omenti

auteur and other fine words and phrases

About a week ago my friend Paul reported on his walking vacation in Iceland.  Paul happens to be in his late 80s and hasn't lost his knack for physics or interesting words and phrases.  He sent photos and noting some beautiful displays of the lux septentrionalis.  In the 45 or so years I've known him I've picked up a fair amount of Latin, Greek and German.  He bears direct responsibility for some of the phrases I use.. cheating in a way as I'm not fluent in these languages.¹  Auteur is a particularly interesting word, so let's dwell on it.

 

Recognizing creation of a book is easy.  Usually there are one or two authors get the credit even though editors, proof readers, printers and more were involved.   It's similar in scientific papers - at least until you get to collaborations of a half dozen or more.  Music is created by a composer, but orchestral performances are jointly credited to the composer and a conductor.  It's the complexity of something - when more than a few creative people are involved, that the term auteur seems appropriate.  I'd nominate James Murray of the Oxford English Dictionary as one of the first auteurs of a series of books - he went far beyond what normal editors do. 

 

The term auteur is usually associated with film.  Even in the thirties one hundred people might be involved in making a film and more than a handful - actors for example - may have had centrally important roles.  Here the equivalent of the creation of the film  is usually given to the director.  A director may not know how operate a camera, the intricate lighting or be able to perform on stage.  What they bring is vision and the ability to communicate it. 

 

Alfred Hitchcock wanted control over every scene of the movie.  He had to work it out ahead of time and communicate it so he repurposed Walt Disney's invention of story boarding to acted film. Hayao Miyazaki draws or corrects a lead frame of each animation segment of his films and spends a large amount of time with  composer Joe Hisaishi to get the music right. His style is dictatorial, but animators regard him as the best - an auteur among animation auteurs.  Pixar has a handful of internally grown auteurs who have seen remarkable success.  Wes Anderson is so good that name actors fall over themselves to get parts before seeing scripts.   It's an impressive group.

 

In spending time with an animation house as well as having worked on some large scale physics experiments, I see a common thread.  There needs to be a vision. There may be, and probably is, someone in the organization for each of the speciality skills who is better at their skill than the auteur.  The problem is having everyone do their best with limited knowledge of the rest causes project to drift from the goal.  It's the sort of thing David Epstein talks about in Range.   Someone has to have vision and taste and that's a special skill that requires development.  

 

It can apply to business.  Steve Jobs comes to mind and there are certainly others at various levels.  An interesting question is at what point does a project get big enough that an auteur is necessary and how does that vary by project type?  Many of you can come up with interesting examples.

 

Since sport is something of a mirror,  one can think of great coaches as auteurs.  It's certainly true  in team sports like football, soccer, indoor volleyball, etc.  Great coaches have developed a sense of the game and the taste in how it should be played.  Certainly they need a group of good players, but not necessarily all need to be, or even should be, great.  Finding a combination to execute the vision is the important piece.

 

__________

¹   Here's a non-alphabetical list of some that come to mind:

Danish (I know three Danes well)

klap lige hesten   "pat the horse" means shut up

det blæser en halv pelican "it's blowing half a pelikan"  means it's very windy

ingen ko på isen  "no cow on the ice" means  whatever the problem is, it's no big deal

så er den ged barberet  "the goat is shaved"  means the problem has been fixed, or the work is done

gå som katten om den varme grød  "walk as the cat around the hot porridge" means some is avoiding the problem

det regner skomagerdrenge  "it's raining shoemaker's apprentices" means the rain is very heavy

hygge a special coziness - what you might find on a snowy evening with good friends, food and a fire.

Italian

commuovere to be moved by a story to the point of tears

Greek

meraki    throwing yourself into something complete with passion, creativity and love.  This is how Paul approaches physics.

Tagalog

kilig the feeling of butterflies in your stomach as it romance or discovery

Malay

pisan zapra the time it takes to eat a banana - about two minutes

Swedish

fika gathering to talk and take a break from ordinary routines. Coffee must be involved.

resfeber the beating of a traveler's heart at the beginning of a journey. A anxiety with anticipation.

