omenti

hacking your vision

It was really stupid - not quite Darwin Award stupid - but close.  Now that my parents are gone I can write about it.

 

As a teen I became fascinated with the sensitivity of the human eye.  It turns there are a lot of tricks you can use - I've written about playing with a few subtleties of your color vision to see colors in the night sky as well as my practice of night walking on dark nights without a light.  Moonbows (like a rainbow, only from moonlight), very dim luminescent beetles, the phosphorescent decay of organic matter in still ponds and the reflection of light from the eyes of animals in starlight.  There is a certain thrill in tapping your inner owl and walking around in near darkness.   If you're a bit on the teenager side of the risk curve you can try running or cross country skiing without lights.  And then the stupid thing I tried.

 

The night was exceptionally clear with only starlight.  The hills were just black regions without stars.  Night walking had opened up part of the outdoors I didn't know, but it made me wonder.  Armed with a brand new driver's license and my Dad's old Ford Falcon,  I had driven North of town past Benton Lake on Bootlegger Trail  - far enough to be away from the light glow of town.   I pulled over to the side of the road, taped over the instrument panel so none of the light came though and let my eyes adjust to the dark.  I started the car without the lights and used averted vision to drive.  It was easy to see where the road and even the center stripe was, but everything went away if you accidentally slipped and used the center of your eye.   That's the hard part - you see a something and tend to focus on it.   Suddenly your sensitivity drops off to less than a tenth of a percent of what it was and everything vanishes.

 

I probably drove that way for three or four minutes at up to thirty miles an hour.  I did it again about a month later with a friend.  He didn't have experience with averted vision so he didn't try, but I had a witness. 

 

Don't ever try anything that stupid!  But learning how to use your averted vision is a nice way to extend your view into the natural world.  The world becomes a richer place when you learn how to see it a bit different.  It is one of my forms of travel and particularly interesting when I'm visiting dark places for the first time. 

 

You have three flavors of cones that are each sensitive to different "color" ranges.  A total of about seven million and they're mostly in an area called the fovea near the center of your retina.  There are also rods.  One hundred and fifty million - approximately a boatload. They're generally more than a thousand times as sensitive than your cones  and in some cases can be sensitive to individual photons.  Learning how to use just the cones is the trick.  

 

The fovea is small and densely packed giving you your detailed and color vision.  It's what you usually think about when you consider vision.  At it's center is a very small region about the size of a small dot of ink - about 0.3 millimeters or 300 microns.  The thinnest blonde human hair is about 40 microns in diameter and the coarsest black hair about 120 microns, so its really small!  It's all cones.  If you plot the density of rods and cones on the retina going radially out from the center (the fovea centralis) you see the density of cones drop dramatically around twenty degrees out.  The density of rods, on the other hand, is very low inside this area, and rapidly increases to a maximum around 20 to 25° out and then slowly drops off.¹  Averted vision involves looking away from the center part of your vision.  Ideally you want to be looking at least twenty five or so degrees out.  Further out the density drops, but not that fast..  I aim for about 40° to prevent accidentally falling back into central vision.  I can't do it without biting my lip - find your own technique:)

 

You can also use a camera to extend your range.  Serious photography forces you to take careful note of what's in an image and you have any number of adjustments to  play with. You can play with different wavelength ranges and see what is normally hidden to us.  I like to play with different slices of time from  tiny fractions of a second to minutes long.  

 

We have fireflies around here in the Summer. Here's a simple 30 second time exposure.  (f3.5, ASA 400 for what it's worth).  Flashing signatures vary with species and I've found four in our area. It is relatively straight forward to analyze the signals and do serious observation.   For something so beautiful it isn't deeply studied as one might think so you might discover new behavior!

 

Before stopping it seems reasonable to mention you can hack how your mind synthesizes and uses the vision it generations.  Our brains turn out to be quite "plastic".  Usage patterns can create new connections and destroy old ones.  Playing a musical instrument develops certain regions in the brain as does speaking multiple languages fluently.  Certain types of online interactions are currently under heavy study - it appears that multitasking leads to different neural optimizations along with easily finding answers without reflection.  Jheri is mostly deaf - I've never met anyone as visually aware.  She does an enormous amount of visual tracking and lip reads to the point where you don't realize she's hearing impaired.  

 

Sports are another way to hack your sense of the world.  People who are good at sports that require "field sense"- knowing the position and movement of others on the court and field- develop certain regions associated with orientation, but on a massive scale.  They're doing it for multiple moving objects.  I wonder if some people who are wonderfully athletic but aren't very good players in field and court sports have problems with this? (of course there are dozens of other areas that must work well too) 

 

All of these changes seem quite normal to their owners - after all, we can't easily know what someone else experiences.    A lot of questions arise.   A few months ago a reader mentioned she was interested in how smell interacts with the body.  It is certainly part of our interoception system and represents a nearly blue sky research area.  There must be room for hacking.   I've been talking to a neurologist and reading about dogs.  But I'm out of time.

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¹ the heights of the curves are different, but you get the idea - artistic license:-)  This is from memory, but in the ballpark.  

 

 

playful thinking

There is this dairy farmer with a problem.  He's tried everything he can think of, but milk production from his herd just won't budge.  The dairy new online push hormones, but no ..  it was time for something unconventional.  He hired three consultants - a mechanical engineer, a psychologist and a physicist.

A week went by and the engineer came back with a stack of papers.  The problem, according to the engineer, is the farmer's milking machines don't develop enough vacuum and the tubes to the storage tank have too many bends.  A special machine is proposed, but the farmer decides to talk to the next consultant.

The psychologist takes a lot of photographs and makes some sound recordings.  He compares these with those of benchmark barns and after a week reports the barn is too disorderly and the sounds from the nearby highway make things worse.  The recommendation is to hire an interior decorator and subscribe to Moozak.  

Nope .. time to listen to the physicist.

The physicist listens to the farmer describe the problem.  "hmmm..." she says as she pulls a half used Fieldnotes pad, pencil and slide rule from her backpack.  Gazing up at the sky focused on nothing in particular she says...

consider a spherical cow

 

You've probably heard some variation of this.  I like it as it describes how a lot of physics is done.  Physics and the other sciences are usually poorly taught - it's anything but facts and equations to memorize and somehow apply.  Rather it's mostly play at it core - at least how you think.  You strip away anything that isn't necessary and see what you can learn.  If the answer doesn't make sense you try a different approach.  The trick is knowing how much to strip away and what to leave in and how to mix in other questions along the way.  Ideally you're left with new insight.

 

A regular reader told me he was curious about my thinking process and asked if I could describe it.    At first I ignored the request, but then decided to give it a try with a little real time play. Using the spherical cow joke as a seed I took a walk with a very smart friend as a sanity check.  This isn't a transcript, but here's roughly how it unfolded.

 

First let's draw a picture of a cow.  Consider a spherical cow of radius 1.  I don't care what the units are and for now a sphere is the simplest shape to get started with.

