omenti

RrdD: how a lot of new stuff happens .. (sort of)

The ripped and stained vinyl covered seat of some lost color puffed a cloud of tobacco smoke when I sat down.  It wasn't the worst seat in the room.  One wall of the windowless basement room was a painted green chalk board.    Over forty years had gone by and it was still called the opium den.  Someone had brought a box of doughnuts from the shop next door.  Fifteen was their  bakers dozen.  I was lucky to have been in this place before the building was torn down.  You could feel the presence of history.

 

In the late 1940s at the Bell Telephone Laboratories an acronym for inventing the future of electronics and telecommunications appeared in the technical journal.

    RrdD

Big R, little r, little d, big D:  pure research, applied research, investigatory/inventive development and development at scale. It was supposed to be a path from a discovery in the laboratory to the next marvel you'd use anywhere from five to fifty years out.  Parts of the labs and the Western Electric manufacturing arm were organized to support that path.  There was just one little problem.  That's not how things happen in the real world.  Some bits of it work sometimes, but it influenced how people think.  That said it's a useful framework.  You can identify the pieces, but they may not appear where you think they will.   I have a lot of experience in R, r and d.  I'll spend most of the post talking about little r as it's the one that often brings dramatic change.  It's probably the one to study if you worry about change, but it's often impossible to see the early signals unless you're a participant.  You need to be playing the game.

 

First a bit on "pure" research.  Science as we know it really didn't develop until the early 19^th century.  One of the great inventions of that century was the modern natural science laboratory.  It was a radical departure from anything people had seen and was best exemplified by the creation of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge around 1870.  A half century later the modern large government lab grew out of Ernest Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley and the Bell Telephone Laboratories started to become a formidable industrial lab. All of these places supported pure research - research with the primary aim was understanding Nature better.  It was assumed that some of these discoveries would be useful and it was important to have people intimately familiar with the discoveries as well as finding some practical use.  It was an important step as the pure research was becoming very expensive to justify as pure curiosity.  

 

Pure is a bit tainted.  A feature of science is when you look at something in a new way - a better telescope, microscope, particle accelerator - you often learn things beyond your wildest imagination.  Technology drives instrumentation.  Computers and exotic electronics and materials fuel better views of Nature so scientists find themselves inventing and perfecting new tools in addition to using commercial tools that came from engineering organizations.  

 

There's an interesting story about the global positioning system.  Shortly after the USSR orbited Sputnik in 1957 the US launched a frantic effort to track satellites.  It enlisted thousands of amateur astronomers and high school students with a dirt-cheap azimuthal spotting scope.  You'd record your latitude and longitude, find the satellite, read off a couple of numbers and note the time.  The largest source of error was accurate timing.  It was recommended people use a shortwave radio and tune to the time standard at WWV in Fort Collins, Colorado, but even then human reflexes got in the way.  A physicist was part of the team and wondered what it would be like if these trackers had their own accurate clocks - atomic clocks. It wasn't practical, but he flipped the problem in his mind.  What if the satellite had it's own clock?  If you had several in orbit you could calculate your position to great accuracy. That was the holy grail of navigation.   There were a lot of details to work out and it wasn't technically possible at the time, but it resurfaced at the government research organization DARPA about fifteen years later when they realized you could do it for a few tens of billions of dollars.  A bargain given the need.

 

With that, on to little r:

 

A century ago a little polytechnic school in Pasadena created  the premiere astronomy program in the world.  A few other brilliant people outside of astronomy were attracted and the school was transformed.  They needed some technical goals to grow past pure science.   The hottest game in the technical world was electrifying the country.  It seemed like magic.. spin a bunch of copper wires in a magnetic field with steam or moving water and make a light bulb come on in a home a hundred miles away.  For many it was more desirable than indoor plumbing and universities, companies and politicians were falling over each other trying to make it happen.  It seemed to be the natural problem for an electrical engineering program to work on.  The folks at Caltech looked studied it and came to the conclusion that the fundamental problems had been solved - it wasn't worth the effort if you were trying to make a major impact.  Rather they decided to work in more basic areas and trust that practical developments would take place. Not in one person or even a department, but if they cleverly linked departments and had people float around a bit..    They went long and deep with the blessings of their leadership.

 

It paid off. They developed an understanding of earthquakes, aerodynamics, and biochemistry.  They developed a rich understanding of the emerging field of quantum mechanics and were able to make contributions in solid state physics - the key to semiconductors and computing.   But the big steps didn't seem to follow naturally.    In the late forties the transistor form Bell Labs was regarded as an exciting curiosity.  They were difficult to manufacture and didn't amplify as well as tubes.  Early devices had a high failure rate.  Bell Labs saw them as being useful for long distance telephony.  A bit later on, as the solid state physics of silicon developed it became clear that you could capture the energy of the sun with silicon and the solar cell was invented. And some people in Caltech were finally positioned to help change the world.   But let's go back to the opium den.

 

My first director was a young Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Labs in the early fifties.  The Labs, as part of AT&T's agreement with the government to exist as a regulated monopoly, had to make most of its inventions available for very modest and sometimes non-existent licensing fees.  He had become an expert on one of the early types of transistors and tricks used to make it  and was in Allentown, Pennsylvania teaching a master class to two in the opium den. One of the two at the table liked the doughnuts, but both were probably wishing for sushi. Akio Morita and a Japanese physicist had traveled from the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation - a tiny Japanese tape recorder company.  They wanted to make smaller tape recorders and were hoping the lower power demands of a transistorized amplifier would make a difference.  They were also interested in the high frequency characteristics and the possible use in a radio receiver.  They asked a lot of questions and managed to survive the room and its doughnuts. Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation later became known as Sony and the transistor radio was a breakthrough product. 

 

By the late fifties a core of R and r people from Bell Labs left to start Fairchild in the Bay Area.  There were some connections to Berkeley and Stanford, but for more fundamental work, to Caltech where some of these people had done their degrees.  Early transistors were about the size of the eraser on a pencil with three wire leads coming out. They were hand assembled and had to be individually tested and then soldered into circuit boards mostly for military and telecommunication applications.  Until it was realized you could turn them into switches.  Suddenly it made sense to build transistorized computers.  Transistors were still too expensive and the tube industry wrote white papers telling people not to waste their time and money.   Few realized one door was closing and another opening.  