Welsh

hiraeth a homesickness for the time and place to which you can't return

Japanese

komorebi the sunlight filtering through leaves on the trees

boketto gazing into the distance without thinking about anything

wabi-sabi finding beauty in imperfections, an acceptance of the cycle of life

German

kummerspeck 'grief bacon'  the weight you gain from emotional overeating

freudenfreude finding joy in the success of others

Yiddish and Yinglish

shlimazel someone who seems to only have bad luck

(this part of the list is long .. mostly from friends on Long Island and NYC. Leo Rosten's The Joys of Yiddish is a wonderful resource)

Bantu

ubuntu 'I find my worth in you and you find your worth in me'  human kindness

French

flâneur a person who lounges or strolls around in a seemingly aimless way. Often seen as an aloof observer of urban society

sirop de poteau 'pole syrup'  imitation or very low quality maple syrup that must have been harvested from telephone poles.

auteur a person of influence or artistic control - often associated with filmmaking.

I'll stop here..  

 

 

 

 

 

comments on a pin

I was asked for to comment on the Humane Ai Pin (omitting punctuation), so a quick minipost.   I have no experience with this device, but have a bit of experience in the area so a bit of background is in order.  

 

For the decade from 1992 to 2002 I spent a good deal of time working on a variety of Internet access schemes as well as spending a lot of time with a human computer interaction group. People in carpetland were interested so we did a number of dog and pony shows as well as wizard-of-oz demos.¹   I'm not good at predicting the future - no one is - but I believe you can construct plausible scenarios and get a sense of some of the possibility space.  You end up remembering the few home runs.  In 93 or 94 I said you'd be able to have a conversation in full color with a relative on the other side of the globe and wouldn't have to pay long distance fee.  Both of you would use a piece of glass with embedded electronics and radio that you'd hold in your hand. Technically it was certainly possible - the main technical rub was the battery.  I hadn't appreciated advances in lithium-ion chemistry at the time.  The other two roadblocks were monopoly carriers and about a half trillion in infrastructure.  I didn't see either of those as being insurmountable - a feeling that was shared by several colleges.  Ten or years may seem like a long time for device predictions, but the foundational technologies are usually on even longer horizons.. it's mostly seeing how they might converge.  The who and how are more difficult. 

 

As the decade went on we began to focus on music over the Internet. We even showed a prototypes to player Steve Jobs at Apple in an attempt to gain support for our music codec (AAC) a few years before the iPod.  Our design wasn't that clever, but the recognition that portable music was important resonated for a few years.   We were also working on other communication concepts - some were just concepts ten or twenty years out.  There was the iCane - sort of a smartphone in the form of a cane, something like Google's eyeglasses, an infrastructure called AirGraffiti that, while basically a good idea, required a billion dollars or so a year to make fly (Google and Apple Maps are sophisticated examples), and so on.. We even looked at brooches and Star Trek communicators.

 

Smartwatches seemed so obvious we didn't spend much time other than being able to generate prompts by snapping or rubbing your fingers together (coming later this year on Apple's watch).  The watch is a wonderful piece of jewelry that can be as inconspicuous as you need it while still signaling personal style - one of the few pieces of jewelry men wear. 

Like a few other research groups, we wondered about other forms. Perhaps something on the belt would come earlier as putting the electronics in a phone seemed ten years off at least and five more for a watch.  Taking with sociologists and anthropologists it was clear that people love images and video.  The phone seemed like a wonderful platform IF you could pull it off.  My piece of glass on steriods, but now only ten years off.  We were beginning to see it as a computational platform rather than simply a videophone.  

 

There were video projectors that could work on slanted and even arbitrary surfaces.. they were really crappy for a number of reasons. They don't and won't compete with a smartphone screen for a long time. Also remember your smartphone weighs about 200 to 300 grams plus or minus.  Try hanging that on your clothes somewhere with properly positioned so you can put a surface in front of it. Also add some weight to run the projector for any length of time. 

