omenti

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.  Important before and (hopefully) a just a happy memory as new hubcaps begin to shine.

 

 

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. 

 

 

 

 

humanism and the dawn of machine learning

Walking in the woods a few months ago I had one of those moments of synthesis.  A dozen or so threads I'd been thinking about for a long time  suddenly wove together into a single something that made sense.  It is something of a form of story telling and I need to see if it really makes sense.   I started writing about it, but it struck me many people who see the post title will think of super intelligent AI.    I'm talking about something much more immediate - something we're dealing with now, but I'll begin with my two bits on super intelligent AI to get it out of the way,.

 

intelligence that is different and beyond

 

There's nothing in physics that says our brains are special.  Intelligence is just a kind of information processing where information goes into some sort of arrangment of elementary particles and a result emerges.   The particle arrangements can take a variety of forms.  A mouse is more intelligent than a tea cup and most of us (with the exception of Douglas)  think ourselves more intelligent than mice.  There are some information tasks where other animals or  machines beat us.  A twenty dollar calculator (or a free app)  destroys most of us when it comes to arithmetical calculations.    As time goes on it's reasonable to assume computation will improve.  There is the sticky wicket of "self-aware" and "thinking" .. I'll punt on those as we're unclear as to exactly what that means for humans.  

 

Science fiction often portrays malevolent super intelligent AIs.   We probably shouldn't worry about how anthropomorphic it's thought process is and accept it will be different. A more fruitful way of looking at the problem may be to ask if we share goals and consider it's competence.     It would be good to at least share goals with a super competent AI.   Think of it this way...  we're more intelligent and usually more competent than insects.  We might want to build a house on a field with a large number of them.  We don't think of ourselves as malevolent, but our goals aren't aligned and end the end we wipe them out without noticing.  On the other hand my ferrets are skilled at aligning their goals with mine.  Dogs rule when it comes to aligning goals with humans often outperforming other humans.  Perhaps that's a reasonable model for going forward.

 

There's a lot of hype and science fiction, but we're only taking baby steps on the fundamental problems. Every serious researcher I know, and there are a number,  thinks this kind of intelligence is decades away - perhaps many decades.   We have some time and we need to be thinking about how to handle it now.   We need to think deeply about what kind of future we want and how we share decision making.  These thinkers need to represent a wide range of backgrounds.  Individuals with great intellectual range as well as focused specialists forming groups that communicate.  More than ten percent with engineering backgrounds is too high.  There is time, but I worry that our track recored dealing with such change has not been good.  

 

There are other interesting aspects of super intelligent AI to think about - the sort I'm attracted to.  You can think about the limits of intelligence in the Universe.  It is a function of  entropy, energy, the expansion of the universe, and limits to communication set by the speed of light.  As you might imagine there's a lot of headroom, but the limits are harsh.  And you can turn your focus in the other direction and compare the brain and human sociology to existing and theoretical computer architectures.   Energy, entropy and communication speed are also important.  You can even put an upper bound on the optimal physical size for human style brains - we're fairly close to the limit. (curiously some animals have some neat evolutionary tricks).  And then there are the alien intelligences already among us - the Cephalopods.  

 

rebooting:

 

humanism and the dawn of machine learning

 

Sometimes I try to teach it to someone else or at least play around with the idea of how I"d turn it into a course.   Here's a quick pass of a syllabus for a hypothetical course.

 

° Eight generations of change - a brief history of the first industrial revolution.  Per capita energy use increased by and order of magnitude and our lives changed.  The distribution of impact was very uneven ranging from increased slavery and war to the shrinking of the world.   

 

° The scientific revolution and the electronic revolution that followed.  How the invention of the scientific laboratory and the revolution that followed was at least as important as the industrial revolution.  

 

° The externalities of change.  We never see the big picture in the beginning and as it emerges we adapt, but sometimes the adaptations are flawed.  Can we begin to think about externalities early in the game and who should participate?

 

° The smartphone - the convergence of at least six technology curves bound together by a bit of social clue into a partner that is always with us.  Is it one of those rare events that socially and culturally rewired us?  Is it one of those events that neurologically rewire us?