 

Radical change seems to come out of left field.  There's rarely an "aha!" moment. People who have done the most impactful work will tell you they've been frustrated working at something for a long time meeting with failure after failure.  They end up trying something different and wonder why it seems to be working differently than expected.  There are still failures, but also a series of promising developments.  Some of these are little ahas!, but the final result is often anticlimactic.  

 

There was a twenty year period when electrification technology went from almost zero to having almost all of the basics sorted out.  There was still an enormous amount of work and investment required to bring electricity to America and large areas of the Earth are still in the dark today, but during this amazingly intense period when almost every good engineer seemed focused on the problem until a certain maturity was achieved and progress slowed dramatically.  About the time electrification was slowing, radio lit up.  Ten to fifteen years and most of the basics had been worked out.  We still use designs that date back to the twenties.  Television followed a similar path during the 30s.  The North American NTSC standard dates to 1941.  Post WWII advances like color were much less radical in scale than the early developments.  And the earliest precursor to the Internet sprang up in the early 70s.  By 1985 most of the necessary technical leaps had been made.

 

After each one of these hot engineering periods people wonder if that's the end of progress.  It never is.  To drop in a bit deeper consider the solid state electronics revolution that began at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, 

 

The cold war created strong demands for radar, computers as well as general miniaturization.  Money was flowing and engineers were focused mostly on dealing the the problems of tube based computers (there's a separate story on computer architecture that I'll leave out for now).  Exotic materials in the tubes to make them last long enough that a computer might work for a day evolved into computers that could have sections die and still keep working. It had been discovered that transistors could be switches and from that you could build all of the logic elements a digital computer required.  The problem was cost and reliability.  IBM stated making some of the first practical solid state computers, but there were a series of wack-a-mole class problems.  

 

Robert Noyce was also frustrated by these problem.  He came up with connecingt them on the silicon with metallic runners that were created as part of the manufacturing process.  He added a few passive components and had invented something he called the integrated circuit.  It was completely out of left field, but helped solve some of those pesky connection problems. Suddenly an entirely new direction had been found.  The focus shifted to increasing the density of devices on the chip.  

 

Carver Mead started wondering, assuming you had the manufacturing technique to make things arbitrarily small, what the practical limit of "micro" was.  As part of what started as a back of the envelop exercise he found factors conspiring with each other in such a way that it should be possible to make working complex devices near the region where quantum mechanics would become an issue - you should be able to make working ICs more than a million times denser than the state of the art at the time.   Gordon Moore was also working in this area and observing progress to date and understanding Carver's clear blue skies, wrote a document that became known as Moore's Law.  It isn't a natural law, like the laws of thermodynamics or gravity, but rather a permission.  It provided people with the belief that fundamental road blocks didn't exist - or at least wouldn't for decades.  You might only see a generation - a year and a half or so - ahead, but if you worked hard you'd get there.  Then there would be a new set of hurdles you could set your eyes on a conquer - but it would be possible for someone to take them down.   It was a permission slip and  probably the most optimistic document in all of engineering and technology.

 

There isn't any isolated pure research in solid state electronics.  The tools and money are in advanced development and production. It is where that part of Nature is most easily studied.  Researchers work in these areas informed by the fast moving problems.  It's somewhat different from the natural sciences and you ignore manufacturing technology at your peril (arguably Intel has fallen victim as have many others).   Now back to the late sixties.

 

Laying out dozens and then  hundreds of logic elements was becoming a difficult task.  The design progress had become a bottleneck for logic based ICs and people were inventing frustrating solutions that weren't solutions.  Wack-a-mole.  The herd is working very hard, but some people get frustrated and realize there's something wrong with the zeitgeist. A few had the freedom - or have managed to create it for themselves - and wander off in other directions.  There was failure but enough little successes and hints to keep going. Federico Faggin had the idea to put enough of an array of logic elements on a chip that he could make it a programmable general purpose computer.  His four bit 4004 microprocessor with a few thousand transistors ignited a revolution was created.  

 

Microprocessors were complex beasts and enormously difficult to design.  Carver Mead had been working on improving design languages and ended up creating a new direction with his silicon compiler.  It was now possible to design very complex chips in a language designers would work with and debug - not unlike the compilers and debugging tools used in software development only rather than an executable program the output was a "tape out" that would let an electron beam writing tool create a set of photomasks used to manufacture the chips.  It became possible for people to design chips without owning a manufacturing plant.

 

Even now there's a new revolution underway. People were building supercomputers in the 80s and 90s as they had for two decades before for scientific tasks, but it was felt they'd be needed for perceptive systems and the next generation of artificial intelligence. Conventional digital computers aren't exactly well matched to these fuzzy perceptive tasks.   A few people had been playing with neural networks and a couple of architectural advances had been made along with the realization that simple processors used in gaming computers could be used as building blocks.  This new class of fuzzy computing is still being sorted out, but it works with a tiny fraction of the energy and cost required for equivalent work on a supercomputer. It even exists in smartphones.

 

I don't think we're at the beginning of that exciting twenty year period for quantum computing yet - but it's probably coming. 

 

So that's what would have been called little r research ..  the process that makes dramatic pivots in technology possible.  You can't create them with market research .. that approach is exactly backwards and there are tragic examples.  It's remarkable that you find yourself with something new that you intended to solve a problem with and suddenly a thousand new other solutions to other problems - problems you couldn't have dreamt of - become available. This is a great example of why trying to predict the detail of future technologies doesn't work.  

 

What happens in what was once called little d .. advanced development .. is also fascinating.  Only a few organizations have managed to pull it off more than a couple of times.  I'll write about it somewhere down the road. 

 

 

 

northward and beyond!

Yesterday a friend asked for comments on a piece about the recent movement of the magnetic north pole.  The article referred to an update to officially published information about the Earth's magnetic field.  Unfortunately it was both confusing and inaccurate so I typed out a reply on my iPhone.  He suggested I turn it into a blog post.  I'm leaving it unedited and adding a bit on the North Star.

