omenti

the small things that make you happy

Pip Coburn and his circle have a practice of sharing "anti pet peeves" - those little things that bring a smile and a bit of happiness. It's a good practice these days.  I had one today and sent it to him and Om Malik.  Om suggested I post it.   Feel free to add your own reason to smile in the comment section.

 

We live next to a large piece of undeveloped swampland. It’s full of deer paths and a mixture of heavily wooded and open areas. For about seventeen years I’ve taken a ninety minute walk around noon when I’m working from home. Today is worth writing about - my vulture returned!

About six years ago a female turkey vulture began to accompany me. She’d wait on a telephone pole where the woods cleared or sometimes she’d spiral down from the sky. For nearly a kilometer I’d walk through a large open area and she’d follow along, making short flights from telephone pole to telephone pole. . Then I’d disappear into a heavily wooded around for about thirty minutes before coming back to the clearing. She’d be waiting and together we’d make our way through the open space - regular partners for nearly four seasons.

Then nothing…

I kept looking and even got in touch with the Raptor Trust in case they had taken in an injured vulture, but after a month assumed she had left the area. Hopefully by her own choice.

Today - mirabile dictu - she reappeared. She only followed me one way, but it was so nice to see an old friend.

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

take it outside

a minipost

 

Other than the new graduate student, most of us have worked together for a few years.  This morning we carried our folding chairs across the large lawn struck by the novelty of seeing each other without glass, silicon and coordinated electrical signals getting in the way. It was our first face to face meeting since late February.

 

It would have happened earlier if we didn't believe the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus couldn't be effectively carried by aerosols, but there's too much evidence to the contrary.  Aerosol clouds move and disperse quickly outdoors, so here we were with our face masks and some distance from each other.  Someone brought an easel with large sheets of paper and a few markers and we were off.  

 

A few things cropped up right away.   It gets hot sitting in the Sun for any length of time (you'd think we'd have more sense, but my type generally lacks it).  It was difficult hearing each other.  I can imagine a smartphone app that could take care of that - a local audio conference cloud.  (Gregg - this would be a good student project - I can think of several ways to do it).  One could also imagine iPad screen sharing, but I don't think it would work as well for our discussions - your mileage may vary.

 

We did manage to get a lot done - much more than the Zoom calls we've had.  There's a lot of "out of band" communication that takes place when you're face to face. 

 

I doubt that many would do this on a regular basis, but it raises an interesting point.  Indoors plus an aerosol transmission vector are a bad combination.  To make indoors work you need good fresh air exchange - perhaps a room volume every few minutes.  (Exactly how thoroughly and quickly isn't well-known yet.  This isn't anywhere as bad as measles for example.) Opening windows and doors using fans can do it.  The same with a properly balanced HVAC system .. but that can be difficult and expensive.  Most building systems recirculate air.  You can pass the air through a high-spec HEPA filter (note - HEPA is not a type of filter, but rather a standard).  Unfortunately they restrict airflow and it takes a lot of power to push air enough through.  I'd bet a fair amount of money most classrooms and offices aren't up to the task.

 

I jokingly suggested perfume, cigarette smoke, or incense smoke as a test to someone who studies aerosol physics.  They said it was a good idea.  You shouldn't be able to smell these kind of sources in a properly ventilated room unless you're very close.  Another test is CO₂ level.  A classroom full of people shouldn't register over 800ppm after an hour has gone by.  Building managers are often equipped to test CO₂ and volatile gas levels (you shouldn't be able to smell the carpet either). 

 

In many countries this won't be a big deal.  They've managed to get a handle on the situation with the ability to find and isolate hotspots.  How safe it is to have k-12 kids in schoolrooms is likely to be an experiment we'll see played out.  Colleges, restaurants and bars are probably a clearer call. Such decisions are well beyond my pay grade. 

 

 

rewiring your tardis

In the past few days three friends have been through a lot of stress.  Times like these make me think about where I've been and the paths I've taken.  I recognize too few people have had the freedom and privilege to make choices like I have.  At times like these I wonder about certain turning points that have been important - points that often seemed unimportant from others at the time.  More and more I'm drawn to thinking about events in space-time rather than in just time or space.

 

Studied closely neither time or space hold up on their own.  They seem to, but it's just an illusion that comes from the fact we move around on the Earth at tiny fractions of the speed of light. Space-time, with it’s four dimensions, gives a deeper way to sort out reality.

 

Since it's difficult thinking about anything with more than three dimensions it’s convenient to think of a three shadow of space-time with space as a two dimensioned plane and time running off at a right angle. If you think of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun as a 2d circle in space, we don’t come back to the spot every year in space-time.¹ Instead it's more like a helical slinky with about  four and a half billion equally spaced turns growing by another turn every year. Your birthdays are a long distance from each other.  A minute ago is a huge distance away too .. there's no way you can get back to it. 

 

Not going into detail, but the realization that paths are much more important than destinations was one that escaped me until I was about thirty.  Friendship, curiosity, serendipity ..  there are many things that turned out to be much more important to me than goals.  I like to think about these paths we take through space-time.  From a distance they look like spirals that ultimately might make eighty or ninety turns.  Zoom in on a short section and you realize there's a lot of jagged movement perpendicular to the flow of time. Other people and animals have their own jagged spirals sometimes coming very close or even touching yours.  Those times we're in the presence of each other.  At the scale of that expanding slinky we travel on around the Sun they're such rare events.