 

° Surveillance capitalism and big data - when the consumer is the product.  Herds of winners and losers.  Connections to consumerism and politics.  The concentration of power in the hands of a few. 

 

° Algorithms - what they are and how they are used and abused.  Who gets to control them and do they understand the consequences?  What would it mean to require oversight or openness?   

 

° What is modern numeracy and algorithmic literacy?  Where and when can it be taught? 

 

° Security, privacy.  Did we ever have them and in what degree?  Will we get some of what we've lost back and the fundamental differences and between the large informations companies.

 

° Brogrammers, sexism, racism and the sterile algorithmic culture.

 

° A brief history of machine learning.  Where it wins and where it fails - reality and hype.  

 

° thread weaving (although this is done throughout).  What will power do with ML and emerging AI?  What are they doing now?  Safeguards...

 

° Another look at the industrial and scientific revolutions.

 

I have a hard time thinking about shoehorning something like this into a single semester, but the point is to refine my own thoughts.

 

Thanks for indulging me

 

 

precision twinklers

Fifty years ago this month Jocelyn Bell was going through the chart recorder output from a new radio telescope she and a few others had built at Cambridge .  She had worked herself up to about a hundred feet of it a day looking for anything interesting in the squiggly line of ink. Very boring work.  Lots of noise and bits of the expected.  

 

But there was this "bit of scruff" when the telescope was pointed in a particular direction.  The scruff was repeating every 1.3 seconds.  Very regularly.¹ 

 

You always doubt your equipment.  Regular noise is usually something man-made or an artifact from the apparatus.  And there were those new fangled satellites beeping away,.  Carefully you try to eliminate the possibilities.  She and her advisor eliminated most possibilities, but they weren't that certain.  Then she found another bit of scruff.  That regular pulsing .. now at a different rate, but still very accurate.  Better than the clocks they had in the lab.  She had found something - something out there.  

 

There was a flurry of activity when they announced.  Astronomers around the world dropped what they were doing.  Theoretical physicists and astrophysicists conjectured.  A few of the conjectures advanced to hypotheses.  And in this swirl of activity  she found and third ... and then a forth.  And in theoryland of the hypotheses made sense.  It was called a pulsar.    

 

She had found the crack in the door to some of the deepest Nature yet encountered.

 

In 2017 something like two thousand have been found.  Shortly after the discovery it was suggested a star could collapse so dramatically that it's core was nothing but neutrons.  Imagine a mass greater than the Sun compressed down to something about a dozen kilometers in diameter.  Like a skater pulling in her arms it spins much faster than the star it started out as. The first went around every 1.3 seconds, but some spin more than a thousand times a second.  Their magnetic fields are trillions of times stronger than the Earth's and, combined with the rotation a beacon-like signal forms.  It sweeps through the sky like the light from a lighthouse as it rotates.  

 

She and her advisor opened up an entirely new and unexpected branch of astrophysics that has led to a much deeper understanding of both astronomy and physics.  Pulsars and their close relatives are hot areas of research.  And they can even be useful.  A GPS system is just a group of accurate clocks with transmitters orbiting the Earth.  Pulsars are as accurate as atomic clocks. You  could use them to build a galactic positioning system that would work anywhere in the Milky Way and not than just on Earth.   And you can make use of their regular beat to build another kind of gravity wave detector.  One that is complementary to the current interferometry technique.  

 

Some of the techniques developed since then have trickled down into important technology we use and many hundreds of astronomers and astrophysicists have spent some time in the private sector making their contributions to the economy.  Pure science is a very inexpensive mechanism for creating future value.  The "problem" is you can't predict where it might lead.

 

Hewish went on to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery.  It is widely felt in the astronomy community that Jocelyn Bell should have shared in the discovery as her contributions were enormous.  But:    1967 and female.   She spoke of it ten years after the discovery:

 

"demarcation disputes between supervisor and student are always difficult, probably impossible to resolve. Secondly, it is the supervisor who has the final responsibility for the success or failure of the project. We hear of cases where a supervisor blames his student for a failure, but we know that it is largely the fault of the supervisor. It seems only fair to me that he should benefit from the successes, too. Thirdly, I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them. Finally, I am not myself upset about it – after all, I am in good company, am I not!"