 

This is poorly written. The model is not used for GPS, but rather for compasses… smartphones and cars have compasses, but the accuracy is poor- a few degrees.. this wander is, at middle latitudes, only a fraction of a degree. There are folks who need very accurate compasses (submarines for example) and using them at high latitudes demands a very accurate map. Also GPS denial is a major worry of the military.

The standard model for the planet’s magnetic field is fairly well accepted, but some aspects are not well known.

It’s exceptionally important.. our form of life certainly wouldn’t exist without it as it builds a shield that keeps energetic particles largely from the Sun from reaching the surface. The core of the Earth is mostly iron and a few other heavy elements. It’s about the size of the moon and very hot - about 5700°C if memory serves - but under enormous pressure so it’s a solid. . Just outside is a 1500 or so thick liquid that is mostly iron with a good deal of nickel. This is also a hot zone, although not quite as hellish, and the pressure is now low enough that it’s a non-homogeneous fluid. There’s a lot of movement - in very very slow motion - with slightly warmer plumes rising and the cooling and falling and getting mixed put into circular motions as from the Earth’s rotation (the Coriolis force). The flow of the hot liquid iron generates huge electric currents which, in turn, make magnetic fields. These separate magnetic field regions roughly align along the Earth’s spin axis and produce the planet’s magnetic field.

The motion of the poles is caused by large scale flows going on deep below. To our time scale it appears slow, but it’s been going since the formation of the planet.

Something dramatic takes place every half million years or so although the timing is statistically random. The poles swap. The last was about 700 or 800k years ago (I could be wrong… the number sticks with me) and probably happened very quickly — in a few hundred years or less. There have been short lived reversals since then.. one was during the last glacial period and only lasted for a few hundred years. The Earth’s field dropped to a very low level - like under 10% of the current level - and filled for awhile before going back to something stable.

The strength of the field has been dropping for a few hundred years and there is speculation it might lead to one of these mini events or perhaps even a complete reversal. There are people who feel it is very likely in the “near” future — like the next 5,000 or 10,000 years.

 

On dark and starry nights most people can find Ursa Major - the constellation know as The Big Dipper.  Fewer can find Polaris - the North Star.  The trick is to use the outermost stars of the Little Dipper's bowl as a pointer.  Extend the end of the bowl upwards five times its length and the bright star is Polaris.  It's close to the north celestial pole - the point in the sky you'd find if you extended the axis the Earth spins on straight up.  Polaris is within a degree - roughly the width of your little finger at arm's length and close enough for simple navigation.¹ 

 

Finding North is fundamentally important to navigation.  If you want to be accurate with a compass you need the magnetic corrections.  And to navigate  by the stars you need the celestial north pole.   Literature is full of references.

But I am constant as the northern star,
Of whose true-fixed and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.  (Julius Caesar III i)

A guiding star is mentioned in Iceland sagas 800 years ago.  But it hasn't always been Polaris.  

 

You've probably played with toy gyroscopes.  Spin one up and points in one direction even when you move it around.  But perturb it you  and it can wobble in a circle.  Its spin axis is said to be precessing. The Earth's slightly  non-spherical shape and the gravitational influence of the Sun and Moon conspire to give the Earth a wobble that takes about 25,800 years to complete.   Polaris has been roughy the north star for about a thousand years and is currently about as close to the celestial pole as it gets.  Vikings were navigating in the 8th and 9th century used Polaris even though it was about seven degrees off - enough for large errors if they didn't make corrections.  At the time of Christ a collection of stars in the Little Dipper was used and it was about three degrees off for Columbus.   Shakespeare's Julius Caesar was using a bad metaphor - the North Star isn't North over time.   But it's even less reliable in another way and that makes it fascinating.

 

Polaris is a bright and fat yellow star about two thousand times brighter than the Sun and nearly fifty times the Sun's diameter.  There are two smaller companion stars making it wobble back and forth a bit..  If you can make accurate position measurements it isn't steady.  Even more dramatic is the fact that its brightness changes on a regular basis . well, sort of regular. (did I mention it was fascinating?)

 

A bit over a hundred years ago Henrietta Swan Leavitt made a discovery that revolutionized astrophysics and astronomy.  She showed the intrinsic brightness of a certain type of variable stars called Cepheids was directly related to the time it took to change brightness.  She ha given astronomers an important method to measure stellar distances.  The fact she didn't receive a Nobel Prize is an astonishing example of sexism. As Nobels go this would have been one of the more important.

 

Polaris is about 450 light years away - the closest Cepheid.  Think of it as a nuclear powered internal combustion reciprocating engine (although technically there isn't any combustion).  In Cepheids a carbon core is surround by thin shells of fusing helium and hydrogen.  The cycle starts with the helium  being singly ionized - the temperature is such that one electron is missing (He^-) . Gravity pulls the shell inward compressing and heating it.  Enough heat that the second electron is stripped away.  Doubly ionized helium  (He^{- -}) is more opaque to heat transfer than the singly ionized variety so it heats up in a hurry.  As it heats it expands beginning to cool in the process.  Finally it's cold enough that electrons from the plasma soup in the layer re-attach and He^{- -} is becoming the He^- variety. Radiation now flows more easily and the star gets brighter as it expands.  But now enough radiation is getting through that gravity begins to pull in the He^- and the cycle repeats.  A huge engine chugging away.  When the largest engines on Earth were at around ten thousand horsepower, Henrietta had worked out the secret of vastly larger engines.

 

Polaris isn't exactly your garden variety Cepheid.  In addition it's getting brighter - ten percent brighter in the last century.  (this would be a true disaster if it happened to the Sun..  most life would be snuffed out in a hundred years and the oceans would boil away a hundred years later)  To make things more interesting the change in brightness throughout the star's period got much weaker almost vanishing in the 1990s - but now it's returning. There are some interesting hints and more than a few conjectures, but it's still a mysterious object. Curiously it was discovered to be emitting X-rays.  That usually implies a super hot atmosphere driven by an extremely strong magnetic field.  Where it would come from is still a mystery,.

 

It's humbling to realize how much we can learn by looking at these tiny points of light in the sky and asking really good questions.