 

There's the notion of 'voice first".  Folks who study human communication note that what we think of as voice is only a small part of spoken conversation.  In addition to expressions and postures there are several types of context:  the context of who, of place, of history, etc..  Voice alone is a relatively small, albeit important, part of spoken communication. To get it close right you probably have to give up a lot of privacy,   

 

I claim video is so addictive to so many that the smartphone in their pocket will rule for some time.  Earbuds, if you need audio, will talk to the phone in your pocket or your watch, which is in a position to take more meaningful biodata than something on your shirt.  I asked an animator friend (she was a student at our place twenty years ago and she regularly looks at designs from her sister who is a high end jewelry designer) to make some sketches of a wearable for clothing that would be about half the volume of an iPhone.  She made a few sketches  and said it would be very dorky.. probably like something from the Victorian era.²

 

These are things you wear..  they say something about you and your person style.  They offer only serious constraints. 

 

There are more technical reasons I can give, but I'm guessing the Ai Pin will fade rather quickly in most social groups.  But then again this is not my area and I'm frequently wrong.   Also in 1993, when Kip told me they were going to get a gravity wave detector working in twenty years, I believed him.  The technology is probably the most advanced on the planet plus they didn't have to deal with really hard problems like style and fashion.  Maybe in ten years, but I'm not one to bet against quality video.  

__________

¹ The label we gave to the C-level floor as the carpet was nearly thick enough to impede walking.

² Applying similar reasoning one of the anthropologists in the department pronounced the hugely promoted Segway a social faux pas as it implied 'totalitarian dorkishness'.

 

 

beyond david mackay?

a minipost

David MacCay was a remarkable fellow.  Curious and cross-disciplinary, he worked in applied math, physics and engineering research at Cambridge.  Passionate about doing something about global warming, he happened to be a great communicator.  I had a few interactions with him: first about thirty years ago playing with neural networks and later in the mid 2000s as he was putting together Sustainable energy – Without the Hot Air - probably the clearest book written on energy production and demand.  You can still buy the book and  proceeds go to support some good charities.  David updated the book online until his early death in 2016.  It's free online, but the printed version is a better experience.

 

The book is written at two levels - one for folks without a mathematical background and a somewhat deeper version that assumes an understanding of high school physics. David goes into depth building easy to understand models and then plugs in numbers from past and present technologies.  The last step is where the book is flawed.  Enormous advances have been made in solar and wind power technology and prices have fallen dramatically.  A few of David's conclusions relevant ten years ago are now dated.  For example he shows that wind power and solar are insufficient for the UK, even in an ideal world without existing infrastructure and bureaucratic inertias. The last two roadblocks still exist almost everywhere, but the underlying story has changed.

 

Brian O'Callaghan's group at THAT other English university have published an updated look at solar and wind energy in the UK and come to the conclusion that they are practical and nearly sufficient at scale.  Here's the summary of their policy paper.  Their technical papers are solid and thorough.   I suspect Sir David would be proud.

 

In addition to getting an important  update, there's an important lesson here.  When describing current and future technology scenarios it's extremely important to lay down some clear thinking that is largely independent of current and future inputs.  The basis of this type of scenario is really just a solid foundation that's waiting for inputs.   It's rare to see ones that work twenty or  more years in the future.   David's did and does... it just needed updated inputs.

 

 

 

when there is elsewhere

There haven't been any extensive use reports of the Apple Vision Pro, but most of the people who had a brief introduction walked away impressed giving a sense that this really is something new.  It's spendy by many measures, but supplies will apparently be heavily constrained as some components are both expensive and very low yield. But with its visual and sound field reconstruction capabilities, one set of use cases may involve real-time remote presence.  A court-side seat at a NBA game or something from a Taylor Swift concert come to mind.