 

I've been having more intense dreams during the pandemic.  These ephemeral "realities" sometimes create alternate space-times that never could exist. Places and times that could never exist in the same real space-time.  During her final years my mother spend a lot of time in this place - even when she was awake.

 

For her last four years my mother had dementia.  It came in the form of small strokes.  She'd have one and then find herself with parts of her memory missing.  Between then and the next stroke her mind tried to make sense of the world.  How do you make reality square with what your mind can now connect to.  The brain does as much as it can and the mind now has a new reality to deal with.  

 

She never seemed to realize she had dementia and was usually very happy. Some memories - smell and music - seemed very robust.  But now her best friends might be someone from when she was fourteen and someone else from her forties.  One from Brigham City, Utah and the other from Great Falls, Montana.  She'd have conversations with them and sometimes complained that they didn't quite seem to see eye-to-eye.  The conversations must have been very real to her and overlapped directly into the world the rest of us perceived as real.  It was like watching someone walking along hearing half of their cellphone conversation.  

 

All of this was powerful to watch. Her mind, as it rewired itself, became a TARDIS of sorts that granted her a dream-like freedom from the rigid constraints of space-time.²  She was bringing some of those jagged microsections of the big helix of her life together.  And she seemed to love it.  It made me ask "who am I to judge the happiness of others."

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¹ it’s really an ellipse, but to make the argument a bit clearer I use a circle.

² On basic principles I won't define what a TARDIS is.

 

 

making obsolete tech sing and beyond

Over the past few weeks I've been playing around trying to repurpose old hardware. Mostly CD and DVD drives and they're chock full of useful parts - lasers, motors, lenses and so on...  That and a bit of Arduino prototyping to come come up with a bag of junk that could be sent to undergrads next year.   Motivation came from the COVID-19 teaching experience.  At least in physics online classes proved difficult and labs unworkable.  Some folks at Caltech suggested a different lab experience where the student assembles or even invents a piece of  experimental apparatus to use to make some measurements.   The fact that most students have smartphones - basically computers with a number of interesting sensors and a network connection - makes this even more appealing.  It probably isn't appropriate for 101 non-major courses, but it may make a better lab experience for more advanced physics and engineering students.  The potential for real learning rather mechanically following directions is great - assuming you have good instruction to go along with it.  There's also the possibility of creating inexpensive lab kits for high schools.  High school lab experiments are ridiculously expensive and inflexible.  There are a number of interesting directions.  It's been fun and several of us are in exploration mode.

 

I need to add I'm a privileged white male with the ability to take a bit of time and focus on this kind of craziness during an epidemic.  Too many people aren't in that position.  

 

The project reminded me of some attempts to help my mother when she was dealing with dementia.  She became forgetful, so we'd make lists.  Then she lost the ability to read so picturegrams.  All along the way glasses, remote controls, almost anything that wasn't nailed down managed to get misplaced.  And then there was medication.  She went into a managed care facility. Life was less stressful, but she was constantly misplacing things and forgetting how to operate the style telephone and TV remote.  I started building gadgets to help out, but by the time one sort of worked, she had lost more capability.  

 

I've thought about it a fair amount since. The facilities are expensive - at least $80,000 a year and usually more.  What could you change to allow someone stay at home a few years longer?  Even if it cost ten or twenty thousand dollars, it could save a lot of money and be better psychologically.  (Greg Vesonder has done thinking along these lines)

 

Om and I were talking about where the local and personal application of "intelligence" is a big thing, perhaps the biggest thing, for Apple going forward.   With their sensors and local connectivity outside of the cloud, the iPhone and Apple watch have great senior citizen potential. The iPhone has machine learning hardware.  Combine this with ultrawideband location and a dozen applications immediately leap to mind.¹   Fertile ground indeed.

 

Of course the trick is to stay healthy and sharp as you get older.  It turns out there's a wonder drug which, taken regularly, doesn't have negative side effects.  The AMA now considers physical exercise a powerful drug -  often with superior results than conventional drugs. It has been shown effective in lowering the probability of several types of cancer, heart diseases, many forms of dementia, and is even associated with "happiness". You don't need a lot. Walking enough counts and you get it for free if you use a bicycle.  But you have to do it. 

 

Many people use smartphones , watches or dedicated fitbit type devices for motivation.It turns devices aren't universally motivating over time, but if they work for you it's money well-spent.  The sensors and processing can be useful for athletes training at the amateur level, but not at the elite level. That's a separate and fascinating story at the frontier of sports science these days.

 

Finally it's becoming clar that certain types of mental stimulation help push back the onset of dementia.  Forget the memory games marketed for the purpose - they've been shown to be ineffective.  What you want is something that challenges you - something you've never done that you have really work at.  Anecdotally creatives who constantly push boundaries are in good shape.  I suspect it doesn't matter how creative you are - just the fact that you're forcing a lot of new neural connections.  The brain stays plastic for a long time.

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¹ Current generation iPhones have the U1 ultrawideband chip.  They haven't done much with it, but it makes a lot of sense for augmented reality, ID verification and object location.  I wrote a bit on UWB a few months ago.

 

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.