__________

¹ As seen from Earth the Moon is about thirty minutes of arc in diameter - a half degree.  Here are some rules of thumb that are close enough for most people.  If you're really tall with long arms your hands and fingers are usually a bit larger.  If you like you can calibrate your hand.  These are all at arms length

1 degree - the width of your little finger

5 degrees - the width of your three middle fingers side by side

10 degrees - make a fist and hold it with the back of your hand facing you.  

25 degrees -  stretch your thumb and little finger as far away from each other as they'll go. Tip to tip is about 25 degrees

15 degrees - a bit out of order .. like the 25 degree measurement, but between your index and middle finger.

 

just what is that privacy thing?

At a birthday party the other day conversation turned to privacy.  When someone complained about the erosion of our right to privacy I saw an opening to ask a question:  

"When was the golden age of privacy in America?"

Among a dozen people there was nearly universal agreement around the time of the Bill of Rights.  After all those founding fathers ..  I just listened.  It turns out they were wrong.

 

The idea of privacy was almost foreign in Revolutionary America.  While the founders were arguing various rights for landed white males, the only nods to privacy were associated with the ownership of property - notably intellectual property.  People were encouraged by the Revolutionary government and later the Federal government to spy on each other to ferret out who might be breaking a boycott or somehow not supporting the cause.  Punishment came through social pressure like public shamming and sometimes worse.  

 

 You might think living in relative physical isolation as a farmer without telephones, cameras and Internet would give you serious privacy.  The rub was you had to deal with others in your community.  You had to buy and sell goods and services, most people went to church and so on.  Chances were you'd never travel far from where you were born so you were surrounded by people who knew quite a bit about you.  You were defined by your reputation and position. It probably seemed very normal to most people.

 

 Change first emerged not on farms, but in the cities among the wealthy.  With property came the idea of ownership and protection.  This extended inside the house where there might be servants  By the mid 1700s doors began to appear inside homes along with this radical new privy.  Dealing with one's personal matters became a private affair.  Jump ahead to the 1820s and even homes of the emerging middle class had private rooms and privies. 

 

The South followed suit, but it took time and was more isolated.    Travelers noted, with some shock, that as late as 1850 many houses were doorless inside and multiple families sleeping  in the same room.  Like New England change first came to the wealthy, but slaves and indentured whites were not allowed these luxuries.  The right to this kind of privacy was reserved for certain social classes and skin colors.

 

 

I've written about the role of technology and will write more in the future, but privacy stakes me as something of a paradox.  Many of us point to the erosion we think is caused by technology, but at the same time there have been great strides in other forms of privacy - keeping the government out of the bedroom and reproductive rights in general come to mind. 

 

I've had conversations with legal scholars and historians.  All told me they can't think of a simple robust definition even though all of us think we now what it is.   At a high level I think it is at the boundary of the relationships among yourself, the state, religion, your work, your family and community and technology.  We're each members of several larger wholes as well as being an individual.   Change any of these in some major way and there is a need to be societal  renegotions .   Technology has been something of a cauldron of change over the past hundred and twenty years or so. .  

 

 We've always had problems with the judgement of others ..particularly when it's capricious, mindless or evil.  With work some of these practices can be discovered although rectifying them can be difficult.  Now we have massive data collection schemes often using data  and data processing of questionable and untraceable provenance sitting in judgement.  People point to China and its citizen scores, but Google, Facebook, Amazon and others are doing similar things here.  As Cambridge Analytica taught us  sometimes all a potential user of this information needs is a relatively simple toolkit.   

 

Laws will always trail - except perhaps in authoritarian countries.   Europe is taking some small steps with GDPR at this point. China and other countries (and companies!) are moving in the opposite direction.  And many in the Western world believe privacy (whatever that means) is a human right. We are seeing regionalization and balkanization of the Internet and that may be just the beginning.  And remember those algorithmic reputation and judgement engines..   So many difficult questions are raised. 

 

the hike that changed pasadena and human knowledge

On a clear day there it is.  Five or six miles East-North-East of Pasadena and  a tempting climb if you were raised around mountains.  Mt Wilson's summit is a bit over 5,700 feet and the view is remarkable in more ways than one. A trail out of Chantry Flat is fine, but tends to be crowded.  It's more strenuous but I'm partial to the Mt Wilson trail.  You can also drive up ..  assuming your car can handle the nest of television, radio and microwave antennas at the summit.

 

Around 1903 George Hale, a young astrophysics professor from the University of Chicago,  took the hike to see if it was the place for his dream telescope.  Up until around the Civil War astronomy had become a nearly dead subject.  Its main purpose had drifted from science to commercial and military celestial navigation.  But something radical had taken place mostly in America.  Physicists attached prisms to telescopes and began to analyze the spectra of light from the stars.  Photographic film had advanced and was better than the human eye at recording dim images.  It was possible to learn much more about the stars and discoveries grew exponentially.

 

Astrophysics was probably the first scientific field that America took the lead in. Gathering the most light possible was essential and big light buckets were expensive.  Hale came from a well-heeled family and had been able to connect with and inspire wealthy industrialists to fund the emerging field.  At Chicago he was able to talk a streetcar magnate into funding the largest refracting telescope - the 40 inch Yerkes Observatory.  Important work was done, but it soon became clear better observing sites than semi-rural Wisconsin were necessary.

 

It was recognized Mt Wilson had potential in the late 1890s.  Harvard tried to operate a small observatory, but it failed for a number of reasons.  Hale wanted to build a much larger telescope of a radically different design..  a 60 inch reflecting telescope with a novel mount.   The trip to Mt  Wilson in the pre-light and automobile pollution days. He loved it .. the view to the ocean was fine, but the view to the stars convinced him this was the place.  He went to Andrew Carnegie and described the potential of the best instrument in the world.

 

Building and getting a 60 inch telescope up the mountain was an effort, but it was a brilliant instrument exceeding all expectations. Harlow Shapley was able to use it to discover the Sun was not the center of the Milky Way and a few other discoveries followed.   It also became clear that an even larger telescope would be useful and Hale managed to persuade  John Hooker and Andrew Carnegie into funding a 100 inch instrument - the Hooker telescope.