Now draw another  sphere of radius 2 - this will be our gigantic cow. What kind of milk production can we expect.  Any linear dimension will be twice as big so we can see if barn door heights and widths will work.  The udder will be part of the sphere.  It will be 8 times as large as the regular cow ..  the volume of any part of the cow scale as the radius cubed - it doesn't matter what part of the original spherical cow I choose, as long as the part on the larger sphere has the same shape, its volume will be r³ or 2³ = 8 times as much.

Already a problem looms.  What is the pressure in the udder?  Pressure is just a force spread over an area (think pounds per square inch).  The force in this case is the weight the udder has to support, which increases as the cube of radius. The area of a section of the sphere is  4πr² times the fraction of the sphere the udder takes up.  Now the udder fraction and the  4π are the same for a spherical cow of any radius.  We'll be comparing the two by dividing so they'll cancel out.  The pressure will be proportional (a physicist would say "goes like..") to r³ divided by r² -- or just the radus r.  Our giant cow has twice the pressure on it's udder as the standard cow.  This may be a serious cow design problem and we would need to know more to make progress.  But it gives a hint of another direction.

 

Now draw a more accurate picture of a cow and giant cow.  A small sphere connected by a cylinder to the larger sphere. What about the force on the neck?  The important innards of the neck are the spine and muscle. Strength goes as the cross sectional area.  So if the double sized cow is a perfectly scaled version of a regular cow, it's neck will be r² or 4 times stronger.  It must support itself and the head, both of which will see their weight go up by the cube.  The ratio of weight to strength is simply r or 2 in this case.  Another design issue for giant cattle breeders.

But what of really big animals - like a dinosaur?   If the head is much bigger than the neck it will be the limiting factor.  Imagine something like a cow scaled up eight times in length.  The head would quickly become too heavy.  Something like a big dinosaur walking on four feet with a long neck would need a very small head.  

Now it's clear why the dinosaurs went extinct.

Their brains were too small. This handicap meant they never developed a space program and were unable to deal with the asteroid. 

 

Of course this is tongue in cheek, but this sort of playful approach is exactly how a lot of physics gets done.  As you proceed detail and more critical questions are added.  One gets to point where measurements of Nature are needed and then you see if you can predict -- if not it's just storytelling and not science.

 

Back to the example.  It's an interesting approach to begin thinking about sports.  What kind of body types are more suited to one sport or the other?  People on the list range in height from something under five foot zero to six foot eight.  One might consider gymnastics and the other basketball or volleyball.  Neither would be a good distance runner...  Soon you need to drill deeper, but the thought process stays the same.  As detail enters, calculations need to be more robust.  The observation and experimentation part can be very difficult to implement.  LIGO - the twin observatories for measuring gravity waves are simple to describe conceptually, but making it work took over thirty years of hard work and invention of new instrumentation and techniques (some of which has had impact in engineering and medicine).  This simple concept is a few minutes at a blackboard with no equations and a string of playful questions eventually led to an entirely new form of astronomy.

 

The approach works in many areas where there is enough information to form some kind of a question - often one that sets limits.  There are times when an hour of thinking gets you within a factor of two of a difficult problem that requires huge resources to answer to any precision.  This is a good way for picking paths to follow.  I've been called on to do this in scenario planning style exercises.

 

And for fun ..  what about the folklore that the breath you just took at least one molecule from Julius Caesar's last breath.  A minute or two of thinking gives the answer, but it raises some really interesting questions about the atmosphere..  The first time I thought about the problem as a teenager I was struck by the notion that the atmosphere for a plant is like a salty sea and the thirsty sailor.  That leads you to think about fertilizer and the enormous scale of the process - probably the primary reason for the planet being able to sustain more than two billion people.  Then you think about the energy costs and other natural limiters.  This style of thinking is a great exercise for anyone who likes to discover dot connections.

 

Clearly one doesn't do this all the time, but it's great fun and I encourage folks to try it out. When you do it with others it's not brainstorming - brainstorming doesn't work.  Rather it's a form of play.  It can get addictive and can be physically dangerous for those of us who can't walk and chew gum at the same time.  I naturally fall into this with one of you who has saved me from Manhattan traffic on several occasions.  

 

 

 

23 1407

A few years ago I was walking through the parking lot of JPL in Pasadena when a license plate caught my eye.  It took me a few seconds to figure it out, but it had to be a vanity plate and one I wouldn't mind having.  I pointed and exclaimed something like 'how brilliant' to a rather perplexed friend.  Just a few days ago someone set a rather amazing Internet ad.   It had an easter egg that grabbed my eye for the same reason, although this was much more explicit.  There is a connection between the license plate and the ad.  I'll get to that, but first I need to talk about some playful tools that physics and astrophysics types use.  

 

Any sort of creative work needs a playful component. Its how you develop your intuition.  I'm sure many fields have their own power tools for play and you may want to think about yours as mostly they are so natural that they become part of how we think.  You need to try and discard a large number of ideas without fear of failure. Some of these can be rather silly.  Often you build toy models in your head or at the blackboard.  Typically they aren't practical ..  if someone were to ask how many cattle are required to provide shoes for New York City you might say to yourself 'consider a spherical cow'..  Physics problems tend to exclude much of the real world so you can focus on just the bit of interest.  Mental or blackboard math rules.  You aren't worried about exact answer.  I love the power of computer simulations but anything you have to type into would just slow you down and break the flow during the play stage.  You want to create little visual models that seem like an extension of your mind so you can dance with them.  People develop a certain affinity for numbers and you carry around a few rough rules of thumb.  Things like π² ≈ 10 to about 1.3% .. when you're only worried about 10% errors the arithmetic is easy.  Some bits of Nature are stored in this fashion:

 

° there are π × 10⁷ seconds in a year to better than a half percent

° the speed of light in a vacuum is close to 3 × 10⁸ meters/second.  An interesting coincidence is the original definition of a meter was 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the pole to a point on the equator. Distances can be measured in the time light takes to travel the distance.  We're used to light days and light years, but light goes about a foot in a billionth of a second or a nanosecond. A very tall friend sometimes gives her height as six and two thirds nanoseconds .. about the time light takes to traverse her length.¹ 

° a light foot is sort of practical when thinking about connecting parts of a computer.  If modules are separated by 10 feet, a delay of at least 10 nanoseconds is introduced.  This gets interesting when you're using a lot of fiber optics or physical wire as the speed of light is slower.²  The speed of light in the fiber is about 2/3s that of in a vacuum or air.  A signal will traverse 1000 km in about 5 thousandths of a second, while a radio wave going through the air only requires  3.3 thousandths of a second.  A very long time for a computer.  The difference was large enough to justify the construction of a specialized microwave network between Chicago and New York City to give some traders an advantage based on the difference between the index of refraction of air and optical fiber. 

 ° the acceleration caused by Earth's gravity is denoted by g and is roughly 10 meters per second².  It varies depending where you are on the surface, but unless you want to weigh a pound less or more, the rough figure works for quick calculations.  

° the diameter of the Sun divided by the height of a person is roughly the same as the height of a person divided by the diameter of a hydrogen atom.

° it takes about 500 seconds for light to travel from the surface of the Sun to the Earth

° photosynthesis in crops and trees is usually under 0.5% efficient

° a cow requires about 10 times as much energy as the plants it eats to produce the same amount of energy 

° ...