 

She's being far too generous.  This was one of those exceptional cases.  At least she's received other significant honors she's had throughout her career.

 

____ 

And something sad.  

 

I rarely use the term genius to describe anyone alive.  Maryam Mirzakhani was an exception.  A fearless mathematician, she was the only women to receive the Field Medal: math's highest recognition.  She died on Saturday at age forty.  She was just warming up.   Here's a well-written piece about her that appeared in Quanta a few years ago.

 

Excuse my political comment, but Mirzakhani was female, brilliant and from an Islamic county.   I doubt someone with these "liabilities" would be welcome here now ...

__________

¹ She recognized that pulsars are astronomical sources where others had failed because she noticed that the pulses in her data (Figure 6.1) didn’t look like other forms of interference and they reappeared exactly once per sidereal day, indicating an origin outside the Solar System.  She and Hewish, “decided initially not to computerize the output because until we were familiar with the behavior of our telescope and receivers we thought it better to inspect the data visually, and because a human can recognize signals of different character whereas it is difficult to program a computer to do so.”  Other people were using software to filter out noise and were throwing out the interesting signal in the process..   

 

 

  

364.4 ± an εar

In October of 1958 Oliver Smoot became a measurement's namesake and part of MIT lore.  As part of his fraternity pledge task his body was to be used to measure the Harvard Bridge - a span connecting Cambridge and MIT with Boston proper.   At five foot seven Smoot was the shortest of the pledges - a feature that would create the most labor.  An added advantage that smoot sounded like a proper unit of measure.  

 

The plan was to have Oliver lie down a few times - perhaps ten - and mark the distance with chalk.  This would calibrate a string which would be used to finish the measurement.  An onlooker stumbled onto this and, given an audience,  the plan was abandoned for something more insane ..  Smoot the ruler would lay down for each sixty seven inches of the way.  This went on for about half the bridge's span with a line marking every ten smoots.  Oliver was now exhausted, so his fraternity brothers carried and dragged him to each new point along the way.  In the end he had to move or be moved three hundred and sixty four times with about another forty percent of his height remaining.  Being proper engineers they added an error estimate of an ear written as εar - epsilon is often used to denote an error measurement. Being beginning engineers they were wrong.. but it became famous and is maintained to the day.  The smoot is a non-standard unit of measure set exactly to 67 inches or about 170.28 centimeters.  If you query Google for length you can request the answer in smoots.  Siri doesn't measure up (yet)...

 

Oliver Smoot went on to a career technical standards and measurements and became the chair of the American National Standards Institute before becoming President of the International Organization for Standardization.  Another Smoot, George, is known for one of the most beautiful measurements in all of science - the anisotropy of the cosmic background radiation.  It is generally regarded as the point where cosmology - a field with roots thousands of years long across many cultures - became a precision science.  George's other cool factor is that he was one of two contestants to win the million dollar prize on the game show Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?  Oh ... he also won the Nobel Prize in physics. 

 

Oliver's smoot is undoubtedly wrong although the unofficial definition is fine.  They should have sorted out the error in using Smoot as a ruler.  What about his posture?  What about his height laying down during the measurements?  What about his angle with respect to a straight shot across the bridge? You're probably one to two centimeters taller if your height is measured in the hour hour or so before gravity compresses your spine after you wake up. Lots of what ifs to consider.  To do this properly an error has to be estimated for each component of the measurement and a grand totaling know as the error propagation that considers them as a whole.  Part of the coursework of anyone early on the a natural sciences course.  

 

How the errors are presented and judgements made can be problematic.  People talk about a crises in science where measurements, usually in the social and medical sciences, are often not repeatable.  I don't think there's a real crisis, but perhaps it is fodder for another post down the road.¹  It applies in many places -- I have worries that some of what has become to be known as data science is done without regard to understanding errors...  It's presentation is often beautiful and can lure people towards misjudging the result.  One I did some post mortem work caused over a hundred million dollars of hurt.