 

It has been argued the Hooker was the most successful telescope in history.  Edwin Hubble discovered not only that there were galaxies beyond the Milky Way, but that the universe was expanding.  Shapley was able to measure the size of our galaxy and Fritz Zwicky found the first evidence for dark matter -- back in the early 1930s!  Our perception of our place in the Universe and evidence its fundamental nature radically changed. 

 

Hale still had yet another telescope in him.  Mt Wilson was becoming victim to light and atmospheric pollution.  The 200 inch Hale telescope was installed on Mt Palomar, seeing first light in 1948.   Its observations made it clear how elements were made in stars and indirect observations of black holes were made. People had been thinking about cosmology from the beginning of recorded history and with observations made with this telescope it finally  had become a real science.

 

If you make it to the summit both of the old telescopes are still there along with a solar telescope. The location doesn't allow serious research, but amateur astronomers can rent time on them and there are small public observation nights on the 60 inch using an eyepiece.  I did it once on a very un-pristine night, OMG!

 

It turns out Hale did much more.  When he moved out to Pasadena he became a trustee of a very small and sleepy technical school - the Throop College of Technology.  It could produce engineers to help build the telescopes, but Hale saw had larger ambitions.  He brought in two very well known scientists - Arthur Noyes and Robert Millikan. The three of them conspired to build an institution that would be small - tiny even - but would hire the best and focus on work that would have a long term impact.  Probably several institutions had mission statements like that, but these people pulled it off.  They created an interesting culture of curious play, depth, rigor and collaboration.

 

Hale befriended Henry Huntington - a railroad and real estate tycoon.  Huntington is fascinating in his own right - the sprawl of Los Angeles and much of it's culture has roots in his projects. He helped with the funding of this emerging technical school and brought in cultural amenities.  By now it had been renamed the California Institute of Technology.

   

That may well have been Hale's greatest contribution to humanity.  For decades Caltech's taste in problem spaces, their cross-disciplinary nature and remarkable students have changed the world. They came a bit too late to participate in the electrification of America, but the type of fundamental and applied science that came from the place changed everything.

 

Hale would have been 150 last week.  He would have been thrilled that he created something special.  Caltech is still at the leading edge of astrophysics and cosmology .. and so much more he couldn't have dreamed.  

__________

¹ Without a doubt it was one of the watershed instruments - that list might include the Galileo telescope, the Hooker, Karl Jansky's radio telescope, the Hubble Space Telescope and LIGO.

 

 

 

 

the development of the concept of privacy

My sister uses old photographs as an ingredient in her art.  One archive is a collection of glass plate negatives, mostly posed studio portraits of Danes.  Danes in suits, Danes in dresses, Danish children in little Danish suits and dresses.  All of them with the same fixed dour countenance.

 

Their letters suggest a more positive outlook on life.  The problem, it seems, was a photograph required an exposure of about ten seconds. It was an expensive process that you only splurged for on big days - Easter, birthdays and weddings.  You have to get it right the first time. Few can maintain a smile that long, but dour is easy.   Try it.  

 

It was a huge improvement from the earlier daguerreotype.  There's a story that Samuel Morse of telegraph fame visited Louis Daguerre's studio in Paris.  Looking at examples of this wonderful new photography, Morse was struck that even the busiest sections of Paris showed no human activity.  Daguerre patiently explained twenty minute exposures were at fault.  The streaks of moving people, carriages and horses only offered a slight blur on the streets.

 

While the Danes were exposing plates my sister would ultimately use, George Eastman had been working on making photography practical.  Around 1885 he had a film fast enough that an average exposure outdoors took just a fraction of a second - a short enough time that a smile didn't change.  He kept working and developed a series of smaller and smaller cameras that were increasingly easy to use. In a few years he had a small camera that was so small and so fast that a subject might not realize their photograph was being taken.  And then came the Kodak Brownie..  a small, fast, very easy to use camera that anyone could use.  It cost one dollar - about $30 in today's money - and came with a roll of film. The camera shown is the Model 2 - an improved camera that was introduced in 1900 at a much higher price point - two dollars.   Snapshots became a national craze.   People were taking photos of others without permission.  One woman even found a sack of grain at a store bore her unauthorized image.  Kodak fiend and Kodaker became insults.  Tabloid newspapers made a good businesses publishing unauthorized society pictures along with those of women in compromising dress - bathing suits and worse. People were fascinated by widely available photography and were doing it on their own, but a boundary was emerging without a much guidance. 

 

The 1870s also saw the wide scale use of telegraphy.  Moving a message from point A to point B usually wasn't direct.  Instead a message from Boston to Minneapolis might first go to New York City where a telegrapher copied it by hand and gave a piece of paper to another telegrapher with a wire to Chicago.  A similar exchange would take place before a connection was made to Minneapolis.  Some of these messages had important business information and there was a good deal of leakage.  Some companies began to use ciphers as a result.  

 

The telephone began to spread beyond the boundaries of business after WWI.  Operators could and did listen.  Many local exchanges were party lines where anyone could listen to anything up to a dozen people might be saying.  The telephone also revolutionized dating.  Scheduled meetings in the parlor of the girl's family could now be arranged to be somewhere else.   The concept of the date as a destination came about in the twenties and the automobile only made it easier. 

 

Society was going through huge changes.  Much more information was available in a variety of forms. Sometimes we wanted it to be made available and sometimes we wanted to protect it.  In 1890 two Harvard Law student, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis published The Right to Privacy in the Harvard Law Review.  It's an astonishing piece.  Clearly written and still regularly cited.   The concept of a right to privacy was beginning to emerge in America.

 

It's a delicate balance that is in many ways a way of looking at how society comes to grips with changing technologies.  The historians I've talked to suggest no one talked about a right to privacy before the Civil War. Rather there was a concept of the home being a castle that an owner had a right to protect.  Information and who has access changed that. 

 

It's a double edged sword.  We want .. we need .. some of our information to be known in order to function in society.  When Social Security numbers were first issued, marginalized segments of society - African Americans for example - proudly displayed their number for all to see as proof of their being part of American society.  On the other hand moral crusaders were invading (legally) US Mail and in the 1950s what happened in the bedroom became an issue for the Supreme Court in Griswold v Connecticut.   Some historians refer to that event as accidentally confirming the right to privacy in America. 

