omenti

ted lasso?

a minipost

I was listening to a panel discussion of elite sports psychologists, sports scientists, and a sports anthropologist when a question was posed:

 

Could a Ted Lasso exist?

 

If you haven't seen the show, Lasso is an American college football coach who is suddenly hired to coach an English Premier League team.  He had success in his D-II school, but it was clear he was hired to fail.  It turns out he didn't.

 

There was some laughter among audience members, but the panel members took it seriously.  It could work.  You'd need someone who was an incredible learner with success leading a team  of some kind.  Someone great at listening, observing and thinking.  They've need a Beard - a character who happens to be a serious soccer expert (among other things), but would never cut it as a coach.   Creating a bond with the players, listening to them, and be willing to experiment is key.  You'd also need management willing to put up with the time required to create a success.

 

The anthropologist noted some of these qualities are missing in NFL, NBA, MBA, and NHL coaching.  Coaches tend to be extremely confident of themselves and there is pressure to win.  Team culture can suffer and creativity is low compared with some other types of teams.  He pointed out some women's teams - particularly soccer and indoor volleyball -  are extremely innovative with positive team cultures well beyond any men's pro team he's seen. 

 

There was general agreement among those in the panel.  Coaching has a way to go in the big pro leagues, but the types of coaches selected are an issue.  A great women's soccer or indoor volleyball coach (several were mentioned) could be a Ted Lasso if they had a Beard at their side and the time to create change.   As an example a women's volleyball coach was mentioned.  Something of a household name in sports, he's as passionate figuring out how to coach a team of pre-teens as he is his countries national team.  He's experimenting and learning and might make a discovery with some twelve year old kids that works with his olympians.

 

It's culture all the way down at the top.  Maybe some of these multimillion dollar coaches aren't worth it, but it's unlikely the culture that selects them will change. 

 

It's an interesting game to think about the question in teams outside of sports.  

 

what's in a name?

Surrounded by dramatic peaks on a narrow road etched into the side of the mountains you drop into forested area that continues into a string of foothills.  It's clear and you wish you were on your bike this time around.  The trees thin out and suddenly it's upon you.  You're at the summit of the last foothill and the expanse of the prairie opens up ahead.  Off in the distance is a short mountain range, but mostly it's prairie and you need to catch your breath.

 

Oceans and mountains have their appeal, but so does the prairie.  I suspect Montana Jeri and Alberta Jheri know this too. More than a few people from the area are taken by the outdoors. You find a number of artists, photographers, as well as people who are taken to learn about their surroundings.  I feel hard for the sky and have yet to recover.

 

The area is positioned such that auroras aren't uncommon during solar maximums.  Alberta and Saskatchewan have groups of serious amateur aurora watchers.   About ten years ago they realized something was different.  Something more frequent than garden variety auroras with a different color (they'd say colour) and shape.  Early spectrographic measurements revealed it was a thermal emission rather than the distinct colors of excited atoms dropping to lower energy levels.  

 

Serious work using satellites and the rich ground-based observations of the Canadian amateurs began around 2016.  It was real and not an aurora.  It needed a name.    One based on a children's movie turned out to be perfect.

 

The backronym Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement nicely suggests STEVE.

 

 

Much more is known now and the name remains.  The past week has been some beautiful displays along the Canadian Rockies.  I say them as a teenager and then again in my 30s, but didn't realize they weren't auroras.   Cheers to those curious enough to ask the questions.

 

the cost of knowledge is a great deal of ignorance

a mini-post

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

good, good, good, good lunations

minipost

The Earth and Moon are gravitationally locked with the Moon rotating around its axis in the same time it takes to travel around the Earth.  The result is we only see one side of the Moon ..   Well... sort of..    The Moon doesn't orbit the Earth.  Instead both Earth and Moon orbit a common point known as a barycenter which is about 1,700 km below the surface of the Earth.  The Moon's orbit is also  elliptical which turns out to impact how much of the Moon's surface you can see.

 

The Moon moves slower when it's farthest away and faster at its closest.  You see a bit more of the Eastern side when it's moving slower and more of the Western side when it's speeding.  Added together we can see about 59% of the Moon's surface over the course of a month.  (There's also a smaller effect due to parallax, but it's mostly the elliptical orbit.)

 

You learn this right away when you start looking at Moon, but seeing a visualization is dramatic.  Andrew McCarthy took two million photos over nearly a full lunar month and put together a wonderful video of the effect.

 

 

 

after a fall

a quick minipost

 

Or after THE fall..  

 

The Olympics can brings years of effort into very sharp focus for some of the best athletes in the world.  A decade or more of hard work and sacrifice can fall one way or another in under a second.  By any rational measure they're all amazing to get as far as they have.   And of course the athletes don't buy that - at least not initially.

 

A few people have recommended a new book on regret.  I haven't read it, but getting the recommendations while the Olympics are underway seems natural.  I don't consider the phrase no regrets to be useful.  Regret can be a powerful motivator, teacher and catalyst for self-reflection.

