omenti

repairability

Growing up our family always had Fords.  For most of grade school through junior high that meant a blue Ford Falcon.  My Dad's reasoning was simple - a neighbor had good mechanical experience with Fords, particularly the straight-6 engine in the Falcon.  He also had a nice set of tools. Much of it was simple enough that I was involved in part of the routine maintenance even before I had my driver's license.  Simple things like changing the oil every 1,500 miles, gapping and replacing the spark plugs, making sure the battery levels were ok, draining the radiator, testing and replacing the antifreeze, and taking off the air cleaner to spray ether in when cold-starting it when it was below -20°F.   

 

By the time I was driving legally  (I drove a pickup on a wheat farm during harvest the year before I had my license. I suspect that was common in Montana.  Learning how to drive a manual transmission amounted to me trying to not stall the pickup while my boss watched laughing for an hour.)  By high school I graduated to more sophisticated work.  Replacing the head gasket on my own and even replacing the rings under the watchful eye of my Dad's friend.  Everything was exposed and simple - most of it was just sorting out fuel, air and spark.   Sometimes, driving to King's Hill on a hot Summer day, the engine would quit.  That meant pouring some cold water on the fuel line near the engine and waiting a few minutes to break the vapor lock.  Each car had a set of peculiar tricks, but makes had personalities.  Changing to a Chevy or Dodge would have a learning curve.

 

While the Falcon was simple and to work on, almost everything was poorly made.  Perhaps not to the eye, but tolerances in the engine and transmission were sloppy.  A careful break-in period was necessary if you wanted an engine and transmission to last.  It was inefficient even though it didn't weigh much by today's standards.  Although it was a compact, it only got 18 miles per gallon on the road and 13 or 14 in town.  Engine and transmission oil had to be replaced regularly.  Tires went about 10,000 miles if you were lucky, brakes needed adjustment every few thousand miles, the chassis needed lubrication regularly and so on.  The body and chassis designs were primitive and non-crashworthy by today's standards.  Cars often remained fairly intact even in fatal collisions.  

 

The seventies brought more efficient designs along with increasing safety regulation.  More sophisticated tooling that produced dramatically improved engine and transmission tolerances that allowed more efficient designs.   They lasted longer, but it was becoming difficult to work on them.   Repair was moving towards replace.  The failure of a wiring harness on the mechanism for an electric window might be a fifty cent part, but the replacement module could cost hundreds and require several hours of work to replace.

 

Home electronics followed a similar path.  Our first TV was a 19" black and white Magnavox from about 1961.  It had a few dozen tubes, a lot of point to point wiring and hand-soldering, and mechanical switches.  If something went wrong the first step was to take off the back of the set and see if any of the tubes weren't glowing.  You'd pull the suspect out and test it at the local drugstore - most had a tube testing kiosk with a stock of replacement tubes.  That happened a few times before we got our first color TV in 1969 - a Motorola "Quasar" which only had two tubes including the picture tube.  It's main selling point was reliability. By the 80s integrated circuits began to invade home electronics and home repairs became next to impossible.  It didn't matter as we perceived our devices were improving faster than their failure rate.  Prices dropped so rapidly that throwing them away became popular.

 

This replace rather than fix mindset applies to many consumer goods, and many aren't engineered for a long life.  During the pandemic our eight year old refrigerator failed.  I was able to get it working again in about a day, but the repair was anything but easy.  The dishwasher also failed.  A gear on the motor, but the replacement module was $260 and special tools are required. It was eight years old so the leap to a new unit was an easy choice.  I probably wouldn't have tried to repair these things if I didn't have the background of repairing things that broke at home.

 

Ten years ago a mechanical engineer friend thought there might be a market for simple good design and quality manufactured items - mostly home appliances.  They would cost more, but last twenty or thirty years and be easily repairable.   He built a few prototypes, but was laughed at.   It turns out we're mostly ok with disposable.

 

The design integration in most smartphones and watches makes repairs difficult.  If compact, rugged and waterproof are goals, replaceable batteries are an issue even though you may need to replace them every few years.  A cynic might say it gives the user a push to get a new device.  

 

More important is the level of software integration across the system.  Apple's walled garden is problematic for many, but the value of more security and privacy (assuming you don't live in China), and mostly well-behaved apps is worth it to many.  Trading price and flexibility for stability and privacy.   