 

A hallmarks of trade has been the standardization of measurements.  If you find yourself in a good reference library track down the history and evolution of a measurement.  A few years ago I hunted the foot in the stacks of the New York City Library with the help of a great reference librarian who specialized in technology and math.    In recent history - about the time the smoot was defined - the foot became standardized and tied to the meter - 0.3048 meters exactly.  It has been part of many systems for obvious reasons.  What surprised me is it varied from city to city from about 250 to 330 millimeters!  Merchants had to carry around books full of conversion factors (some beautiful examples exist in the library).  In one case a despot wanted to take tall young men from a recently suppressed area in Poland for his army.  His region defined a larger foot than the area with soldiers who appeared to be much taller on paper than they really were.  If you are six modern feet your height could be anything from nearly seven foot three to a bit over five foot six.  And that is in the areas that divided a foot into twelve inches .. some used sixteen digits..  

 

The enlightenment gave us the metric system - official adopted everywhere except the United States, Myanmar and Liberia..  We may as well use smoots.

 

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¹ It has much to do with how science deals with and learns from failure - also that medicine and social sciences are extremely messy given human subjects that are often impossible to completely control for.  Many, myself included, feel they are real sciences (yet).  That doesn't mean they aren't worth doing! Math isn't a science and neither is engineering.  

 

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Recipe Corner

 

I love brussels sprouts, but in a pan or the oven..  never a microwave.  Until now.  If you're pressed for time try this (sent by Chris).  It isn't too bad...

 

I would clean the sprouts, cut part of the bottom stem off, then slice them in half. Then, I would get a small glass rectangular dish that was about 1 1/2 inches deep. I would place the sprouts cut side up in the bottom of the dish along with a tablespoon of water. Now, I would melt some butter in the microwave oven and spoon a little over each of the sprouts. A very slight pinch of sea salt and white pepper over the butter. Now, the most important part - the wrap you cover the dish with. I do not use a lid for reasons I will explain. I use a good clingy wrap (Stretch - Tite, available at Costco), and place it tightly over the dish and down the sides. Then I place them in the microwave (one that has a rotating platter), set it on a medium - high heat (65 to 70 percent), and cook them for about 2 to 2 1/2 minutes, depending on the power of your microwave. I let them sit for about three minutes, then set the microwave at the same heat for about a minute and a half. You should see the stretch wrap rising like a bubble above the dish. Watch them to make sure they do not brown. When cooking is finished, remove them from the microwave and the stretch wrap will suck itself down around the sprouts, almost like they were vacuum sealed. Leave them like this for a few minutes - it is at this point that the butter, salt, and pepper will be forced into the sprouts by the apparent vacuum. Cooking them this way retains most of the color of the sprouts and retains their wonderful flavor without the smell during cooking. If one has to watch their sodium intake, leave the salt off, as the butter has a small amount 

 

 

 

 

how much would someone pay for a low carbon dioxide SAT testing location?

I was in a fourth floor office on the extreme Eastern end of the installation.  The view was great, fantastic colleagues, interesting puzzles and questions ...  the problem was something smelled wrong.  Nearly two months had passed since I moved to the downgrade and it was time to get serious.  A massive retrofit to Bell Labs buildings 1 and 2 at Murray Hill, the downgrade was an external corridor five stories high and over eight hundred feet long intended to bring location infrastructure up to date as well as to improve energy efficiency.¹  

 

Office buildings need to have their airflow balanced to keep the air fresh and prevent the buildup of undesirable pollutants.  My office airflow was poor and there was an ever present chemical background smell.  In theory it had been adjusted twice, but I wasn't seeing any change.  I needed help and that meant doing a bit of trading.  Murray Hill had something of an underground economy that was very useful when dealing with the trades.  Many of these people were extremely good at what they did, but it was a union shop with strict scheduling and work rules.    A variety of currencies were used, I was part of the baking economy.