 

But there are questions. Horace is one of the best Apple analysts out there as well as an all-around really smart guy. (If you're interested in tech or micromobility, you need to follow his podcasts, posts and live events.) He recently posted some thoughts on the value of remote presence and how it might be one of the  drivers for Apple's new device.  I would be really surprised if folks at Apple aren't thinking along these lines.

 

I sent a note to him that offered a little pushback that wasn't really pushback..  it's more that value of being there varies a lot and the same for quality of experience.  Sports and music are two very interesting cases.

 

Last night an indoor women's volleyball match between Nebraska and Oklahoma set the attendance record for any women's sporting event.  Normally NCAA games are held indoors in places that rarely seat more than 8,000.  High school and college women's volleyball has the greatest participation of any women's team sport in the US.  This wasn't an important match - Nebraska has a much higher ranking than Oklahoma and it's preseason, but it's an event.  There's a strong passion is that part of the country - one of you is well aware of it.¹ So 92,003 paying fans filled more than the seats.. about 10,000 had to stand as the football stadium was too small.  The view of action was probably terrible for most of the fans, but that wasn't the point.  All of those people in the same place sharing the same passion and seeing it roll out at the same time.

Here's the walkout video for a sense of scale

I'm a beach volleyball fan and regularly find myself waking up at two or three in the morning to follow a match with a player I know or a team I care about on the other side planet. The streaming is sometimes poor and costs $80 a year. Tickets aren't terribly expensive, but travel is so I haven't been to a large number of events.  The sport is extremely friendly, probably because there isn't much money in it, and talking to players and other spectators is at least half of it..  going to dinner with a couple of gold medalists isn't exactly an everyday event.  I wanted to go to Tokyo and had been invited as a friend of a Canadian team, but Covid.  Perhaps Paris. 

 

The BBC had a nice piece on why people care about games. It's a short and worthwhile listen.

 

So would I use an Apple Vision Pro if a steam that offered a court side view with good commentary existed?  Sure!  Well - maybe. How much would I pay?  That's an interesting question.  It would largely rest on how much the streaming experience was improved. It can't replace the physical experience of being part of an event.  It's interesting that American soccer (football to the rest of the world) sometimes go to bars to find a critical mass of likeminded fans when their team is playing.  And there are Super Bowl parties.  For a couple of hours what people do for a living, religion, political  views and so on don't matter.  There's a distributed group bonding.  Do products like the Apple Vision Pro augment or replace that form of interaction?  I don't think so, but I don't have a working crystal ball.

 

And there's music. These days it mostly falls into live streaming, on demand streaming, in person concerts and a small (but growing again) amount of collecting physical media.  The streaming experiences aren't great, but they're cheap with large (for popular genres) catalogs.²  I prefer small live music events. Not only do the musicians connect with each other and the audience, but the audience often connects with the musicians and that can be magical. Depending on the event the interactions within the audience can be important..  Taylor Swift concerts are a prime example, but many other musicians have similar or better "magic", albeit at a smaller scale. (I'd offer Yo-Yo Ma as an example).   

 

There's a scale for each person and each event on the importance of various aspects of these different takes on interaction and consumption. Radio and then television changed the values as did the expansion and, in some cases, contraction of live events. Streaming has made a difference, but it has so many rough edges.  I suspect Apple's new product may offer something very different that will once again bring some change, but probably not for some time.  I'm guessing we'll have a better idea around the time Apple Vision Pro 3 or 4 is announced, You'll know it when you can get NBA games through Apple Vision Pro + service for $20 a month:-)

 

But if anyone wants my reaction next Spring, just buy one for me and I'll review it:-)

 

__________

¹ Nebraska had two legendary players in the 2000 → 2010 era.  Jordan Larson and Sarah Pavan.  Here's Sarah's college record  and when her number was retired.  Both of them went on to illustrious indoor careers overseas and Jordan has been a key player on the US Olympic Team.  Sarah eventually switched to beach volleyball has had many honors including world champion and two time Olympian.  One of Sarah's awards was the Honda Cup in 2007  - the best college female athlete in any sport that year.  Shortly before the Tokyo Olympics the organization that presented the award interviewed her as part of their podcast series.