 

This raises the question of what should we be using?  Cars are much safer and efficient, although more expensive to operate, consumer electronics are mostly better and much cheaper.  Thinking of different ways to do things probably makes sense.  Getting rid of a second car and adding an electric cargo bike if your roads are safe enough is an option.  Three very sophisticated friends have traded their smartphones for simple "dumb" phones.  Well-made and designed clothing that lasts a decade.  Not everyone has multiple choices, but the pandemic seems to have people questioning many things. 

 

I'll end with a recommendation that applies almost universally..  staying away from IoT (Internet of Things) devices makes a lot of sense unless you know exactly what the security and privacy issues are in each case.  And a fundamental flaw in many - they have software flaws and the only way to update is to throw them away and buy something new.  And while it's beyond the main message, some of these IoT devices send information back to organizations that market it.  They turn you and your behavior into a product.

 

 

power different

Recently a friend sent a piece on an energy harvesting device that coverts some of your body's waste heat into electricity.  The description was sparse, but it mentioned the average person produces about one hundred watts of waste heat and went on to say that is enough to power a laptop.  

 

umm..  Both true, but there are some problems ...

 

The average adult metabolizes about 100 watts on average to stay alive.  That's about the same as eating 2000 calories of food a day.   The average adult has about 1.7 square meters of skin area.¹  This means we need to get rid of about 0.006 watts per square centimeter of skin area.  Six milliwatts of power per square centimeter.  The photo of the device showed a ring like affair with some fins - maybe two square centimeters of radiator area.  Let's round that to about ten milliwatts for the device - hardly enough to deal with a laptop, which are on the order of 20 watts or even a smartphone which are a few watts.  That assumes all of the waste heat can be harvested with one hundred percent efficiency.  Here things begin to go down hill quickly.

 

A thermoelectric converter on human skin has a theoretical efficiency of about 5% at room temperature.²  This reduces the six milliwatts per square centimeter down to 0.3 mw/cm².  Even if you covered your entire body, you'd only harvest five watts and you'd be shivering.   And that's unrealistically optimistic as these devices rarely have more than single digit efficiencies on top of their thermal efficiency in this temperature range.  Even optimistically we're down to about 0.03 mw/cm² or 30 microwatts/cm².  Something like an armband might have 100 cm² giving us 3 milliwatts.

 

This isn't reason to abandon hope.  There are hardware devices with sub-milliwatt power requirements. Small energy harvesting devices that harvest mechanical or solar energy also exist and make it practical to put tiny sensors with tiny transmitters nearly anywhere as long as your receiver is nearby. The micro part of the Internet of Things (which has its own issues).  It turns out this is a rich area for college engineering projects.

 

But what about larger power demands where it's inconvenient to change batteries?  Spacecraft that travel past the orbit of Mars generally rely on radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) because the Sun is too dim to make solar power practical.  An RTG puts a thermoelectric converter on something hot - a radioactive material that decays rapidly.  Ideally it's an alpha emitter so you don't need heavy shielding.  There are a number of candidates, but Plutonium-238 (Pu-238) is the most common American choice with a half life of about 88 years. Not only do these generators produce electricity, the extra heat is used to warm the spacecraft's warm.   The current generation of Martian rover is RTG powered. 

 

There are a number of RTG stories.³  I don't want to go on forever, but the nuclear powered pacemaker and artificial heart are among the more interesting.  

 

A problem with early pacemakers was longevity. Batteries had to be replaced every eighteen months or so necessitating expensive and risky surgery.  In the late 60s and early 70s two types of tiny radioisotope generators were manufactured for use by several pacemaker manufacturers. They had enough shielding to be very safe and would last longer than even very young patients.  They were also very cost effective and a few thousand patients received them. Then, in the mid 70s, the practice suddenly halted.   The worry was devices might not be removed before cremation from patients who had died.  This would destroy the shielding and turn an area in and around the crematorium into a radioactive hot zone requiring evacuation and a very expensive cleanup.  

 

The radioactive heart implant never made it into a patient.  To make enough power to run the heart, the RTG generated about 50 watts of waste heat adding to a normal person's 100 watts.  It wouldn't be bad if it could be spread over a skin sized area, but that would be impractical.  It would be like holding an incandescent light bulb.   One of those interesting ideas that you wonder about afterwards...