 

Tony got a blueberry pie. He had access to some serious air monitoring kit and was more than happy to come down with two portable racks.  Unsurprisingly we found a variety of volatile organic compounds and stagnant airflow in most of the office.  What surprised me was a carbon dioxide reading of about 1,600 ppm.  I knew that too much was not a good thing, but had no idea what the limits were.

 

After some searching it became clear that values over about 5,000 were considered dangerous, but tests suggested lower limits were in order.  The standard for HVAC systems was to try to keep levels under 1,000 ppm - about 650ppm above atmospheric levels at the time.  1,000 still appears to be the target number.

 

I needed an airflow expert.   I knew from experience Sal was a chocolate chip cookie guy.  It took nearly three days of on and off adjustments along with replacing the tiles in the ceiling and floor to replace with a special nonvolatile variety earmarked for the executive offices. (he really liked my baking) VOCs came right down and he managed to get CO₂  tracking between 475 and 550 ppm.

 

Years before there was the Brookhaven house. During the late 70s some work was done on passive solar homes as a response to the energy crisis - at the time a large percentage of homes in the Northeast were heated with imported oil.  The idea was to link architects with physicists and material scientists and anyone else with an interest to see if a normal looking home could be built for about the same price as a conventional home, but with annual heating, cooling and hot water energy costs under $100

 

The house easily exceeded its energy goals.  Mostly it was used for testing, but at times people could stay there.  The problem was it was sealed so tightly that you noticed the stale air and felt uncomfortable.  Better heat exchangers that allowed more air circulation needed development and, if necessary, it was better to leak a bit of air to keep indoor pollution levels low.  This is largely a solved problem these days, but I spent some time in the house and its problems started me to think about the problem. 

 

Over the years studies came out showing that indoor air was often much worse than some of the most polluted cities on the planet.  A few of the studies looked at cognitive problems.  CO₂ was particularly interesting as most large building HVAC systems measure it.  Some studies suggest that cognitive impairment begins around 1,000 ppm, but others suggested lower thresholds - some in the 600 to 800 ppm range.  I'd venture a guess that, unless you're outside,  where you're sitting is above 600 ppm.

 

Getting these studies right is very difficult as office and school environments have very dynamic atmospheres.  Cognitive studies add a level of complexity.  Recently a robust study was published in Environmental Health Perspectives.

 

It studies at VOCs and CO₂ levels in office environments and suggests fairly dramatic improvements can be had.  The disturbing note, something that needs further verification, is statistically significant cognitive impairment occurred at levels commonly found in offices and school  - 950 ppm.  Impairment increased with increased concentrations and was very noticeable at 1,400 ppm.

 

from the conclusion

...

Office workers had significantly improved cognitive function scores when working in Green and Green+ environments compared to a Conventional one. Exposure to CO₂ and VOCs at levels found in Conventional office buildings was associated with lower cognitive scores compared to levels in a Green building. Using low emitting materials, which is common practice in Green buildings, reduces in-office VOC exposures. Increasing the supply of outdoor air not only lowers exposures to CO₂ and VOCs, but also exposure to other indoor contaminants. Green building design that optimizes employee productivity and energy usage will require adopting energy efficient systems and informed operating practices to maximize the benefit to human health while minimizing energy consumption. This study was designed to reflect indoor office environments in which large numbers of the population work every day. These exposures should be investigated in other indoor environments, such as homes, schools and airplanes, where decrements in cognitive function and decision-making could have significant impacts on productivity, learning and safety.

...

 

It needs to be stressed that much more work needs to be done, but if you spend your time with cognitively demanding tasks you may want to have a conversation with your building's HVAC engineer to measure and possibly adjust your office VOC and CO₂ levels.  There are some groups that worry about this.  Are organizations being handicapped with high levels of indoor pollution?  What happens when people are better equipped to measure this on their own?²

 

And the subject line...  if your kid was taking the SAT and lower carbon dioxide levels were an extra cost option, how much would you be willing to pay?

 

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¹ An aerial view of Bell Labs Murray Hill.  My office was at the location marked by the red arrow.  The transistor was invented in several labs roughly where the yellow arrow points on the fourth floor.  The retrofit was called the upgrade, but most of us called it something else.