² In 1994 two of us probably hold the first time record for streaming non-trivial, live music at reasonable quality over the Internet.  A Utah Phillips concert from the Folk Project in New Jersey at 96 kbps stereo by bonded ISDN lines to a hub in Princeton where it went to the Net where a few people with AAC players could listen.  So I guess I'm familiar with streaming.  It was good, though (for those of you who get the reference:-)

 

 

non-neutral technologies and a book recommendation

I’m of the opinion that almost every technology that touches, directly or indirectly, society is not neutral. This may not be apparent at first to users at large even though some of the risks are known early on. A case in point is coal in the industrial revolution. Tyndall and even Fourier recognized the climate changing potential of pumping CO₂ into the atmosphere. A larger number of people recognized the health issues from pollution in the air and water. And there was an enormous economic displacement that took a few generations to iron out (pardon the pun). So what was the major problem from the point of view of governments (especially the military branches) and industry? That coal could run out in as little as 50 years.

 

We’re in an age of running fast and breaking things and well as laws. ‘AI’ has emerged as something seen as an existential threat by some (a diversionary tactic largely for castle wall-building imho) and direct harm that is taking place now by others. I put ‘AI’ in scare quotes as it covers so many very different technologies. Now generative pre-trained transformers - LLMs - like ChatGPT are hot. It has a few lovely uses, but there’s a good deal of misapplication, legal issues and cases of direct harm. Machine learning is another branch (although it’s used in the GPTs) with it’s own shiny wins and pitfalls. And there are embedded bits in the devices, programs and services we use all the time.

 

So how do you navigate these and potentially avoid mistakes? Very few people can hope keep up on with the technical side.

 

Juliette Powell (caveat - a close friend of mine) has a new book out on Tuesday co-written with her business partner, Art Kleiner. The AI Dilemma: 7 Principles for Responsible Technology is a distillation of s her work at Columbia. The first part is a non-technical look at the systems and how they might be improved to minimize harm. The next part focuses on what uses - businesses, etc - can do to minimize risks to themselves and others.

 

A number of people from the tech and society and tech world have seen it and given enthusiastic thumbs up signals. People ranging from Ester Dyson, who wrote the forward, to deep legal and social thinker Brett Frischmann. I’ve been involved in building a few systems that have some severe constraints - mostly machine learning in astrophysics and cosmology. I’m clearly not a technologist or social scientist, but I actively follow those who are trying to understand these systems more deeply.

 

I followed her work at Columbia and this is a nice summary and extension. Thumbs up!!

 

If you prefer audio books, Juliette took on the narration task. She has an excellent reading voice.

 

those third places

a mini-post

Recently I spent the better part of an afternoon chatting with an urban sociologist about third places: parks, libraries, pubs, dog parks, gyms, bookstores, coffee shops, churches - those social places separate from home (the first place) and work or school (the second place).  She's particularly interested in what they meant during the pandemic, how they're changing, and how why young people see them differently.   

 

A few notes from the chat.  There isn't any order or story, just  think of them more as points to think about as you look at your own experience.

 

Third place visits have traditionally had a impact on physical and mental health, although it's difficult to tease out specifics.  Researchers have pointed out they can "level" differences like ethnicity, class, religion and age.  Dogs parks and some types of sporting events are used as gold standards for mixing people. (I can personally recommend a beagle)  Churches do a great job within a religion, but often raise barriers to outsiders.  Suburban parks that encourage physical activity tend to be frequented by young well-to-do white people, while parks with benches and picnic tables cater to families and ethnic minorities. 