_________

¹ The approximation medical researchers usually use is from Mosteller:  (height[cm] * weight[kg]/3600)^0.5  a

² The theoretical maximum efficiency of a heat engine is 1 - Tc/Th  where Te is the temperature of the environment - the air around the device in this case - and Th is the temperature of the radiator - the skin temperature.  We have to use an absolute temperate scale so Th = 310°K and Tc ~ 295°K.  So about 4.8% efficient.. let's call it 5, although it is probably half that with poor coupling to the skin and air. 

³ One could go on for a long time .. the CIA's RTG in the Himalayas is particularly interesting.  And then there's the Apollo 13 RTG that required last minute maneuvers as the limping spacecraft approached the Earth.   The very hot RTG is somewhere on the floor of the Pacific.

 

a meltdown between two brownies

You need to read Om’s blog post Why iPhone is today’s Kodak Brownie Camera  It reminded me of my home-brew digital camera about 35 years ago (the Meltdown the ferret photo is in this post - probably the first digital image of a ferret).   

 

 

Digital photography - at least how we usually think of photography (more on that later) - was invented in 1975 by Steve Sasson at Kodak.  (a fun NY Times piece)  Charged coupled devices (CCDs) used to capture the image, had been invented at Bell Labs a few years earlier.  Sasson used one made by Fairchild for his experiments.  I had read a bit about digital cameras when I built mine, but decided to used a modified DRAM memory chip because I could get one for nothing and it seemed like a reasonable thing to try.  It was just that - fooling around with some hardware and writing a bit of software for fun.  The fact that it captured my only record of my ferret Meltdown made it special.

 

 

But there’s another form of digital image making.  Experimental particle physics people moved from detecting events with regular photography (bubble chambers and film emulsions) to electronic counters.  Around 1968 the multiwire proportional chamber revolutionized the field and set the stage for dramatic discoveries that lead to the Standard Model - still the best description of three of the four fundamental forces.  A MWPC consists of many planes of parallel wires.  They’re assembled in a chamber filled with a gas that ionizes when a charged particle flies by.  The wire closest to the passing particle detects the event and a signal is read out. These arrays are arranged at right angles in tightly spaced pairs so it’s possible to calculate a position in two coordinates.  As the particle passes through the chamber its x and y position is registered along its track.  A computer calculates a trajectory for each particle and all of the particles that registered form a 3d image of the event.  This information is then processed to reveal the physics of the event.   This type of photography has become more sophisticated and MWPCs have largely been replaced by more capable detectors, but it's still the same idea - just a fancy camera.    The people  who use these exotic cameras use their smartphones like everyone else for all kinds of personal images. 

 

 

Over the years I’d spent some time worrying about image and sound quality.  At one point I thought better was - well - better.  My epiphany came in the a perfectly restored 66 red Mustang.  It was near Cleveland with the head recording engineer from Telarc Records and a seriously good musician from the Oberlin Conservatory.  We were talking about where music reproduction might go with sound field reconstruction and dramatically more information than CDs could provide when a favorite Beatles tune came up on the 8 track (gasp! - it *was* an authentically restoration).  The volume came up and the two of them were singing along to the music in pure delight.  There is something transcendent about the music - even with awful reproduction in that noisy environment.   Portable music players with cheap headphones would be good enough for most.  As long as there's a personal touchstone.

 

 

Om points out there is a market for high end photography.  Perhaps the real distinction is high end photography is more of a verb than a noun.  You do it to learn how to see images as much as to capture them.   Hopefully it will never go out of fashion.

 

why you can watch I Love Lucy

A few days ago Om and I were talking about some technologies.  I mentioned I sort of predicted one with reasonable confidence about twenty years out.  It seemed a bit too scifi on the surface, but other people in research agreed it could happen if a lot of money was spent.  It seemed desirable, so why not?  There was only one major roadblock and that turned out not to be roadblock at all.  It needed a much better battery than anything we knew about.  A lithium-ion battery was in the ball park at the time, but we had no idea Sony was playing with the technology at the time. We were equally unaware of the fundamental work in university labs two decades before.  

 

It's interesting to think about areas of technology under rapid development and the importance of missing technologies. Television is a great example.