² This is a tough question.  It is likely that low cost meters that talk to, or are even built into, smartphones will appear.  We're seeing that now with PM2.5 measurements in China now and has had a big impact on government decision making.  Any measurement needs to be understood in terms of accuracy and repeatability as well as the context of where and how it was taken.  Getting this right for many of these measurements is a challenge.  I worry that a flurry of low quality tools and measurements may cause more problems than they solve in the beginning.  At the same time having thousands or millions of people making environmental measurements in their homes, offices and cities may force large amounts of change on law makers and the legal process.

 

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Recipe Corner

 

Very easy - try variations.  I make this and variations all Fall and Winter.

 

Roast Green Beans

 

Ingredients

 

° 1 pound fresh green beans

° 2 tbl olive oil

° 1/2 tsp kosher salt

° 1/2 tsp freshly ground pepper

° 1/4 cup slice almonds, or pecans

° 1/4 cup dried cranberries.

 

Technique

 

° preheat oven to 425° F

° snap off the ends of the beans. Put them in a large bowl and toss with oil, salt and pepper.  Spread the coated beans on a rimmed pan/

° roast for about 15 minutes

° remove the pan and sprinkle the nuts and cranberries... return to the oven and roast for another 5 minutes or so.

° adjust the seasoning if necessary and serve.

 

a question of what products and services do for you

Over the years I’ve come to think about products and service in terms of ‘does this improve my life?’ and ‘does this make me happier?'  Reflecting on these questions has changed how I look at my relationship with services and things. More recently I’ve asked a few others to take their time and ask similar questions.   Rather than sumarize, I’d like to ask a larger group:

 

‘what product or service has made the largest impact on your life in the past decade?’ It could be a positive or negative impact.  Feel free to go into detail and tell a story.    I’ll collect the answers and summarize (if you want to be anonymous let me know) and send the results to those who answered.

 

send them to esc at mac dot com

 

perceptual filters for non-verbal communication

[credits rolling, theme music fades and a conversation between a couple begins]

Hello.
I'm sorry I'm late.
I had some important police business to attend to, you know.

- Everything's all right?

Yes, absolutely fine.
Allow me to let you in the car.

Please.
- It's beautiful.

- It's rather neat, isn't it?

I call it the Silver Hornet.

Yes.

It's a little overdue for service, unfortunately.

Perhaps it's better to leave that there.
It's a beautiful night. Why don't we walk?

What an excellent idea.

- L'm sorry about that.

- It's quite all right.

You look ravishing tonight.

- Yes, I know that.

- You know that?

I knew that you knew that.

You did? L knew you knew I knew that.

What made you decide to become a detective?

It's not something one decides every day of the week, you know.  But in my case, it began when my great aunt was kidnapped...  and held for ransom
by an unlicensed Armenian phrenologist.

An Armenian phrenologist?

Yes, you know. A man who reads the "bimps" on the head.

- The "bimps"?

- What?

[conversation fades, music returns]

- from the credit section of The Revenge of the Pink Panther

 

 Phrenology was rooted in the idea that the mind had a limited number of components that were regional in the brain and that the importance of each of these was determined by its size and shape.  Somehow this was reflected in the shape of the skull.  The phrenologist would feel the shape and bumps on a person's head and make judgement statements on the person's personality, mental capacity, and even their potential moral worth. It was a quick filter for information conveyed by a type of non-verbal communication and, like so many poorly thought-out filters, it was pseudoscience.

 

It was hugely popular until becoming discredited around the mid 1800s.  Part of the public discrediting came in the form satire.   Nasology (by George Jabet under the pseudonym Eden Warwick in 1848)  claimed to judge character based on the size and shape of the human nose.  The first printing of the book in England made its point, but a second printing years later somehow caught on in the US and was popular in some quarters as it appeared to justify racism.  Thankfully modern America is sophisticated enough to not fall for the satire of The Onion and The Daily Show.