 

Every successful group and organization I've been around holds postmortems for projects independent of outcome.  In large particle physics experiments it's common to hold internal and external postmortems.  These are particularly important where the culture and institutional memory are long term goals.  External postmortems are held for other experts - often competitors - and are important for ferreting out and fixing issues that hadn't been considered. (Feynman frequently said ~ The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool...)  Of course there are regrets and people can feel a bit stupid, but you learn and grow.

 

At a personal level regret can be a highly motivating teacher.   With enough reflection you become much better at making decisions and you get better at what you're doing.    And sometimes life's big decisions come into clearer focus.  Are you really doing what you like?  Are you doing what you should be doing? Should you change your goals or invent completely new ones?   A life with a singular focus can lead you down a path that you realize all too late was the wrong one.  The self reflection of regret seems like a mechanism to make midcourse corrections, learning and growing as you travel.

 

I've had wonderful failures and mostly useful regrets.  To some I may seem like a failure, to others a success, but to myself I'm lucky enough to still be learning - plus -  all of my fingers and eyelashes are still intact.

 

the moon's going to be okay

You've probably heard that an old Space X rocket will crash into the Moon on the forth of March.  It's very likely and a good excuse to look at a few other things.

 

The object in question is the second stage of a Falcon 9 that was used to take the Deep Space Climate Observatory to L1, the first Lagrange point in the Earth-Sun system.¹  The observatory monitors the Sun, specifically the solar wind, from a vantage point a million miles closer to the Sun.  In addition to science, it it gives about an hour's warning for satellites in orbit as well as power stations who need to prepare for large solar storms. 

 

The Falcon's second stage has been looping around the Earth and Moon in an unstable orbit making a few close approaches to both Earth and Moon.  This type of orbit crashes into either the Earth or Moon or is perturbed into a solar orbit.  Exactly where is difficult to predict, but almost certainly it will be on the far side of the Moon.  Too bad as it might be visible through a telescope if it were to hit an area in the night side of the Moon's near side.  

 

That brings up another point.  The far side of Moon is the part away from us. We see the dark side, at least some of it, all the time except when the Moon is perfectly full. 

 

The Moon's rotation is tidally locked with the time it takes to make an orbit.  Initially the Moon wasn't and rotated at a faster rate. Over millions of years tidal forces slowed it down to the point where it became locked.  Roughly speaking the Moon is slightly egg-shaped rather than a perfect sphere.   If the long axis through the Moon isn't pointed at the Earth, a torque is exerted which moves it back into position. Once locked it would take a large force to unlock the rotation. 

 

The Moon's far side is only the dark side when we see a full Moon from Earth.  If you're interested in how bright the Moon's surface is, the far side tends to be much brighter than the side we see.  And the elliptical orbit of the Moon permits us to observe a bit more than half of the Moon's surface over about a month, although only half at once.

 

A few other neat things about the Earth-Moon system.  The two bodies orbit a common point, or barycenter, about 1,700 km below the Earth's surface. (the barycenter for our solar system is sometimes outside the Sun, currently it's on the inside).  

 

And finally the average distance from the Earth to the Moon is increasing at about the rate your fingernail grows. Tidal forces are also slowing the Earth's rotation.  There's a point where a day on the Earth will be the same as the lunar day - something like 46 days long.  It's a bit in the future though..  long after the Sun becomes a red giant and incinerates the Earth and long after before the Sun explodes forming a planetary nebulae.  The Earth and Moon will have vanished long before, but planetary nebulae are beautiful.

 

 

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¹ In a two-body system like the Earth and Sun, there are five points where the gravitational force on an object  exactly equals the centripetal force necessary for that object to move with the bodies.  L1 is closer to the Sun and great for a solar observatory, L2 is behind the Moon and a great place for a telescope like the James Webb Space Telescope. (note the little orbit around L2 - it turns out the JWST orbits L2, rather than sitting there so the Earth doesn't shield it from the solar energy it needs to operate.  L3 is where the anti-Earth of science fiction would live.. (except it's unstable, so not really), an L4 and L5 are useful points on our orbit to put solar observatories that look at the Sun from an angle other than head-on.

 

 

 

 

skiing!

a minipost

With Beijing approaching I started into a piece on skiing, but the number of drawing needed to illustrate carved turns, sidecut radius, reverse camber, self-turning, plowing and so on was daunting.  Looking around I found a good, not very technical, discussion of downhill skiing. The discussion falls apart on freestyle and ski jumping. I'll save freestyle for later as it's a rich area.  But I know a little about ski jumping.

 

The point of ski jumping is to jump as far down a hill as possible while showing style. Contestants are judged on how far their landing is from a critical line know as the K line (kritisch is critical in German).   The main hill at the PyeongChang Olympics was K98 - the K line was 98 meters from the end of the jump.  The long hill was K125.