 

There are hundreds of little relations like this and a few curious numbers too.  One of the most famous is the fine structure constant which describes the strength of electromagnetic interactions between charged particles.  It is close to 1/137 and appears in enough calculations that every physicist knows it.  If you want to flag one down in a stream of people (airports for example), just write 137 or 1/137 on a piece of paper and hold it in view.  I've experimentally found this to be remarkably effective.

 

Some of the relationships aren't directly connected with Nature, but are just fun and sometimes are even useful.  There are too many to list, but here are two..

 

° e is the base of the natural logarithms and is of fundamental importance to economics and science.   It happens to be irrational and transcendental, but the first few digits are easy to remember:  2.7 1828 1828 45 90 45  (1828 repeats twice, and the angles in a right angled isosceles triangle)

° of course there is Hardy–Ramanujan number.  The story goes that G. H. Hardy was visiting his friend and colleague Srinivasa Ramanujan in the hospital. He had ridden in cab number 1729 and remarked that it was such a boring number.  Ramanujan counted, pointing out that it was the smallest number you can express by cubes in two ways:  1³ + 12³ and 9³ + 10³.  This has slipped into popular culture and has appeared in both the Simpsons and Futurama in the form of easter eggs.  But then again some of the principals of those shows are mathematicians. 

 

And number on a taxi brings us back to the number on a vanity plate.  My eye was probably caught by the initial 23, which happens to be my favorite prime, but  it looked suspicious - something close to 20 plus π ...  I remembered e^π - π is just a bit less than 20.  The number on the plate had to be an approximation of e^π.  The connection with the ad is perhaps the most beautiful relation in mathematics : ³

 

e^iπ + 1 = 0

 

While e^π isn't the real thing, it is suggestive enough to bring a smile.  Of course there is the possibility the owner just considered e^π cool without thinking of e^iπ, but this was the JPL parking lot.  

 

If only vanity plates allowed superscripts...

 

 

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¹ again an approximation.  If you want to do this more exactly the speed is about 0.984 ft/ns .. 

² the speed of light in a material is c/n, where n is the index of refraction.  n is close to 1.0 for air, but about 1.5 for optical fiber

In physics experiments signals are delayed with respect others to make logic gates work properly.  You develop a sense that 8 inches or 20 centimeters is about a nanosecond in coax.

³ It links the two most important irrational numerical constants e and π, number i which is the base of the imaginary numbers which gives us complex numbers, the additive identity 0 and the multiplicative identity 1.  It also answers the question "how many mathematicians does it take to change a light bulb?"  Then answer, of course, is -e^iπ...   

If it seems strange that the exponential of a complex number could be equal to 1, consider what the number e is.  It is closely related to compound interest ...  e^z is the limit of (1 + z/N)^N as N goes to ∞. If you set z = iπ and do the math you get -1 + 0i or just -1.  Here's an animated gif: 

 

 

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Recipe Corner

 

Caramelized Carrots

 

Ingredients

 

° 3 pounds of carrots - go for the fancy colored ones if you want it to look good

° salt and freshly ground pepper

° 2 clementines or one large orange

° 1 tbl red wine vinegar

° 3 tbl butter or vegan margarine 

° half a bunch of fresh thyme

 

Technique

 

° peel the carrots. you can quarter of halve them, but if they're pretty whole carrots with a bit of the tops on are beautiful

° put carrots in a large pan and just cover with water.  Add a bit of salt and ground pepper and the clementine juice, the vinegar and butter

° bring to a boil and cook until nearly all the liquid has evaporated

° add the thyme sprigs, reduce heat to low and cook for about 5 minutes to caramelize 

 

a legacy behind and beyond a legacy and an exhibit

In 1958 Willy Higinbotham of Brookhaven National Laboratory cooked up a bit of kit and created Tennis for Two - perhaps the first video game to engage kids at a laboratory open house. 

 

Peter Takacs of BNL has recreated the game for exhibit. If you are in the area catch it at the New York Historical Society through April - the history of technology created in the New York City metropolitan area.  

 

Although interesting and cool, it is unfortunate this has become his legacy.  He was head of the instrumentation division at BNL for many years and was responsible for a large amount of innovation in high energy physics apparatus - innovation that had a profound impact on medicine and other aspects of human life.  He was also a passionate force for nuclear non-proliferation.  As a young scientist he was part of the Manhattan Project and, like many others, pushed for the elimination of the weapon.  He went beyond the ordinary and cofounded the Federation of American Scientists.

 

 

The spinoff from experimental physics has been enormous. Physicists have to invent techniques to make their measurements.  Although developments are often a historical chain, most of the instrumentation used in medicine has a direct link to physics.  In the past few decades medical imagining comes directly from nuclear and high energy physics techniques.  Perhaps the most direct example is positron emission tomography which was largely developed at BNL. 

 

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recipe corner

 

This was really good, but I have a weakness for sweet potatoes 

 

 

Sweet Potatoes with Mustard

 

 

Ingredients

 

 

° 2 large or 3 medium sweet potatoes

 

° 2 tbl vegetable oil

 

° 1 tsp brown mustard seeds

 

° 1/2 tsp cayenne 

 

° 1/2 tsp tumeric

 

° some chopped fresh cilantro - one or two tbl

 

° salt

 

 

 

Technique

 

 

° bake the sweet potatoes in a 350°F oven for about 30 minutes.  Let them cool a bit, peel and cut into half inchish chunks

 

° fry the mustard seeds in oil in a skillet on high heat until the seeds begin to pop.  Cut the heat to medium 

 

° mix in the potatoes, turmeric, cayenne and salt to taste

 

° cook about ten minutes until a crust starts to form. 

 

° garnish with cilantro

the spark gap

The structure was small but, despite the amazing view, there was only one small window.  A curtain was kept out sunlight. A cluster of electric cables connected the building to the cable car building a thousand feet distant.  Twelve is an age when most of us are still at curiosity and society lets us get away with it.  I knocked on the door.

 

My family spent a few weeks each Summer anywhere from the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area in Montana up to Jasper in Alberta.  That year it was Banff.  We had taken the Sulphur Mountain cable car to the viewing platform.  On a clear day the view was nearly a hundred miles.  The observation deck was crowded to capacity with tourists from all over the world.  My parents and sister were talking to a couple from England when I left for the unusual building along the mountain's North ridge.

 

Physicists have a primal need to explain things as deeply as time and their audience's patience and curiosity permit.  Almost immediately I was learning a bit about cosmic rays, muon showers, scintillators, photomultiplier tubes and so on until my father showed up.  He had been looking for me for a few hours and happy wouldn't be the right word to describe his mood.  

 

The ride down the mountain and then back to our camp was quiet - I knew better than to say anything.  That didn't seem to matter at the time.  I was completely engaged in what I had seem.  Most of it was over my head, but seeing the existence of the remnants of a cosmic ray shower on a simple detector someone put together solely to explain what they were doing hit me deeply.   I saw the beginnings of how people ask questions of nature and it had nothing to do with looking up things in a book.  By the time Lyra was overhead I feel asleep knowing I would be either a physicist or an astronomer.  It was a calling. 