 

We have rich communications, often unconscious, with others outside of our speech.  Non-verbal communication includes everything from body language, eye contact, physical distance, and much more.  Fashion and clothing are a signal that communicate class, personal taste, mood, and more.  Sometimes we make choices about the signals we send.  Sometimes there are miscommunications based on social non-verbal visual filtering.

 

As part of learning about apparel I've become interested in these communications.   The industry is beginning to undergo radical change and understanding filters as drivers of design is centrally important.  Of course this goes beyond what we chose to wear. We make similar judgements about a person based on their body shape and appearance.  Bodies are less malleable, but have a fashion of their own and that has driven dieting, physical fitness and body modification.  

 

Dieting for weight loss was popularized William Banting with his publication of the Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public.  Perhaps the fact he was an undertaker by trade tells us something his diet consisted of large amounts of meat, some wine, smoking (!), and very few carbohydrates.  It became wildly popular in America establishing a model for the fad diets that followed up to the present.  Dieting was recommended and advertised in men's publications becoming a component of the Muscular Christianity movement that was beginning to gain steam around the same time.

 

Muscular Christianity linked physical health and piety to perceived character.   Self control through rigorous physical exercise supposedly conveyed purity.  Christian men were to be ruggedly masculine and the image of the ideal Western male shifted beginning with the elites.  Buff had become a desired state for the young, wealthy and white and casual clothing was developed to show it off.

 

Dieting and exercise were a path for the emerging middle class.  They came from a lower class and were excluded from power - partly became they were considered vulgar and uneducated.  Dieting and sport demonstrated they had self-control and worth.  Being overweight was linked to weakness, greed and corruption.  There was a worry that men had become too weak - too feminine.  The YMCA was a product of the movement along with games like basketball and volleyball which were invented as gym based physical activities.  This helped ignite an interest in sports like baseball and football in the US making them activities first at elite Eastern colleges and then at more aspirational institutions.  At the peak of the movement the Olympic Games of the modern era were established.

 

Women were initially excluded from this new drive to be physically fit.  A proper woman, at least in the US and England, wasn't to do physical labor.  The desired body type had become - well - plump.  Women's magazines told them losing weight would cause premature aging and a being unattractive for men.  Lillian Russell represented the wealthy white feminine ideal of a fertile plumpness. 

 

Change came from the women's rights movement.  It was believed that if women could control their bodies in the same way that men did they can show they are rational beings of high self worth deserving of equal rights.  Women began to diet and exercise as a means of liberation. 

 

These new visual signals were meant for the white middle and upper class only.  Those from the working class who didn't have the time and means to exercise were viewed as lazy and without worth as they can't control their bodies - and perhaps they should not be granted equal rights.

 

Youth fitness slowly emerged as an issue. During WWI it was noticed that some American draftees were rejected for being overweight.  The numbers weren't huge, but  it became an issue and lead to a study of the physical fitness of several thousand American and European children a few decades later.  The Americans fared poorly triggering alarms about future security.  President Eisenhower, something of a fitness junkie himself, established what later became the President's Counsel on Physical Fitness as a cold war effort.  American children had to become fit, but they had to do it by choice as a counter to the film reals of Soviet children doing required mass calisthenics.  That presented a problem.  It was easy for the Godless communists to motivate a generation, how do you do it in America?

 

The solution was quintessentially American. Hire the guys who gave us Smokey the Bear, our great influencers - the admen of Madison Avenue.  Physical fitness was pitched as being cool.  Gym classes received more attention and producing athletes as ideals became more important.  In Junior High I remember calisthenics to an old 45 record - the practice survived until the 70s.

It is useful to achieve some level of physical fitness, it is important not to judge.  We have powerful social learned visual filters that often lead to character judgements based on someone's race, appearance, height, weight and physical shape.  We may laugh at phrenology, but sometimes we use something equivalent. And there are other filters - some day perhaps I'll write about the phrenology of Google and Facebook...

 

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Recipe Corner

I've mostly been grilling veggies and various types of produce.  Since so little work was done I tried someone else's recipe.  A fun and delicious idea noted by David Lebovitz - vegetarian 'Faux Gras'.  It is great on a hearty bread.