 

Many small businesses are third places and many went out of business during the pandemic. They're coming back and have become particularly important to those who saw their first and second places collapse into a single place (work from home).  She suggested businesses should encourage work from home employees to find third places they enjoy given the mental and physical health benefits. She also loves that Washington DC has a tax on vacant retail space. Areas are more inviting and offer richer third space potential when there are minimal vacancies. 

 

Researchers sometimes tease out how introverts and extraverts fit into all of this.  Both benefit from third places, although the types of places differ.  She noted something fascinating.  It appears the depth of interaction times the number of interactions may be roughly constant across these personality types.  I'm skeptical of statements like that as studying anything as complex as human relationships is tricky, but it's interesting and may have an impact on business and public space design.

 

 

a return to mount hydrogen?

Usually she buys the same number as her age, but this year she rented a small helium tank that ended up filling 56 balloons.  For the past ten years Jheri celebrates her birthday by giving balloons away to kids and adults who look like they could use one. 

 

We think of helium in terms of balloons but, particularly in its liquid form, it's uniquely suited to a number of important applications.  First discovered when astronomers analyzed the spectrum of a total solar eclipse in 1868 and then later found on Earth, it became part of a race between an English and Dutch scientist.  Not because getting there first would lead to uses, but rather to scale a peak. 

 

By the mid 19th century Michael Faraday managed to get down to about -130°C.  It seemed almost impossibly cold at the time, but wasn't enough to liquify oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen.  He conjectured the trio were permanent gases. About that time Sir William Thompson (later known as Lord Kelvin) deduced from the emerging science of heat, that there was a coldest temperature.  An absolute zero  -273.15°C.  Well below Faraday's mark, it gave hope that much more was possible.  Sir James Dewar, at the Royal Institution in London, had been refining techniques to go to very low temperatures and took up the challenge.  It didn't take long for him to liquify oxygen and nitrogen, but hydrogen proved more difficult.   The Dutch scientist Kamerlingh Onnes was also entered the game.  It was an expensive and even dangerous quest.  One of the great stories of science follows.  Onnes was the good guy, Dewar not so much.  I won't go into it, but there's an excellent half hour audio history with a transcript.  Listen to it - seriously - then the title of this post might make sense) Without spoiling things too much, Dewar got there first, but helium had been discovered.  There was another gas to try and liquify and race got much more serious.  

 

Almost all of the helium on Earth is produced by the radioactive decay of Uranium and Thorium and is trapped in a few pockets around the planet.  That wasn't known at the time and it was basically unobtainium.  Dewar's personality caused him serious delays and his relentless push led to serious accidents that injured himself and lab assistants.  Onnes was banished from his town ..  (listen to the audio)

 

Now that he had liquid helium, Onnes, began to study the bizarre liquid.  Curiously the electrical resistance in mercury lowered to liquid helium temperatures fell to zero.  Onnes coined the term superconductivity.  A few other materials have this property.  It allows you to build extremely powerful magnets which are used in MRI machines, maglev trains, particle accelerators and fusion reactor research and more.  Almost all of the practical superconductors require liquid helium temperatures.  Being able to do this at warmer temperatures would be revolutionary.

 

In 1986 I was a the big annual meeting of the American Physical Society when Bednorz and Müller of IBM announced they had found superconductivity in a ceramic at liquid nitrogen temperatures.  Pandemonium broke out and it was on the front page of the New York Times the next day. It's very unusual for a Nobel Prize to be awarded soon after a discovery, but they were in Stockholm for the ceremony the next year.   The material wasn't terribly useful, but it opened up new area of research.  

 

Superconductivity at liquid nitrogen temperatures (77 K, -196°C)  is appealing as LN₂ is very inexpensive and relatively safe.  (Karrie and I have both made ice cream with it:-)  More progress has been made with superconductivity at liquid hydrogen temperatures  (20 K, -253°C).  LH₂ is flammable, tricky to handle, and somewhat more expensive, but is almost free when compared with helium.  And now practical superconductors for a few uses exist at LH₂ temperatures.