 

Television has been around for a long time.  Philo Farnsworth's all electronic television in the 20s was probably the most important breakthrough.   The lens of a camera focued an image on a photosensitive plate while an electron beam was scanned row by row across the imaged area.  A signal of strength that varied with the brightness of the region the beam was on would be transmitted as a radio signal to a television receiver.  The receiver had a cathode ray tube that, in lock-step with the beam in the camera,  scanned a piece of glass coated with a phosphor that would glow when the beam hit it with a brightness that changed as with the signal the camera was sending. All of this was done at about thirty frames a second - good enough that your mind perceives motion.

 

Television was such a great name - viewing a moving scene at a distance as it happened.  Shortly after WWII a few television networks sent their television signals between cities and then across the country.  Even though the receivers were expensive it quickly caught on and the networks were spending serious money on production. But there was this problem with time zone.  You put a program on at 6 PM in New York City and the television receivers in Los Angeles would display the image at 3 PM.  Not exactly good for creating the largest potential audiences.

 

Electronic recording would fix the problem, but wire and tape recorders were just getting good enough for audio and television signals had about a thousand times as much information.  It just wasn't possible.   The solution seems a bit crazy now - point a film camera at a television monitor and immediately develop the film. Eastern and Central time zones were live, Mountain and Pacific were delayed by two hours.

 

At first these kinescopes used  16mm film.  Once used most of the film was thrown away it degrades and is a fire hazard..  By 1954 television kinescope delayed broadcast became the largest consumer of movie film eclipsing Hollywood and the home movie markets combined. A bit before  I Love Lucy became a huge hit show.  Lucile Ball demanded higher quality so a switch was made to 35mm.    The larger format was so expensive and had to be stored in newly constructed fireproof facilities.  An archive began to emerge. 

 

A few years passed and Ampex came out with a video recorder able to handle the flood of information. - a monster that used two inch wide tape.  An expensive and initially temperamental monster that used two inch tape, but dirt cheap compared to the  kinescope process.  It quickly became the standard for time zone delay. The curious thing is that the television people didn't see tape as an archive medium.  For a few years none of the tape delayed shows remain as the expensive tapes were reused until they wore out.  No one thought long term storage was important.

 

The last part is interesting.  We don't think of television as remote viewing - rather it's a video stream that might be live, time delayed, manipulated,  archived, or all of these. 

 

Oh .. the prediction from 1993?   You will take a flat piece of glass out of your pocket and have a video conversation with a relative in India and the "call" won't cost anything.  We knew how to code video, mobile radio would easily have the bandwidth in 15 or 20 years, multi-touch screens were in the labs, lcd color screens and lcd cameras were only going to get better, the price of bandwidth was going to crater (our corporate management didn't like that message) ... Moore's law on everything but the battery.   Note:  I've made a few good predictions, but looking back at my old lab books can be an embarrassment - you tend to forget the dead ends.  

 

 

eliza the next generation

At the beginning of each year I take a two week mini-sabbatical to explore something outside of my field, but interesting nontheless.  Around 1985 it was the computer language Lisp (Common Lisp because one of the machines in research had it and a tutorial).  The best way to learn a computer language is to give yourself a task.  I wanted to build a chatbot - specifically recreate ELIZA.  It wasn't particularly difficult.  There was a very small (like a half page of code) main module and scripts of responses.¹  I only had two scripts - both were simple, but they worked. 

 

ELIZA was created by Joesph Weizenbaum at MIT in the 60s to test human computer interactions.  The most famous version was DOCTOR where ELIZA was a psychiatrist.  It was primitive by the time I tried to recreate the basics, but it blew people away in the day.  At least one magazine predicted this was the end of any number of jobs.   It also made people think and rethink what the Turing test was. Since then there have been a variety of chatbots of varying degrees of sophistication.  You've used more than a few interaction with companies over the telephone or via the Internet. 

 

Times are changing.  I'm reacting to chats I've had with friends who do 'AI' (such a loose term!) at Stevens, Columbia, Google and Facebook as well as a recent paper that shook up some people.  These conversations lead me to a prediction:

You should learn about Large Language Models and be wary - very wary.