 

And now we have the Internet and an exchange of a number of services in return for information about us .. information that we often know little about.  The information may rightly or wrongly describe us and it is often used without the correct context.  It might have implicit or explicit bias.  It is then used with a sea of other information about us and others to create a set of digital judgements which can be used for targeted ads or for darker purposes.  This gets fascinating and deserves another post or three.  

 

Technology usually outstrips the development of a social norm which usually precedes law.   It's messy and companies are now betting their futures on it.  It's interesting that one of the largest companies in the world has decided a right to privacy by  the end user of their products is a core value.  Of course it isn't completely bulletproof, but it is diametrically opposed to many of the other players.  All of this while people generally unaware of the issues.   

what if manufactured clothing fit everyone? what could possibly go wrong?

It was the dawn of the jet age the US Air Force had a serious problem.  Early jets were suddenly complex and flying them was more demanding.  There were a lot of crashes - a few days saw a dozen planes go down.  Sorting through crash reports pilot error was the big problem.  The question was what were the root causes?  

 

Attention turned to training, mechanical issues, checklists and cockpit design.  In the later there are issues of control type and layout and also the pilot.  At the time military pilots ranged from about five foot four inches to  six foot two.  To get to the bottom of things Lt. Gilbert Daniels, fresh out of physical anthropology from Harvard, measured nearly 150 dimensions of over 4,000 pilots.  The hope was to find and characterize averages or ranges of averages that could be used by cockpit and control designers. 

 

He picked ten of the most relevant measures..  leg length, reach and so on and narrowed things down to an average range of heights from five-seven to five-eleven.  Then all of the pilots were compared to the averages of the ten relevant measures.  The expected result would be a subset that would be within one standard deviation on all ten. The answer was zero - there was no average pilot out of a sample of 4,000.  

 

People who are looking for clothes that fit well are familiar with the problem average sizes.  They were good enough measures to allow mass produced clothes to take off and prices fall to the point where clothing could become a statement of style for average people.   It produces a lot a waste and lowered expectations of fit quality and access to design that might fit a personal style.  Clothing can be tailored, but most people put up with lower quality in return for very low prices and the opportunity to always buy something new. Some groups are at a built in disadvantage - plus sizes are too difficult to deliver to size using current production and sizing techniques.  And there are some groups who are out of normal size ranges who have to pay dearly for custom clothing if they want to express a personal style.    There are many problems and a good deal of opportunity for change in an industry that does about $1.5 trillion a year.

 

A few years ago I supported a Planet Money Kickstarter that funded reporting on the making of a simple t-shirt from planting the seeds to taking delivery.  The result was a fascinating serious that made two points.  The standardized shipping container has had an enormous impact on the world's economy since about 1980.  I'd put it's impact up there with computerization, although it has certainly used a lot of that technology.  The other point is that apparel manufacture is complex with most of the steps, even in the developing world, being automated.  Most of the steps but one ..  sewing.

 

Sewing has been fiercely difficult to automate.  A variety of approaches have been tried, but fabric stretches and threads move non-linearly and are not simple flat sheets.  A skilled seamstress ( in the developing world over 90% of the sewing is done by women) is performing difficult computations and manipulations.  

 

A few researches took the hammer and tongs approach of taking high resolution very high speed (1000 frames per second and higher) video of the fabric and figuring out where every thread is and how it is moving.  This information goes to small manipulators - fingers if you will - that move the fabric into just the right position as sewing takes place.  Researchers at Georgia Tech made the most progress and a company was spun off - SoftWear Automation.  It was snapped up buy Tianyuan Garments Company - one of the largest apparel manufacturers in the world.  They've announced a plant in Little Rock, Arkansas with 21 production lines of Sewbots.  The cost goes to about thirty cents a tshirt - about half that of  a woman in Bangladesh sweatshop.  The factory will produce 23 million tshirts a year for Adidas - all made in the US by a Chinese company.  Costs will fall furthers in the future.

 

There are any number of vexing social problems that should be solved.  Very few people will be needed for automated sewing production. Currently about five million women in Bangladesh alone depend on the meager wages they get from the lowest cost apparel makers.  Conditions can be awful and the wages far too low, but for many this is the step above true poverty.  Of course other things need fixing such as education and the place of women in society, but fully automating apparel will put real pressure on millions of people.  One hopes we don't repeat the terrible labor phase problem that plagued the Industrial Revolution, but I wouldn't count on it.

 

Current systems only work for a limited range of clothing like t-shirts, but jeans, dress shirts and uniforms are considered solvable problems that will fall in the next year or two.  Within five years the industry should start feeling an impact.  There are other problems.  A good overview of current ethical and environment issues is Overdressed by Elizabeth Cline.

 

Back to the sizing problem.  Apart from lower costs and domestic assembly, automated sewing offers the potential of clothes for any human size and shape at a reasonable cost and for almost any design.  The technology for body scans is well developed and could be scaled quickly.  Paired with flexible manufacturing lines - probably within overnight delivery range and quite possibly owned by companies like Amazon - your measurements could be matched to designs in a day or two.  About five years ago I predicted this could happen in ten years. I think we're still on track, but it is likely to be a premium for awhile with the major focus being slashing the costs of current fast fashion and mass manufacture and creating an assembled in the US branding.  

 

Other potential changes like the disruption of how design is done and who owns it and perhaps low cost seriously advanced machines for home or fabric store use.  I haven't carefully reviewed the IP, but perhaps there's more of an opening than for 3D printing.

 

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

 

 

50 miles on a pint of peanut oil

When I was a kid my Dad would bring comic books home.  My favorite involved the Donald Duck series character Gyro Gearloose.  Gryo was a brilliant semi-failed inventor for hire with offbeat ideas that I loved.  I wanted to be Gyro when I grew up - I even pestered my parents for round glasses (I didn't get them)One was a flying scooter that got 50 miles to a pint of peanut oil.  A flying scooter was a neat idea, but the number stuck with me - 400 miles per gallon.  