 

If Mount Hydrogen can be economically scaled for a wide range of superconductors, any number of applications where high magnetic fields are important become much more practical. Cheaper MRI, maglev, large motors and generators and beyond. It could bring electric aviation closer.  Moving to LN₂ superconductors levels much larger scale applications emerge.  Perhaps important sections of the electric grid, public transportation and nuclear fusion reactors.

 

It quickly gets technical, but a class of superconducting materials that work well at liquid hydrogen temperatures have been around for awhile, but manufacturing them (you find yourself looking at single crystals over a kilometer long) is difficult and expensive.  But demand, driven applied science work in fusion reactors,  has soared recently and new manufacturing techniques have appeared.  Production has grown from meters of wire to hundreds of kilometers.  Costs are now within a factor of four or five of a tipping point for widespread use.  The problems ahead are difficult, but probably solvable. In ten or fifteen years we may see the beginning of widespread use of these materials and even serious progress at liquid nitrogen temperatures. 

 

The audio piece I linked to describes the lowest temperature made on Earth in about 2004.  The record has fallen - it seems likely the coldest spots in the Universe are in physics labs around the Universe - hopefully more than just the ones on this planet.

 

 

magnets and a most dramatic moment

The opening ceremony of each Olympic game is filled with pageantry and sometimes, with the lighting of the cauldron, drama.  In my mind the most electrifying occured in the 1992 Barcelona games when Paralympian Antonio Rebollo performed some serious diablerie. 

Across the ocean in New Providence, New Jersey David and Mary watched the scene on a small black and white television as they shared pedaling duties.  David was pedaling at the time and gasped.  Fortunately there was a flywheel.

 

Their parents didn't allow television in the home, but both of them had been involved in competitive kayak and canoe events.  Lynn had been an alternate for the Montreal Olympics.  Introducing Mary and David to the Olympics was a good idea, but Al decided to make it educational. The kids would be given an exercise bike, a generator, access to a television and help from their mechanical engineer father and mathematician mother.  They had a few weeks to work things out.

 

When the the friction wheel generator was finally adjusted and working, they were shown how much power they produced and how much power various televisions used.  A twelve year old could keep a small color set going for a short time, but that was it.  They wisely chose the black and white set.  Through trial and error they ended up with a bicycle chain transmission and abandoned the exercise bike for one of their own on a homemade stand. They could now produce nearly twice the power for the same amount of perceived work.  A flywheel was added to make everything smoother.   They had something by the opening ceremony and the kids spelled each other off and developed an amazing sense of how long the commercials lasted.  They saw the torch lighting.¹

 

It's too bad they had a standard generator.  Something with better magnets would have had increased efficiency.  Not enough to move them into a color set (if they were a few years older and more athletic they probably could have managed), but certainly a better experience.  The strength of the magnetic field in a generator or motor is centrally important.  The strongest fields come from superconducting magnets, but they need to be cooled to near absolute zero rendering them impractical for most applications.

 

Electric vehicles use either induction or permanent magnet motors.  The permanent magnet designs tend to be lighter and are more efficient.²   There's a rub.  You're trying to optimize cost and magnetic field strength (among other things).  Rare earths like neodymium work much better than the cheaper ferrite-based magnets and have generally taken over the medium and high end automotive market.³ 

 

The problem with rare earth materials isn't that they're rare .. they fairly comment.  They are, however, unevenly distributed and difficult and toxic to mine and process.  Most of the active mining and processing is in China and it's an environmental disaster.  The US had a single mine in California in the fifties.  Since then it's had t an up and down existence including being closed for economic and environmental reasons.  With the interest in EVs it's back in operation again  and the US has gone from 0% of the world's production of neodymium to about 15% in about seven years.  In theory the mining and processing and safer and less toxic than the Chinese effort. Production should increase in the future.  The US is also largely unexplored - serious mineral exploration has only just resumed after a 60 year hiatus. 