 

A month later I tagged along with my father on a trip to Los Angeles.  He was taking a ten day workshop for a certification and I was seeing California for the first time.  Friends and family recommended trips to Disneyland, Knott's Berry Farm, Hollywood, the beach and other things kids are supposed to see in Southern California.  I wasn't interested and probably to my father's dismay  managed to get my way.  I visited JPL, and earthquake observatory, the planetarium at Griffith Park , and the La Brea Tar Pits.   

 

Years later in grad school I came across a survey by the American Physical Society of recent graduates .  A large majority of US born recent Ph.D.s, over 80%, had been raised in rural areas or near a natural history museum.  This wasn't true of undergrad declared majors who mostly changed majors along the way but those who made it to the end were predisposed to have been in areas where some contact with Nature was likely.  

 

Perhaps some areas are richer in sparks than others. 

 

Some say kids are natural scientists.  I disagree.  Kids are wonderfully curious, but science isn't a grown-up version of child-like curiosity.  Doing science requires learning and practicing abstract skills that are often not intuitive.  Older students who have problems in something like a college chemistry class haven't unlearned an earlier ability, but rather

 

A few kids manage to get struck by a spark and dive in seeing the learning and work as play.   This teenage dedication is far from unique to science.  Music, sports, mechanics, art ...  many kids spend their time picking up and honing basic skills that allow them to progress.  These skills can be picked up at any time, but there are some kids who have a great head start - it isn't native intelligence as much as it is learning deeply.   

 

There are two gaps that need to be jumped.  First the initial spark, the calling for some, and then a longer gap that makes it possible to enjoy developing a somewhat different type of thinking than they're getting in school.  This longer spark is a form of play.

 

The best day of the year at the old Bell Laboratories was the 24^th of December.  Employees brought their families and kids would wander around and see some real research often with some enthusiastic guides.  Some departments went all out preparing demonstrations for the kids.   After a few years kids became bored.  They had home computer games were more interesting than anything at the labs.  By the mid 90s kids weren't coming unless their parents dragged them along.  Bell Labs had become a mostly spark-free environment.  Where do you find events with spark potential these days?

 

Thinking about this earlier today I remembered the Lexus Hover Board ad...  

 

The ad is real without digital special effects.  It took me back to my first course in statistical mechanics.  The professor was a low temperature theorist.  We had been studying some of the oddities of liquid helium and he showed up with a dewar, a large beaker, a strip of metal and a magnet.  The metal went into the beaker and was covered by the expensive liquid helium near absolute zero. He dropped in the magnet and we watched it levitate skittering around over the superconductor almost without friction.   In the helium the metal had become a superconductor.   The superconductor allows current to flow without resistance.  When a material becomes a superconductor it excludes magnetic fields.  

The field of the magnet induces current loops in the superconductor that exactly cancel the magnet's field.  The magnet 'sees' a mirror image of itself and levitates.  Its called the Meissner Effect.

 

 Demonstrations like this fill your mind with questions and are entirely worth the cost of a bit of helium (there were only a eight students in the class).  After Back to the Future II showed the Mattel Hover Board it was common to ask students to calculate what it would take to build such a device.  

 

It gets even better...

 

Improvements in superconductors made it possible to levitate with (almost) dirt-cheap liquid nitrogen.  In addition to the Meissner Effect  there is something closely related called quantum flux trapping or flux pinning.  I won't get into the details, but where the Meissner Effect shields the superconductor from the magnetic field, flux from the magnet enters tiny sites and is effectively pinned in place.  With a bit of care you can fix the height and orientation of levitation and move objects along almost without friction.   

 

Once you get a handle on flux pinning the Hover Board is just a matter of money.

 

These days there are any number of interesting YouTube videos.  PhysicsGirl is doing terrific work that should inspire teenagers - particularly girls - much more than expensive produced television like Cosmos.  That said I believe there is a need to see things for yourself and then begin to explore them on your own using real Nature rather than just watching videos or playing with simulations.  This is partly broken, but perhaps we're seeing the start of it return.  It is this hands-on component that encourages the hard work and experimentation necessary to move from the curiosity of a child to that of a scientist.  Of course sparks for many things can come at any age - most of us are too busy to follow up, but every now and again something dramatic happens.

 

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Recipe Corner

 

An end of Summer salad.  There are so many ways to go, but here's tonight's with sweet potatoes, apple and corn

 

Ingredients

 

° 1 medium sized sweet potato chopped into inchish pieces

° 1 large gala apple  (or equivalent - a honey crisp would be good) chopped 

° 3/4 cup cherry tomatoes sliced in half

° 1 ear fresh horn - husked

° some olive oil

° a couple of handfuls of arugula

° a quarter cup toasted nut pieces

° sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

° 1 tbl extra-virgin olive oil 

° 2 tsp chipotle paste (I had some around - you could use powder)

° 2 tsp cider vinegar

° 1/4 tsp honey or maple syrup (I love maple syrup)

° salt and pepper

 

 

Technique

 

° heat oven to 375° F

° toss sweet potatoes, apple and tomato on a baking sheet with olive oil drizzle and pinch of salt and pepper.  Roast for abut 30 minutes turning halfway through

° wrap the ear of corn in foil and put it in the oven for about 20 minutes

° whisk the olive oil, chipotle, vinegar, honey and salt and pepper to make a dressing.

° put arugula in a bowl along with the roasted pan contents.  Slice the kernels from the corn and add.  Toss the salad.  Season to taste.

 

the black hole that terrorized a city

Someone asked if I liked to watch horror/scifi movies.  It depends...

 

A few years ago I was trapped on a cross country flight and saw The Black Hole - one of those scripts that is so bad it is almost, but not quite, worth watching.  Check out the trailer...

 

Most special effects and animated movies take liberties with physics.  Starting with Disney many of the classic animation films created increasingly more interesting variations on physics to improve the storytelling physical worlds.  There were any number of tricks to trick the viewer to better immerse them in the story.¹

 

Special effects tend to suffer.  I'm able to enjoy films like Guardians of the Galaxy, but poor scripts and acting break the story telling and I find myself spending most of my time thinking about the physics.  

 

With that a mini-analysis of The Black Hole - (no plot is spoiled as I didn't notice one)

 

Somehow an there is an accident in a secret physics lab a hundred feet below St Louis.  Physicists have managed to create a tiny black hole that escapes and trolls around under the city coming up for buildings like the great white shark in Jaws.   At this point I'm completely out of story space and am thinking about small black holes.

 

Hmmm... about 30 meters underground and buildings on the surface are collapsing.  I'll make the assumption it is a miniature classical black hole, more on that later, and suggest that the gravitational force from it at the surface is about ten times Earth's gravity - that should be enough to flatten a building.  I could have picked other numbers, but we're just doing a little thought experiment and don't need to accurately understand how strong buildings are.  With this you can work out its mass - roughly about twenty trillionths the mass of the Earth - a bit over 100 trillion kilograms.  Now we're getting into interesting territory..