 

At the time the family car was a very inefficient station wagon that got about 12 or 13 miles per gallon in highway driving.  It would be replaced by a very light Ford Falcon that reached the then almost unimaginable 20 mile per gallon level.  About the same time I got my first real bicycle - a three speed "English Racer" from Raleigh.  It was used, but Mrs Isler at Isler's Bicycle refurbished second hand bikes in addition to selling new Schwinns and Raleighs that were beyond my means. 

 

The black Raleigh lasted a few years before I need to move on.  I took care of it, but it was used at least nine months out of the year and was showing its age.  That and consumer bike tech was changing. I'd go down the Isler's and drool.  Sting Rays and then ten speeds.  She had a derailleur mechanism set up that you could hand crank and physically feel the effect of using different gears.  In ninth grade I finally got a bright blue Schwinn ten speed.  Five hundred dollars in today's money -not the top of the line, but still and object of desire.  It took longer, but I wore it out too - the rocket assist experiments probably didn't help much.

 

Bikes were becoming a thing nationally.  I started college at the University of Utah.  There were at least three bike shops in nearby, bike racks everywhere on campus and at least a half dozen sheds with compressed air and tools for quick bike repairs.    Later I moved to Pasadena and found bikes everywhere at Caltech too..  I moved on to a hand built Raleigh Professional which is still a thing of beauty.  In fact they were on the rise across the US and in Northern Europe. The second great bicycle revolution was underway.

 

The first came with the invention of the safety bike.  Starting around 1890 bicycles came on the scene in large numbers.  Roads were built and a manufacturing industry was born.  The boom lasted about twenty years.  Kids still used bikes, but the automobile was becoming practical and large sums  were going into automotive infrastructure.  Bike makers moved into automobiles and airplanes.

 

The second boom was sparked by better tires and inexpensive and reliable gearing systems - at least on the technical side.  The social and infrastructure components were more complex and interesting.  Sort of book length interesting so I'll give the abridged version:

 

 Denmark and the Netherlands saw cycling as important for very different reasons, but supported it with policy and infrastructure.  Public acceptance was slow, but by the 90s both countries had  successfully integrated cycling into their transportation systems. The boom in the US and UK died.  Cycling in the US survived as a recreational sport with a very small and very male portion of the population.  Children still learned how to ride bikes, but the movement of controlling the activities of children killed the the notion of using them for transportation.  Bike racks disappeared from schools and many considered bikes dangerous.

 

We're beginning to what some - Horace Dediu and I are in the camp - would consider a third revolution.¹  This one is a bit different.  It's concerned with efficiency.  How do you move someone around efficiently?  The answers are complex and involve far more than just the vehicle, although aspects of the vehicle suggest pathway.  You may have a thirty minute commute - that's pretty standard and has been for decades..  people often live in places that give them thirty to sixty minutes of commuting.  The percentage of commutes longer rapidly drops at longer commutes.  The day only has so many hours.  One the other hand an analysis of most trips shows a number of smaller trips are very common.   Anything under about four or five miles is rich bicycle territory.  Why use a car?

 

Let's take a diversion and talk about efficiency. .  Electric drive trains are much more efficient than the best internal combustion drive trains ..  about three times as efficient (nearly three quarters of the gas you buy heats up your engine block and that won't get much better).  Electrics are efficient, batteries are dropping in price and charging infrastructure is improving.  Sweet - but the vehicle is still a car.  One and a half to two tons hauling around one person and a few groceries.   Something is broken.

 

Here's were something like a bike comes back in.  A few years ago and friend and I measured her efficiency on a bike.  We measured how many Joules she "burned"to go a fixed distance and converted it into MPG_e - miles per gallon equivalent.²    

 

She got slightly over 1,000 MPG_e at about 13 miles per hour on flat ground.  She's very tall and her coefficient of drag in the upright position is - well - not good.  In a racing position she's probably be over 1,100 MPG_e. 

here's a little conversion table

 

1 MPG_e ~ 0.013km/MJ

                   0.0478 km/kWh

                   1 mi/33.7 kWh

                   0.0297 mi/kWh

 

so convert away...

 

It varies with formulation, but MPG_e assumes a gallon of gasoline has about 33.7 kilowatt hours of energy.  It also happens to be very close to the energy density of diesel fuel and  - well  - peanut oil.  So if she was drinking peanut oil, she'd be well over Gyro's number.   If she had something like Ben and Jerry's she'd be closer to 300 MPG_b&j..  and that seems a bit more fun.

 

Riding a bike is terrific exercise, but it may be too much if you have hills, longer distances or not much time.  This is where a human-electric hybrid comes in (they go by several names).  Normal riding on a bike uses about 100 watts of muscle power.  With an ebike you still supply muscle power , but an electric motor augments your pedaling with 25 to several hundred watts depending on your taste.  You're still getting exercise, but now you're producing power on the order of a Tour rider or better.  You have become superman or superwoman.  The feeling is quite amazing.

 

I built one in the mid 80s trying to crack 2,000 MPG_e ..  It was a primitive hack, but I managed 2,300 MPGe.  A good ebike starts at about $3,000 and go up, but large scale production would dramatically drop the price.  

 

I'm skipping over a lot, but you need infrastructure and a cultural acceptance to make cycling part of an efficient transport system.  Outside of a few regions I'm not sure how successfully those issues can be addressed in the US, but much of the rest of the world is ripe.  And in the US some small cities (say under 100,000 population) and suburbs may be fertile ground for female riders... people who want transportation rather than a toys.³  That means moving something besides themselves.  This is where an ebike can shine, but the design diverges from what one normally thinks about.    A friend who is heavily into bikes as transportation in a Denver suburb sent this link of her new "crossover" - a practical electric cargo bike designed with women in mind.  

 

There are so many other aspects to this, but pencils down - my hour's up.

 __________

¹ Horace is a very clear thinker.  You really should follow him ..  he's also at Asymco. 

² It's only meaningful in the US as most people here think in terms of miles per gallon rather than something like liters per hundred kilometers... they're measuring the same thing, but I'll use MPG_e. When I'm doing physics I'm usually in joules or electron volts.  If it's human scale energy, I usually use watt-hours.  Whatever is convenient. 

