquisitely sensitive instrumentation is required for some of the loudest - like colliding black holes where the energy that goes into the resulting gravity wave can be the equivalent of several solar masses.   It turns out the frequency of the first one detected was a chirp that went from about 35 Hz up to about 250 Hz (close to middle C).  You can play the signal as audio.

So much information there, but it may not be pleasing so let's end with one of the most demanding pieces for the human voice - in this case a coloratura soprano.  The Queen of the Night in Mozart’s  Die Zauberflöte. 

I'll leave you to find some good piano music today.  Perhaps Om's list is a place to start. 

_________

¹ It also depends on the mass of the string, its diameter and tension.  Additionally a rich set of other frequencies are produced giving the louder central frequency richness and character.  There's a good deal of art in the design and construction of a fine piano and none of the sound the same. 

² It's a feature.  Longer range would confuse them with signals from other bats, plus they tend to work a few meters from their prey.

 

the cost of knowledge is a great deal of ignorance

a mini-post

First a caveat - I have almost no background in the social sciences.

This week a few people have written about information overload. It’s certainly been with us since the beginning of the 16th century in the Western world and one can make arguments that extend further back. The rate of new knowledge, as opposed to raw information, has increased in many fields, doubling or more every decade and causing many fields to fission into new subfields. It’s a major cause of the imposter syndrome I feel when I’m trying to hack through a paper in low temperature physics for example … sixty years ago there wasn’t a problem thinking about both.

We deal with the information increase by specializing and creating what are often rich traditions. I’ve been able to carry on rich conversations with people where I have no Mandarin and the other person had almost no English by jotting abstractions and drawings of our shared tradition on a blackboard (slate blackboards are another tradition in my field) .

But these traditions blind us to the greater knowledge around us. .. It reminds me of the early experiment where you train a dog to respond to a bell. When you measure the brainwave of the dog you get a clear signal when the bell is rung. Now put a piece of juicy meat before the dog and ring the bell. The bell signal is nowhere to be found - it’s been overridden by the sight and/or the smell of the meat.

It’s funny - we don’t make progress without tradition, but it can also blind us to the greater world.. My belief is it’s important to communicate across the boundaries of the many traditions. I think this is an area where the arts are very powerful. We’re resorting to mechanisms we don’t have a real grasp on.. machine learning comes to mind.. to deal with some of this. There are many views on the subject, but I’m guessing it isn’t as useful as many suggest.

Finally there's an issue in traditions where knowledge doesn’t increase rapidly. How to be kind, how to be a good person, love, peace. Areas where people a long time ago had figured things out within the context of their tradition and arguably we haven’t made progress..

anyway .. just random thoughts on a rainy Spring evening. There are so many issues here that are interesting to think about.

Enjoy the Spring and listen to some music and enjoy some art. And some of you are creatives so create rather than sit back!

______

A note on ignorance .. that's a complex subject in it's own right, but the title seems to fit.