LLMs are statistical models of words that we might use.  A very large corpus of writing - say Wikipedia, blogs, everything posted on social media, some public domain work - and even computer code (GitHub for example) - is used to find strings of words and statistical probabilities of what comes next.  These are computationally expensive to build so expect them from the largest tech companies and governments. Not many people have this expertise and they're mostly academics. But once you have one, the task of building a front end to interact with people is cheap in terms of talent, time and compute power. 

 

They have no intelligence and can't make reliable predictions (although I suspect horoscopes are very likely:-).  Early work suggests they can be appear authoritative even though they're mere, as Emily Bender suggests, mere stochastic parrots.  I suspect a lot of people will swoon and some real damage can be done before the right niches are found.

 

Here are a few I can think of (some suggested by folks I know)

translation in real time  Not the quality you'd use at the UN or for contracts, but better than high school French or German.

transcription  Human transcription is very expensive.  For most talks and meetings you don't need the accuracy of a competent human. 

spam  This class of tool should be able to write highly targeted spam that can fool a lot of people.

national destabilization  We've seen what it's like with human authors and tv and social media platforms.  Expect certain players to exploit these tools when they're available.

writing  Book reports for kids to journal articles.  They can be very misleading.  In areas where the corpus isn't deep expect to see serious plagiarism.

search  This one really scares me.  Authoritative answers that can be very wrong. Of course people will sign away any legal rights they have before being allowed to use these. They might serve as a writing tool to rephrase something poorly written. Think of it as a next level spelling/grammar checker.  

there have to be many we haven't thought about!

 

It will happen in less than five years.. maybe even next year given what I've seen so far. My advice to to think about implications.  I worry too many bad ideas are the result of running fast and breaking things.

And since I mentioned plagiarism:

 

__________

¹ Here's the pseudocode:

function Generator(user sentence) returns response
    Let w be the word in sentence that has the highest keyword rank
    if w exists
        Let r be the highest ranked rule for w that matches sentence
    response ← Apply the transform in r to sentence
    if w = 'my'
        future ← Apply a transformation from the ‘memory’ rule list to sentence
        Push future onto the memory queue
    else (no keyword applies)
        Either
               response ← Apply the transform for the NONE keyword to sentence
        Or
                response ← Pop the oldest response from the memory queue
    Return response

 

connecting the titanic, sputnik and dealing with forgetfulness

1955, Fred Whipple had just been appointed to head the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge.  The International Geophysical Year was less than two years away and he wanted to involve citizen scientists as much as possible.  Whipple was one of the few who realized a satellite was likely and set about creating a web of radio operators to monitor and relay transmissions from satellites along with groups of amateur astronomers who could optically track their orbits.  Operation Moonwatch was formed and by Sputnik's launch over 200 teams were in place. 

 

Tracking a satellite was done with a clock and a low power telescopes that could read azimuth and declination.  The National Bureau of Standards time signal broadcast on WWV in Fort Collins, Colorado used as the reference clock and most people into amateur astronomy had a shortwave radio. Readings from stations separated by hundreds of miles were sent by amateur radio operators to a computer at MIT that gave the project a bit of its precious time.  More clusters of readings would come in from around the world and a model of the satellite's orbit generated an ephemerides - predictions of where it would be. Later specialized cameras were developed by Bell Labs to automatically generate satellite ephemerides as well as tracking ICBM tests, but Moonwatch was a success and lit the imagination of a few people.  

 

In physics it's common to turn a problem on its head to gain a bit of insight.  Operation Moonwatch used known positions on earth and an accurate clock to measure a position in orbit.  What if you put synchronized clocks in space and measured how long it took radio signals to reach a position on earth?  With enough satellites with synchronized clocks you could triangulate a position anywhere on the Earth's surface.  The technical details were difficult details, but the basic idea was simple.  

 

It turns out accurate navigation is very difficult and expensive and a limiting factor in fighting the cold war.  It was so difficult that as technology progressed ARPA decided to push ahead with a satellite based global positioning system - the inverse of Operation Moonwatch.  It was a bargain for what it gave to the military.  Finally a good enough signal was made available to civilians and navigation changed.¹ 

 

GPS doesn't work everywhere.  It would be nice to track things indoors and at a lower cost. Bluetooth and WiFi are currently used -  usually measuring signal strength from several transmitting beacons and triangulate a position.  Sometimes it's just proximity to a single beacon - a lighthouse model.   The approaches aren't very accurate - three to ten meters is common.  Good enough to track your phone as you move around, say, in a mall or subway, but doing better would be nice.