³ Women are bicycling's indicator species

 

 Derailleur

drawing lines of sound

Sound is an ornery beast.  Even serious people use different definitions.  To a physical scientist it's a vibration that moves through a solid, liquid or gas as a mechanical compression ..  moving regions of alternation compression and expansion.  To a psychologist or neurologist it's the result of processing the brain does after it detects the mechanical compressions - what you hear in your mind and neatly answering the question about trees falling in the woods without anyone around.

 

What we hear covers a range of wavelengths ranging from about 15 meters to 1.5 centimeters -  a factor of a thousand.  Visible light's range is less than two.  Sound waves are relatively slow in the air - about 340 meters per second.  The speed depends on temperature and, to a lessor extent, pressure and humidity.  Sound waves to be unfocused, bouncing off some things and getting absorbed and attenuated by others.  Our brains have evolved to make sense of all of this although sometimes we want better control.

 

If you're listening to live music the positions of the instruments and design of the hall can make enormous differences.  Even where you sit.  Acoustic engineers attempt to make the experience good over as much of the hall as they can, but have to deal with different audience sizes, the dynamics of the music and size of the ensemble, and even the clothes worn by the audience.  Some halls are better suited for certain types of music and some regions just sound better.

 

Movie theaters are a problem.  The same problem you have with music plus it has to synchronize with the film everywhere.  Not easy as the difference in distance to different speakers can sensed.  Some people can detect sounds that aren't synchronized to within ten milliseconds ...  a wave traveling ten feet more or less than one from another speaker for example.  Blockbuster movies - the ones that tend to make the most money - often have sudden percussive blasts of sound.  We are very sensitive to slight differences in timing for such sounds.  It would be great to be able to provide a good experience at every seat.  Wouldn't it be great if you could aim sound?

 

It turns out you can... and it started with a Canadian inventor around 1900.

 

Reginald Fesseden is one of those names you keep running into during the early days of radio. He noticed that if you take two slightly different frequencies and run them through something called a mixer they "beat" ..  You get a new frequency that is equal to the difference of the original frequencies.¹  He discovered this in electrical circuits, but the same thing happens in sound waves in the air.  You may have heard this beating if you've tune a musical instrument against a mechanical or electronic tuning fork.  Fessenden's discovery revolutionized radio and is still used.   In the sixties people realized you might be able use it to aim some types of sound.

 

Very high frequency sounds don't spread as much lower frequencies.  Even speech requires a wide range of frequencies.  Depending on the frequency of the sound how much the sound waves spread varies.  Generally the higher the frequency, the lower the spread.

 

The trick is to use ultrahigh frequencies - sound waves that would disturb bats and dogs. You use frequencies that differ by a frequency that you want to create.   Say your desired sound is a 440 A (440 Hertz or cycles per second)  and one of your ultrasonic frequencies is 100,000 Hz you beat the 100,000 Hz signal against one at 100,440.  In practice there is an array of ultrasonic transducers - the fancypants term for speakers - and with a few tricks you can create a "beam" that you can point.  If the beam strikes someone's ear, they'll  hear the 440 A, but someone just outside the path will hear nothing.   Generally you can get a beam about two feet wide at twenty feet.  

 

Clever, but there are a few problems that have kept it confined to very specialized uses - art installations for example.²  So I was curious when I heard about the Impossible Run:

 

It's encouraging and even heartwarming - send a couple of "lines" of sound down a track as a guideway.  The video is slick - a design company that did the work - but the idea isn't terribly flexible.  On the other hand it makes you to think a bit about what navigation for the partly sighted and fully blind could be like.

 

The sound beam approach is similar to the early days of aviation where directional radio stations spread out like a grid across the country beaming a pair signals in four directions.  The signal pair are at a slight angle.  One was the A in Morse Code  - dit dah, and the other N - dah dit.  The pilot tuned a radio receiver and, if you were flying directly towards the tower,  you'd hear a blur .. a more or less constant tone.  Veer to one side or the other and an A or a N would begin to appear.   This later became something much more flexible (VOR) that allowed you to use 360 different directions and then the shift to inertial guidance and finally GPS systems.  

 

So what about the partly sighted person?  The problem strikes home as my wife Sukie is nearly blind in one eye and has no peripheral vision.  She bumps into things and things bump into her.  Unlike a runner on an empty straight track or an airplane in flight, she has to worry about objects, often moving objects, in close proximity.  At least she still has some vision.  The problem is even worse for totally blind people.

 

I've built a few things, but building something smart enough to be trustworthy and making a useful interface is a serious problem.  I was inspired by the few blind people who have taught themselves how to echolocate (no kidding - this really works!).   For Sukie and other partly sighted person  personal LIDAR is probably the best emerging technology.  This is about the level for the amateur experimenter.  For the totally blind person you probably want centimeter accuracy navigation with LIDAR for object avoidance.  Preferably without realtime network connections!

 

Right now some hardware from Nvidia would work .. the problem is it would take several hundred watts of power.³  Expect a lot of progress.

 

I'm particularly curious about what might happen a new iPhone generations down the road with AirPods providing a sonic augmented reality interface.   I've done some thinking and a bit of simple prototyping to work out some ideas, but it is one of those things that will happen in a couple of years as some technology curves cross.   Perhaps hats come back into fashion.

 

Geordi La Forge indeed

 

In the near term I wouldn't be surprised to see movie theaters begin to provide sound through smartphone earbuds, but some sounds are not "heard" through the ears.  Some low frequency and loud sounds are detected as pressures on the skin and mixed in with the other signals in the brain to form the soundscape around us. Then again sophisticated earbuds and computation may add  augmented reality to the movie or home video experience.

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¹ Actually you get two.  If the original frequencies are f₁ and f₂ you get f₁ - f₂ and f₁ + f₂.  In practice you only use one. The new frequencies are called heterodynes.

² There is quite a history of trying to solve problems with this approach.  Sometimes it is called a sound laser, but the term is inaccurate and that's something else entirely.  It may be one of those hammers that keeps looking for the right problem.

³ Light Detection and Ranging.  A rotating pulsing laser beam measures range.  These are common on autonomous vehicles.