 

The event horizon of a black hole that mass is roughly a tenth of a trillionth of a meter -  about ten thousand times smaller than a hydrogen atom.²  Put it on the ground and it won't feel any resistance to any material on or in the Earth.  As soon as its created it will fall toward the center of the Earth picking up speed as it goes.  It whizzes through the center at about eight kilometers a second and starts slowing down as it heads towards a point, judging from my globe, on the surface of the Indian Ocean well off the Australian coast. Maybe it dines on a fish before reversing direction and heading back about 42 minutes later.³  Back and forth, back and forth - we have an odd sort of clock.

 

Games like this turn out to be a central part of play in physics.  You make a non-physical assumption -  assume a miniature black hole is created just under St Louis - and follow what happens using established physics.  In the process you can quickly deal with many questions and decide on those that are the best candidates for serious study.  Now that we have our black hole tic-tocking between St Louis and the Indian Ocean, let's look at smaller black holes.

 

I mentioned this was a classical black hole.  In 1974 Stephen Hawking proposed black holes can evaporate. The time required for one formed from a collapsed star is extremely long - it would take about 10⁶⁷ years for one with our Sun's mass ... approximately forever when you consider the age of the universe is 13.8 billion years.  But the rate of evaporation has a strong dependence on the black hole's mass and lighter black holes evaporate faster.   The little St Louis black hole would last about a hundred times longer than the current age of the Universe.

 

Smaller black holes can have lifetimes small even on time scales we're used to.  One with the same mass as a small car - about 1,000 kg - would evaporate in a billionth of a second and would be about 200 times as bright as the Sun.  These super tiny black holes would make a very powerful and completely impractical doomsday devices - even more impractical than antimatter.  In other words the perfect plot device for a movie.

 

I'll end with a problem for those who like to work things out.  Send mail if you'd like hints.

 

The Master from Dr Who or a slightly annoyed Vogon captain approaches the Earth with a super slicer beam that instantly makes a cut through the Earth.  What happens if the cut is through the equator and is  one centimeter wide?  What happens with a one meter cut?  How about ten meters?   Now work the problem with the same three cuts, but this time slicing from pole to pole.  How does humanity make out in each scenario?  

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¹ If you have the slightest interest in animation The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation by Olie Johnson and Frank Thomas is just wonderful.  Go for the hard cover and treasure it.  Disney did amazing groundbreaking work, and other expanded wrote new rules.   Chuck Jones created an animation for roadrunners and coyotes that is an art form.  Even today the tricksters are still at it.

² the Schwarzschild radius is proportional to mass r_s = 2GM/c².  The point is it only goes linearly with mass while the mass of a star goes as the cube of the radius - the event horizon get small very quickly as mass drops.  The Sun has an event horizon of about 3 kilometers ... far too small to contain it.  r_s for the Earth is 0.9 centimeters.  

³ 42 minutes through a frictionless tunnel is the result everyone calculates in physics 101, but that assumes the Earth's interior has a uniform density.  Recent work giving a better understanding of the Earth's density distribution cuts a few minutes off the transit time.

 

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Recipe corner

 

I grilled some asparagus and used a homemade olive based dressing.  Ideally the trick would be to layer pieces of tomato on a bed of the grilled asparagus before adding the dressing, but it isn't good tomato season (yet).  Here's the dressing...

 

Olive dressing

 

Ingredients

 

° 3 tbl finely chopped kalamata olives

° 3 tbl extra virgin olive oil - a good one pays off

° 3 tbl red wine vinegar

° 3 tbl crumbled feta (leave off if you want it to be vegan)

° 2 tbl finely chopped red onion

° 1 clove garlic - very finely chopped or grated

° 1 tbl honey

° 1 tbl dijon mustard

° 1 tsp oregano

° salt and pepper to taste

 

 

Technique:-)

 

° mix the ingredients

 

playing and learning

This morning wasn't great for Perseid watching.  At 3:30am there were some high scattered clouds along with the light pollution common to this part of New Jersey.  In an hour's time I only saw five, but I have a low threshold for entertainment so it was completely worth the effort.  There are still a few days to watch and tomorrow morning and the next should be much better assuming the sky is transparent enough.

 

I've been watching the shower - or at least trying to - since I was 12.  Somewhere in high school I discovered meteor trails would make antennas.   They are just narrow columns of ionized atmosphere about 50 kilometers long.  You could "listen" to them by tuning a radio to a line of sight radio transmitter that was over the horizon.  Normally you wouldn't hear anything, but suddenly there would be a few seconds of signal.  North Central Montana was mostly devoid of commercial FM stations, so I picked one in Edmonton and waited.  Meteors passing overhead would ionize nice trials making effective antennas that would reflect the signal back to Earth and to my radio.¹  Listening to radio signal scatter from ionized paths is more challenging in the highly populated East Coast, but there is an easy way out and anyone can enjoy it.  

 

The Air Force send a ridiculously powerful continuous wave signal into space from a few transmitters around the clock as part of their Space Surveillance Radar program.  A nifty way to monitor space stuff, but also a wonderfully strong signal to use for finding meteors.  Stan Nelson lives in Roswell, NM (no jokes please) and has a receiver tuned to a ~217 MHz transmitter in Lake Kickapoo, TX.  He encodes the resulting signal in AAC and streams it to the Internet.  

 

listen

 

Understanding nature a bit more deeply greatly enhances one's appreciation of it and gives clues that help you find more beauty.

 

I was thinking about play and education as a friend and I were talking after a conference on the education experiments taking place in colleges and universities these days.  We're already in a post MOOC world - not terribly surprising as most of the experiments will produce no more than brief flashes in the pan as the issues are understood more deeply.

 

In the natural sciences it is critical and perhaps the nature of education is a bit different, so we may be looking at the problem with very biased filters, but both of us are proponents of hand's on education.   I learned a good deal of optics as well as learning to deal with failure building my first telescope.  Amateur radio taught the practical side of Maxwell's Equations and so on.  I was hooked and I still build things to get a better look at nature.  And while it is easy to lament the fading of amateur radio and telescope building, there are many new opportunities - some of them wonderful.

 

Last week I played with a Bigshot camera.²  An easy to build $90 kit, it can teach more than a few bits of science and engineering to kids (or to their STEM rusty parents) and has the added feature of being sort of good enough to do a bit of real photography.  I'm a strong proponent of STEAM education (STEM + Art) and photography is a natural path.

 

There are bits and snatches of lesson plans and starting points for the curious on the Bigshot site, but it can be greatly enhanced.  Think of it as a hardware kickstarter for the imagination.

 

We need more projects like the Bigshot and more mentorship, but there are many branches you can take with photography.  Digital camera sensor arrays are sensitive to the infrared and it isn't a big deal to modify a camera to explore the infrared world.  I wouldn't do this with a new camera, but most of us have one or two old point and shoots sitting around.  Some can be reprogrammed to make time lapse movies or you can buy an inexpensive GoPro - used ones can be had for very little thanks to an aggressive new model schedule.  Connect a camera to a cheap microscope or buy a cheap portable digital microscope to take out into the woods.

 

so many ways to use a bit of tech to play with nature and it only gets better with experience...

 

(The opening photo is a Perseid photographed from above by Ron Garan orbiting in the ISS.)