 

This is where the Titanic comes in..

 

On April 15, 1912 the Titanic struck an iceberg.  Frantic radio signals went out, but there was confusion among rescue vessels and people on land trying to coordinate the rescue effort.  Sometimes it takes a disaster to create order and an effort to regulate radio frequencies began soon after. Transmitters were assigned narrow swaths of the electromagnetic spectrum that were large enough to effectively communicate with receivers that could tune to those frequencies. Regulations changed as larger chunks of this resource were needed - AM radio required more than Morse Code, FM radio even more and television much more. Government would parcel out these increasingly scarce resources, but power was also regulated and it was possible to give much larger chunks to low power short range communications - WiFi and Bluetooth are examples.  Most of radio engineering tried to pack as much information into as little spectrum as possible and to build transmitters and receivers that could be accurately tuned to specific frequency ranges  If you waited for some technology to catch up there was another way (actually several, but I'll only mention one) way to do radio.

 

You may have heard about ultrawideband (UWB).  In the mid 2000s it was supposed to be a good way to send large amounts of information over short distances.  Cheaper and higher bandwidth than the WiFi of the day. Often existing technologies are improved with scale and an embedded base making it difficult for new players.  Sophisticated coding technologies and enormous penetration (WiFi has greater penetration than smartphones) cemented WiFi as the prime high bandwidth low range wireless connection.  In a few years UWB went from redundant to lagging. Many thought it was dead, but it had a few advantages in some use cases.   

 

Here's how it works.  Rather than sending out a precisely tuned narrow band frequency, UWB sends out narrow (in time) digital pulses that "splash" over a very wide frequency range.  The signals are usually only one or two billionths of a second long and aren't sent that often - a hundred thousand to ten million a second are common rates. The frequency range is so wide that usually at least some of it can pass through objects that block signals like GPS and WiFi.  It's also so weak that narrowband communication can't detect it.²

 

 Imagine scattering a few UWB transmitters around where you know their location with some accuracy.  Now start transmitting synchronized pulses.  A receiver notices the time of arrival of each signal and, using the fact that light travels about 30 centimeters in a billionth of a second, can triangulate it's own position.  Accuracy is about ten centimeters - about four inches.

 

A use case I'm familiar with is finding the locations of players in a beach volleyball game.  In international FIVB games a very small (less than a half ounce) UWB device goes in the back of each player's  shirt or sports bra.  Their positions are tracked within ten centimeters about a hundred times a second and accelerometers and a compass send out rotation and orientation information on the UWB signal that the announcers, coaches and sports science people use.  Four transmitters are used and all four players are easily tracked.

 

It would also be useful for augmented reality and Apple has included an UWB chip in every iPhone 11 - the greatest deployment of the technology so far.  For now it's being used for data transfer, but wait a bit.  Someone could also make very cheap ($10 or less) postage stamp devices that might be powered by available light that could be location tags.  Put them on your keys, glasses, remote control .. anything you tend to lose track of.  We went through trying to manage dementia with my mother.  I would have paid a lot for this capability.  And thousands of other uses from amateur sports to tracking boxes accurately in warehouses.

 

There are probably some bad things that can be done with it.  We need to be thinking these things through, but our track record isn't exactly good. 

__________

¹ It also gives a very good frequency standard and a timing signal.  Without this our mobile phone system, high frequency trading and a host of other core technologies we depend on would break.  This is an issue as GPS is vulnerable to attack and we've done almost nothing on backup technologies. 

² The FCC defines it as taking up at least 500 MHz of spectrum somewhere from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz.  Power is under -41.3 dBm/MHz .. or 75 nanowatts.  Since it only deposits a tiny bit of power in any narrowband frequency, it's just below the noise floor of a narrowband receiver.  Fortunately it's straightforward to build a receiver that can detect the signal. 

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.