 

The first phase is the in-run.  A ski jumper releases from a metal bar at the top of the ramp and begins to turn  gravitational potential energy from the height they're at for kinetic energy.  They crouch to lower the area their body presents to the oncoming air.  Aerodynamic helmets and tight fitting suits are used and their arms are out behind them.   Ski jumps have refrigerated ceramic tracks that form a very slippery layer of ice.  New snow or warm sunlight can dramatically change frictional drag and ski waxes are picked for specific conditions.

 

The ski jumper has a good deal of speed and momentum as they reach the takeoff table at the end of the ramp.  It may look angled up, but that's an illusion. It's still slightly down and the jumper needs to change from the crouch they've been in and physically jump into the air.  You don't just fly off.  The timing and power of the jump are critical elements.

 

 The ski jumper/ski combination is a glider at this point subject to three forces:  gravity, aerodynamic drag, and lift.  They've changed from a minimal aerodynamic profile to something more like an airfoil with greater surface area and the best possible shape. The skis move to form a V shape and  with the ski jumper in control of the angle of each ski (a total of six angles) and their hip and chest angles. Their arms are held slightly apart from the body to add some additional area while keeping aerodynamic drag at a minimum.   The best lift to drag in competition is about 1.6 - for every meter a ski jumper drops, they travel 1.6 meters forward. A common sea gull has a L/D of about 10 and modern airliners are in the 15 to 18 range.  

 

The V ski position revolutionized the sport in the mid 80s. Sorting out all of the angles and learning how to  change them for differing conditions is necessary for winning.  The aerodynamic problem is still very computationally difficult, so large low speed wind tunnels as well as racks on top of vans are used for experimentation and training.

 

You might think that a heavy jumper, coming off the ramp with greater momentum, would have an advantage, but the force of gravity is more important and lighter jumpers fly farther.   There were body mass index requirements, now lighter skiers are penalized with shorter skis that reduce lift.  Ski jumpers still tend to be very thin.

 

The flight is rarely more than four meters above the ground, the flight plath roughly following the hill's downward slope. Landings are highly technical and judged for style.  The transition from the V flying configuration to parallel skis one foot ahead of the other requires timing, strength and balance. 

The longest ski jumping events are on K185 and longer hills - "ski flying"  It's not an Olympic event, but shows off the flying portion:

 

But one of the most memorable performances was that of Eddie the Eagle in the Calgary 88 games.  (it won't embed .. watch at the link) You can place last and be the most celebrated athlete Calgary.  If you've stood at the top of a ramp, you get an appreciation of what it must take to even try it.

 

frozen bubbles

minipost

 

Someone asked about the frozen bubbles we made years ago at Stony Brook.  It turns out that bubbles freeze (there's some interesting physics going on) with interesting patterns.¹  I've never tried to photograph them as (a) only about ten percent of my bubbles freeze properly and (b) I'm not a photographer. 

 

The recipe I've used forever is 

200 ml warm water (warm enough to dissolve the rest of the ingredients)

35 ml corn syrup

20 ml dish soap

25 grams (2 tbl white sugar)

a cold calm day or evening with some good lighting.  I generally find temperatures between -15°C and -25° C  best.  One can experiment with the final water temperature as a first step.  If you're really serious you could try a walk-in freezer. (not that I haven't been tempted)

Here's an excellent video on YouTube.

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¹ Here's my hypothesis of what's going on.  A liquid gives off a bit of heat when it freezes - the latent heat of fusion.  Those vibrating water molecules lock into a structure and the energy of the water molecules motion has to go somewhere.  When the bubble lands on a cold surface it begins to freeze at the point of contact. A ring shaped freezing front proceeds up the bubble.  As the region freezes a bit of heat goes to the liquid part of the bubble in the immediate area that hasn't frozen causing a flow of slightly warmed water that moves upwards.  This flow grows and puts stress on the freezing front causing bits of new ice to break off and slide around the still liquid part of the bubble.   If I'm right the illusion that individual freezing zones form is just that - an illusion - and an artifact of the single moving ring.

The corn syrup gives sturdier bubbles.. the white sugar doesn't totally dissolve and gives good nucleation sites for crystal formation.

Of course this is just a guess that would need testing.

 

 

a dive into snowflakes

miniost

Derek Muller interviews Ken Libbrecht.  Ken is an astrophysicist, but like many scientists his curiosity extends past his core interest.  He's a great example of someone making progress in one of those small areas not many people worry about.  His enthusiasm comes through communicating why people do science.

This is so good!

how electrical energy moves..

a quick minipost

Most people don't understand how electric energy flows until they take and Electricity and Magnetism class in college. I've found teaching it without math to be challenging unless your good at drawing or some other type of visualization..    Derek Muller does an excellent job without having to resort to the math! 

 

Maxwell's equations are often the first place a physics student has the wind knocked out of them by sheer beauty.