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¹ This is reliable enough that meteor burst communications is a cheap and reliable way to access remote data sources. Snowpack in the Western US is transmitted this way 

² A SciAm piece on the Bigshot project - one of the better education projects funded by the Google of old.  Most kids will have better cameras in their phones, but they won't learn very much about how cameras work.  This is a potentially rich vein for them to mine.

 

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Recipe Corner

 

A chef friend told me you can make a tasascoish sauce quickly in a pressure cooker.  Play around with the types of peppers and vinegars.  The first try was a success and there is enormous room for experimentation.  

 

Homemade Tabasco Sauce

 

Ingredients

 

° 450 g (1 pound) hot peppers - your choice depending on the intensity you want.  You can thin with ripe bell 

° about 1-2/3 cup cider vinegar ..  experiment!

° 2 tsp salt (a smoked salt was recommended, I just used a non-iodized sea salt)

 

Technique

 

° Chop the peppers and add to your pressure cooker

° add enough vinegar to cover (1-2/3 c for me) and salt

° close it up, crank the heat and when you are at pressure lower the heat to the setting up use to maintain pressure and cook for a minute.  When the time is up move the cooker off the burner and wait for it to come to atmospheric pressure naturally. (10 minutes for me)

° Puree the pepper mash with an immersion blender and strain into clean sealable bottles.  It will freeze if you want to store it a long time.

 

placetime

trees are the poems nature writes to the heavens

 

I need to find a suitable tree in the woods.  Sandy caused so much damage as did Irene and the pre-Halloween snowstorm.  Finding the right tree has not been easy this time.

 

but I'm getting ahead of myself...

 

When I was an undergrad I read Polya and decided to write down some steps on problem solving.  This is not meant to be specific to a field and it tries to be serious even though some of the steps may seem trivial.  It isn't a checklist - just a rough structure for approaching a problem.  I wrote these on a sheet and keep it above my desk.  

there are many techniques. Not every problem would have all of these steps and some would have new ones.  I've added a bit of annotation (in blue) to the original for clarity, but feel free to skip down.  The point is I wanted to impose some structure to make progress.

1. Understand the problem

 

- do you understand all of the words and equations in the problem?

- can you restate the problem in your own words?

- can you think of a picture or diagram to help understand the problem?

- what do you want to find or show?

- what level of accuracy do you need?

- is there enough information to find a solution?

- is the problem a relevant problem or is it gibberish?

- what is the scale of the problem?  can you do it in an hour or will it require unobtainium?

2. Devise a plan

 

- guess and check

- consider special cases.  what are the boundary conditions?

- select your tools

- do you fully understand your tools?

- draw a picture

- solve a simpler version first

- create a model

- use approximations - but understand their impact

- work backwards

- be ingenious …  this comes with experience and often with re-thinking the problem in a different context.  

This and the next step - connecting the dots are the non-trivial piece!!  Remember:

play and your ability to fail with grace are essential

curiosity is your driver - remember informed ignorance rules in science and math! never lose fact that your final job is to expand your ignorance - results are a by-product!!

- connect the dots - this is a subset of being ingenious

serendipity is another driver.  remember that serendipity is making discoveries by accident, but you must have enough sagacity to note what holds potential.  

dot connecting is best done using averted attention.  Don't tool constantly on your problem.  Focus hard, but pivot off to equally long period of something completely different. This may even fool others into thinking you have a life. 

3. Carry out your plan

 

- find a quiet place with no interruptions.  nature is your friend

- use some care and be a craftsman

- if you get stuck, take some time off and try to forget about what you are doing

- if you fail, use another approach

- know when you have failed

- if you are working with others know where the strengths are and divide appropriately

4. Check with reality

- does your answer make sense?

- can your solution make testable predications?

- ask an expert in your field to examine your work for flaws

- reflect on what you have done and examine what worked and what didn't

 

 

This approach helped with physics and math problems, but needed modifications for doing real science - something that I began to taste in grad school.  Observation and experiment have their own techniques and learning that answers may not be what you are looking for requires adjustment.¹

 

There are many places to jump from here.  Several have been mentioned in earlier posts, but I want to concentrate on how this fits with place and time.

 

Finding a bit of nature has been important for me - even in city environments.  As an undergrad I would spend time in the library listening to music for awhile and then going to "my rock" - a large rock just inside a small wooded area that no one seemed to walk through.  Being able to lay on my back and look up through the trees seemed to clear my mind and it was easy to tune out other noises.  

 

You can always build a simple tree platform or even a tree house.  These don't have to be elaborate, but they have the feature of purposefully removing you from some of the world.  Of course it is important to not have electricity and you need to leave your mobile phone behind, or at least turn it off.   

 

Working mostly out of my home these days I'm finding the woods to be an extremely important place and tool.  In addition to spending time working there I take a daily walk around lunch that allows one to mentally shift.  There is something constant, but always changing nature about the place that is worth a lot to me. 

 

I was lucky enough to have started in a lab at Bell Labs that strongly believed in some daily private time.  Even the phones went dead for incoming calls during the period.  You could chose to collaborate, but the choice was yours.  When I moved to other organizations that didn't have this policy I found myself coming in very early to get a few uninterrupted hours.  

 

The organization that first used the private time approach evolved a few curious practices that seemed to be organic extentions.  There were a variety of small collaboration areas outside the (private) offices.  If you wanted to collaborate and could find someone else agreeable (signaling was done with colored flags just outside your office door),  you would often meet in one of these areas - somehow that was better than either office.  They had nice chairs and a blackboard and were tucked into quiet out-of-the-way parts of the building.  Places for special collaboration times.

 

Intersection and collaboration with others is also critically important.  The old Bell Labs Murray Hill installation was something of a maze.  Throughout a career your office would move and would find yourself collaborating with people in other parts of the building.²   I don't believe in most forms of brain storming, but I've seen it work in some small and stable groups.  These groups were usually attached to place, time and often had some ritual.  One of my favorites was unscheduled, but usually took place late on Friday afternoons (three to seven pm was common), invovled a couch, a nice view of some trees, had three or four regular participants who were friends and was fueled by chocolate covered coffee beans.  

 

Collaborations can, of course, be remote.  There is a growing understanding of what works and doesn't.  Collaborations in place often fail and remote collaborations are sometimes fruitful.  It is important to understand for you and your organization what works and what doesn't and why.  Much of it comes down to personality and relationship strength, but corporate culture often has a role.

 

Working on some ideas and projects, one tends to run into walls.  Ideas and approached become stale and work slows to a crawl.  A good approach is to shift the primary focus to something else - something entirely different.  Sometimes a break to an extremely different activity or place is called for.  Somehow the mind seems to be considering the original problem and a flash of insight can come.  

 

Proper toolkits help a lot.  Perhaps it is the time I'm from, but a real slate blackboard and high quality chalk are important to me. Whiteboards don't cut it.  When AT&T Research moved to Florham Park, NJ after the AT&T/Lucent fission, the head of research recognized this and gave everyone a choice of board.  The same holds for paper and pencil for sketching - get something that feels wonderful when the pencil is in motion.   Sketching can be anything of the moment - sometimes visualization of the problem, sometimes working through equations and sometimes doodling or trying to focus and draw something.  The last is a form of meditation to me and a often a path to clearer thinking.  The paper has to feel good under a good sharp pencil.  Everyone will have something that is important to them - the point is figure out what it is and use it.  These are cheap paths that can encourage flow.