 

giving time a hand

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

 

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

 

My mind was blown

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

abigail van allen's layer cake - catalyst for the last half of the 20th century

I was in my second year of grad school and had gone to dinner at my advisor's house.  These dinners were always interesting and the deserts were a near match.  That night we had a wonderful homemade cake.  A layer cake rolled in the shape of a log, filled with fresh fruit and coated with a thin layer of bitter chocolate.  One of the guests - James Van Allen - yes the guy the Van Allen belts are named after - remarked on the cake and told us the story about Sputnik starting the space race was all wrong.  The real beginning came years earlier in his living room over his wife's excellent layer cake.  Reality is often more fascinating than the recent history we hear in school.

 

It was around 1953.  Van Allen and a group of physicists were at his home after a formal meeting.  This night a critical step was taken.  After talking about new learnings from balloon and sounding rocket explorations of the ionosphere.  Someone suggested maybe an Earth orbiting satellite would be possible soon.  After all - this von Braun guy was making a lot of noise about space travel being practical.

 

Indeed Wernher von Braun had been trying to popularize space travel.  He had teamed up with science fiction writers and later with Disney and Collier's trying to convince the public. Although von Braun was charismatic, he wasn't taken that seriously.  The only thing the government wanted him for was leading the Army's program to be rockets that could deliver nuclear weapons.

 

Enjoying the excellent cake was someone who could make a difference.  Lloyd Berkner was one of the most respected scientists in the United States.  He had the ear of generals and even the President.  He made an interesting suggestion.  Maybe the way to learn more about near space would be a multination collaboration like one that explored Antarctica.   Given global tensions it could be useful for political reasons and would spread the costs. Larger sounding rockets could be built along with expeditions to the poles.  Maybe even a satellite.   Everyone at the dinner loved the idea and the International Geophysical Year was proposed soon afterwards.  Ultimately dozens of countries and hundreds of scientists were involved.  The target year would be 1957.

 

Van Allen and the other near space guys kept proposing satellites with no luck.  Then, a few years later, Berkner found the key.  President Eisenhower was focused on avoiding WWIII and countering the Soviets.  Something like a satellite for science was nothing but a distraction.  Berkner had used the "it will shock the other side" argument without luck.  Then he changed gears and suggested it could lead to spy satellites.

 

Eisenhower was a general.   Having great surveillance is deeply embedded in military DNA.  Spies on the ground, high altitude aircraft, code breakers .. whatever it took.  The only trick with a satellite, Berkner said, would be to establish Earth orbit as neutral territory.  A small scientific satellite could set a precedent.   Eisenhower agreed and the Navy ultimately won a competition to work on Project Vanguard - a satellite to be instrumented by Van Allen's team. 

 

The Soviet Union's ICBM project was led by a scientist more interested in space flight than ICBMs.  He realized an ICBM would make a dandy satellite launcher and when Khrushchev took power managed to convince him on an ICBM program and added an Earth orbiting satellite would have a great political impact.  Khrushchev agreed, but what he really wanted was a big ICBM.

 

Through the International Geophysical Year interactions it had become clear that the Soviets were building a satellite - indeed that it would launch in the Fall of 1957.  It seemed like a fantastic cap to the year, but the knowledge and excitement didn't go beyond far that group.

 

When Sputnik (fellow traveler) launched it was mostly ignored by the Americans - certainly the government.  The New York Times made a big announcement and people went out to look.  Satellite tracking became almost a hobby for some (that was the genesis for a global positioning system, but that's another story), but America wasn't quaking in fear.

 

The American government was happy - perhaps delighted.  They weren't first, but this little Soviet metal sphere orbited over American territory several times a day.  Precedent had been established. It would take time, but the Americans would get their spy satellites.

 

The story most of us know came from Texas.  Lyndon Banes Johnson worried whoever controlled space could control Earth - an old sci-fi trope.  LBJ also happened to be the Senate Majority Leader.  He gave impassioned speeches about falling behind.  His words resonated with the public and early American rocket failures only increased public anxiety.  

 

And what about Van Allen and the other scientists?  Johnson managed to open the serious money spigot.  It became clear that ICBMs made great satellite launchers with modest changes.  The scientific study of space was a dandy idea to help prove in new rocket technology.    STEM education in the public schools sprang up largely out of Berkeley and MIT.  The world was changing.

 

The Van Allen Belts?  They were discovered using the early Explorer series of satellites in 1958.  The interaction of the Earth's magnetic field and the solar wind was beginning to sort out. 

 

So that's the secret .. really good layer cake.

 

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.