 

These are some of the tools I find useful - time from an earlier post and place and the interaction of time and place.  The point is you should find what placetimes and supports to them work for you.

 

Back to the beginning of the post.  Clearly the line is much more beautiful than anything I would pen.  Yesterday Om tweeted an Instagram post of his with a somewhat similar line by the poet Kahlil Gibran.  I've read quite a bit of his work. This one is famous and, while beautiful, breaks into sadness

 

Tree are poems the earth writes upon the sky

We fell them down and turn them into paper

That they may record our emptiness

Several years ago one of you had a similar line - the one at the beginning of this post - and I had to ask.  It turns out she had rewritten a someone similar line from a much older poem in her native language

 

God's fingers are the trees painting the sky

 

I realize poetry often doesn't translate, but consider Jheri's inspired variation much better and have been using it.  

 

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¹ I can't stress enough how important simple things like wiring are a well as trying to deal with all sources of error.  Play is even more important as is the ability to play with others who have different skill sets and views.  There is also a realization that hunting for the discovery - that rare eureka moment - is not what science is about, but rather finding new questions is much deeper.  But that is a core theme of this blog (hopefully)

² It is wonderful that cross disciplinary collaboration is "hot" again in some institutions.  I've never seen a place that supported it better than the old Bell Labs.

making use of time

Mary Roach is one of the more entertaining non-fiction authors and I've been enjoying Gulp over the past few days.  Highly recommended, but I'm afraid this isn't what I like to be doing.  Don't get me wrong - I love to read for pleasure, but there are other things that are better.  Things like tithing my time.

 

I've written about it before - the short version is I was looking at a few practices in religion that didn't make much sense on the surface to see if there was anything I could adapt.  I started tithing my time as money seems like a silly thing for the purpose if it is to be meaningful.  First it was about four hours a week to a variety of causes, but I wasn't learning.  Somehow I started working on the projects of friends and the epiphany came.  I was getting back much more than I offered.

 

I'm lucky enough to have friends with a range of very different interests and this has become a rich source of new learning and even serendipity.¹  These days my practice is to tithe my waking hours - about 11 hours a week.  I read for pleasure is there isn't a project to work on...

 

My goal, of course, is to be as poorly read as possible.

 

This is centrally important of my practice and to me as a person - perhaps something that differentiates my work from others.  It has given me a rich set of connections far removed from my normal boundaries.  One of the brilliant features of the old Bell Labs was its rich diversity in research interests.  While perhaps not optimal for some tasks, it was fantastic for discovering new areas.

 

Mentoring fits in with this, but there are times when you are working with people of different interests that the act of mentoring has a strong two-way flow and you find yourself being mentored.  It can be a waste of time if you lose your curiosity and just try to teach. 

 

Jean has been talking about time lately and Charlie has suggested I put together a post on the subject.  I'm not exactly a model user of it so caveat lector...

 

I don't multitask well when I'm supposed to be thinking deeply about something.  Multitasking is something that is generally inefficient - while there are a large number of processes running in our brains, the conscious mind seems to like single tasking and context switches from task to task when presented with multiple tasks. There is a cost in context switching ..  somehow the state of what you're doing needs to be saved and  the new process started.  When you re-enter the original process you have to somehow re-create the state of where you were.  For simple tasks this may not be difficult, but deep thought can be a disaster.  There are cases where it is impossible to recreate where you have been.

 

To single task I give myself blocks of time where I cut distractions.  The phone goes off, no net, no distractions from other people or even the critters.  The go is to find a state of Csíkszentmihályian flow - largely because it feels so wonderful and it has traditionally been very useful to me.   The first lab I was in at Bell Labs had this as policy.  Researchers could pick a three hour block in the morning or the afternoon.  When I moved to different organizations I had to create blocks of time.  If they were adverse to it I would come in before others started work leading to my practice of arriving at about 5:30am.  Others feel into the same practice - more than a few people in the Labs referred to going into cave mode.² I find it interesting, talking to some friends who teach graduate courses in physics at some of the best schools in the world.  They note that few of their successful students have any major involvement in social media and they tend to focus - no laptops during lectures, no smartphone use, etc ...  very much in contrast to what one sees in undergrad classes.

 

When I'm working on very deep tasks I tend to not work on them all day.  I do them as long as I can manage and then shift to other, usually easier, tasks.  If I haven't made progress in a month, and that is common for many tough problems, I set things aside and do something challenging that is completely different.  It doesn't have to be formal work - sometimes physically building something or getting heavily involved in a drawing is sufficient.  The remarkable thing is, during the different task, the mind seems to be continuing on with the original, but at a lower layer so I'm not conscious of it.  Sometimes there is a realization of what should be done, but more often the problem is much easier when I finally get back to it.  

 

I mentioned drawing...  I'm no artist, but I draw recreationally.  It is a very convenient way for me to empty my mind and prepare to move to focused work.  I'm picky about my drawing tools and usually throw the results out, but it is probably the closest I come to meditation.  A lot of people do variations on this - an athlete friend does photography and writes poetry to get into a state where she can focus on training and playing.

 

Playing ...

 

Play is centrally important.  Playing with others and their ideas when I can and approach work playfully where possible.  This means not being afraid to fail assuming you can learn from your failures.  It means that you have to budget time to allow for this.  Sadly many forms of work don't allow a playful approach.  I suspect it is not only useful for creative work, but at some level necessary.  Probably something for a future post.

 

There is more to say (the importance of exercise and the use of iPod time-shifting to give myself the luxury of at least 90 minutes a day), but I'm approaching my one hour limit.  I find it useful to put a limit on some tasks as it gives focus and forces single tasking.  It also prevents me from reading and editing what I've written, which for the purpose of this blog is a feature.

 

 Drop a line or leave a comment if you want to talk about this at a deeper level... and if you're looking for an entertaining read try Gulp.

 

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¹ I gave a TED^x talk on the subject of serendipity and collaboration.  Time tithing is central to that practice.  I should note that I use the old definition of serendipity - namely it is the act of paying attention and having the sagacity to notice there is something new and interesting.

The talk isn't well done - I'm not a good public speaker.  Also the format of these talks is very restricted and not something I feel works well.  

² One of the companies I've worked with decided to try this internally.  My understanding is several hundred of their people use a two hour slot every day.  They can focus on their own work or use it for collaboration with others who agree and don't want external distractions.  It should be noted the employees have separate offices and a flag that indicates they can't be disturbed.  They've told me they consider it an important tool and something they hope their competitors don't adopt.

Many types of work don't adapt to this as interruption is a necessary feature.  There is a lot of very interesting research on the subject and some HCI workers are trying to offer the right interruptions at the right time - not an easy task, but potentially valuable.  

 

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Recipe Corner 

 

I'm a big fan of soups - particularly easy soups.  This one is mostly for a food processor, is simple and easy to modify.  It is particularly good with a warm crusty baguette

 

Avocado and Corn Soup

Ingredients

 

° 1 avocado

° 3 cups almond milk

° 4 cups corn kernels

* tbl finely chopped yellow onion

° 1 tsp cumin

° 1/8 tsp turmeric

° sea salt (I use Maldon)

° freshly ground pepper

° coriander chopped (you could use parsley) 

Technique

 

° blend everything but the corn and coriander in a food processor.

° add the corn, season and heat until warm - I think it is better warm that hot

° serve into bowls and garnish with the coriander

 

 

those da*n glassholes are on my lawn! and cum hoc non propter hoc

As the year 2000 approached human computer interface labs all over the world were hot onto studying what comes after the desktop and handheld computer.  Some were doing tablets, but others were wondering what happens if you combine a phone that happens to talk to the Internet with a camera, what happens if you have a radio equipped watch with a display on it, what if a fairly powerful computer can be shoehorned into something handheld with a wireless Internet connection, what if that little powerful wireless computer knows where it is ....  My lab was involved in several of these as well as what happens as computing becomes more invisible and ubiquitous. 

 

A few like Steve Mann were doing leading edge work to sort out how a person may integrate with sensors and networks.  The stuff that excites technologists and science fiction writers.

 

You could make reasonable predictions based on Moore's Law and some educated guesses on mobile phone technology.  Designing interfaces was extremely difficult, but just as important was how acceptable to the public would it be.  Some of these devices would be worn.  What had good design and was fashionable?  Could the design be so good so as to be aspirational?

 

The social dimensions of the problem were, and still are, enormous.  We were making all kinds of observations and performing simple tests.  It wasn't science by any means even though some called it that.  People were learning bits and pieces of a larger problems.  We were learning more about the problems so as not to appear totally stupid.¹

 

Some of the trials produced location dependent results.  A lab in Cambridge using a located ID badge found its employees building any number of useful applications for themselves.  A sister lab in Palo Alto had a near revolt with the same devices even though they had similar backgrounds.  The culture of the two different labs rendered the badges aspirational in one location and a pox in the other.  Sorting out why was non-trivial.

 

There were a lot of crazy leaps being made based on small amounts of work.  It was a real disease in labs that did not have a diverse range of skills.

 

Oh yeah - the post's title?  That's Latin for "with this, not because of this" and is found in statistics to emphasize that correlation does not imply causation.  It is one of the first things taught in any statistics class to warn about jumping to conclusions.  You run into nearly everywhere these days - except in science.  It turns out to be a phrase that almost guarantees the speaker isn't a scientist.

 

An explanation is one of degree.  People without a statistical background jump to conclusions - we're pattern recognition machines and historically have come to some very wrong conclusions.  Not only that, we're still doing it.  A good statistical background gives you some tools to calculate correlations, but caution is advised.  A scientist subjects their work to very elaborate testing measuring and taking into account errors along the way and producing a result in terms of how likely it is.  If they don't their competitors will do it for them and there is little tolerance for mistakes.

 

But back to the phrase ...

 

To a scientist correlation suggests causation.  It is an early clue that there is something worth pursuing.  You might quickly rule the linkage out or perhaps there is something wonderful to be learned that generates a shower of new questions.  You don't want to eliminate possibilities early out of hand..  Much of science is playing with any number of ideas seeing if they are worth going deeper.  As in many other fields you develop a talent for it.  

 

Too frequently it is invoked to dismiss something out of hand even though the person who uses it often has no sense of the depth of the statement they are dismissing.

 

All of that the device and interface/interaction exploration in the late 90s was probably good as it was creating a space of interesting questions.  Except for a few technologies like camera-phones, smartphones and high capacity mp3 players it wasn't essential that anyone understand them deeply right away.  Some of those who worked on the near horizon problems were richly rewarded. But now it is time to begin to understand issues associated with wearables. 

 

It seems daunting as we haven't yet worked out social conventions for the use of smartphones.  Technology often outruns the understanding of its consequences.

 

In the past few weeks at least a half dozen have been in touch to ask for my opinion on Google Glass.  A fascinating area, but they're well over their heads.  Not only does the user interaction model need considerable work, but the design and social issues are daunting.²  They aren't going to pull it off by having a designer put together a frame for them.

 

People may develop appropriate interaction and social conventions - that seems to be what Google is counting on - but the company that introduces a new social technology rarely has a change to ride the wave very long. Deeper thinking is required and it will be  more demanding than ever before as we're going well beyond conventional engineering and technology.  I suspect something approaching real science will need to be done and people from a wide range of fields will need to be involved.

 

A few years ago I tried to put together some one line descriptions for each component of STEM ..  it is far from perfect, but here's what I said:

 

° Science is the study of nature.  Some useful insight becomes available as a result, but that is not the driver

° Math is language of science and also of engineering.  It is beautiful by itself.  

° Engineering is the art of building tools and 

° Technology is the tools and their use

 

These four fields are now insufficient.  Social clue is necessary..

 

We need to understand fashion, design and aspirational design, human nature, local and global cultures, and several other areas. I've been trying to become a student of design and fashion and have been reaching out to people in these and several other areas, but am only getting to the point where my questions aren't completely foolish.  Hopefully one can get to the point where they can have useful connections with enough diverse people to make a dent in the problem.  I'll probably be writing much more on the subject as time goes on.   In the meantime I wish Google luck, but this is a really deep people and the Silicon Valley engineering notion of solving everything with technologies is insufficient and broken.

__________

¹ I look at my own record and find it mixed after 15 years.  There were some solid hits - particularly with location aware services and a large number of misses.  One tends to remember the hits and forget the misses. 

² from an email I sent last week

Google has a habit of asking designers to come in at the end of the process …  they have a reputation for driving HCI types and designers crazy ..  they like to just bolt it on at the end.  So this isn't surprising.  It will be essential to make the things look presentable.

Their approach appears to be taking a vocal command with a specific interrupt, but such approaches have failed in the research world (not for technical reasons). What is needed is a nice set of orthogonal out of channel communication commands - what linguists call phatic interactions (the communications we all use not to carry core information, but rather are meta commands that kept the channel open. If I say "you're breaking up" on a cellphone call, I'm giving a phatic vocalization. There are any number of phatic signalings that are non-verbal - your phone vibrating to let you know there is a text message for example)

They use verbal phatics like "ok glass", but that can be socially awkward and is fairly unnatural.They really need to crack that one - or find some work that has.They may be interested in having the public solve it for them. Just like hashtags on twitter.

__________

 

Recipe Corner 

 

Waldorf salads are delicious, but hardly healthy.  I threw together this one that was delicious and healthy.  I like to add some dried fruit like cranberries or cherrys

 

Heart Friendly Waldorf Salad

Ingredients

 

° 1 tbl white-wine vinegar

° 1 tbl walnut oil 

° sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

° 1 Granny Smith apple, cored, quartered, and thinly sliced

° 1 cup seedless red grapes, halved

° 2 celery stalks, thinly sliced, leaves for garnish if you like

° 50 grams coarsely chopped toasted pecans and or toasted walnuts 

 

Technique

 

° whisk together the vinegar, oil, some salt and pepper to taste

° add celery, grapes, apple, and nut to the bowl, and toss to coat with dressing.