 

The higher cost has some companies, notably Tesla, talking about going to ferrite permanent magnets.  They'd be heavier, less efficient, but would be cheaper and may be the core of lower-end vehicles.  Another alternative is to use a more efficient vehicle.  Electric bicycles and other micromobility solutions use small motors.  You can build 50 to 200 electric bike motors with the materials from one Tesla-class motor.  Not only that these vehicles are very practical for the short trips that dominate much of our mobility needs.  Sadly some areas have saddled themselves with transportation infrastructures that encourage inefficiency.

__________

¹ Mary continued in the families sport tradition and went to Princeton on a fencing scholarship.  She found she was interested in aeronautical engineering and went on for a Ph.D.  I heard she had something to do with the rotor design on the Ingenuity helicopter currently flying on Mars. 

² There are often questions about how permanent magnets work.  Most people have seen electromagnetic induction in school.  A current flows if you move a magnet in a coil of wire and a current through a wire produces a magnetic field.  Permanent magnets are more difficult to talk about .. I've done it at least once, but this short video is a nice intro.

 

³ There are other rare-earth based magnets, but a neodymium alloy is the most common.  It's an allow of neodymium, iron and boron - Nd₂Fe₁₄B - that forms a crystalline structure.  They have widespread use outside of EVs.. GM and Sumitomo Metals independently developed them about 40 years ago to get away from much more expensive and brittle samarium–cobalt magnets.

There's a lot of talk about tetrataenite (an iron-nickel structure) permanent magnets.  In theory they have better magnetic characteristics than neodymium alloys and should be much cheaper, but they're off in the future.  If they happen, expect some unhappy rare earth mining companies. 

 

ai and humanity

Om wrote an interesting piece on what AI (whatever the term means - it's being used almost without meaning these days) has in store..  will it eradicate humanity.  I'm on Om's side.  He raises the more interesting point of what it does to humanity.  (I believe AI not only has the potential to harm, it is already doing so.  That's another discussion.  The real existential threats at this point are global warming, nuclear weapons and pandemics.) You can ask questions of any technology.   Let's focus on technologies that augment human capabilities.

 

The inventions of drawing and writing represented our first external memory systems.  Plato believed writing would erode real communication.  From his dialog between Socrates and Phaedrus:

 

And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.

What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows.

He goes on to compare written text with a painting

You know, Phaedrus, that is the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly correspond to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive. But if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words. They seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say from a desire to be instructed they go on telling just the same thing forever.

It's ironic that his dialogs only exist because they've been written down.

 

The external memory system of writing improved by going to paper and then to bound books and cheap books with the printing press.  We had to learn how to read to access this memory system, but most societies feel that's an appropriate use of time.

 

I wouldn't be able to do much of anything without glasses - a human augmenting technology that uses a bit of grinding and the properties of glass to perform complex realtime optical computations to move my focal plane to where it should be. 

 

In high school I learned how to use a slide rule to help with multiplication, division and trig functions. Little did I know it would give me an intuitive sense of how logarithms work along with vastly improving my ability to do mental approximations.  I still find I'm more creative in early problem building if I'm sketching on a blackboard and using a slide rule rather than relying state of the art tools like Mathematica. 

 

As a teenager I made use of the postal system to communicate with two mentors in what turned out to be one of the most important educational experiences I've experienced. The latency of the postal system turned out to be  important as it  gave more weight to each leg of the communication.  A great deal of introductory math and physics is available online these days, but it would have been too easy and I would have probably learned at a superficial level.

 

My style of thinking turns out to be very visual and using my imagination, perhaps aided by some sketches and wrestling with equations by hand and visually in my mind gives more insight than visualization tools, although they can be very useful at later stages.

 

There's great value in thinking and creating.  Making something out of wood with simple tools rather than ordering it premade or 3D printing it.  Learning how to play a musical instrument rather than just listening.  Communicating with a friend over time with pen, paper and the postal system rather than a video chat.  And then you're doing your taxes (at least in the US), you're probably using a tax program on your computer.  All of these involve augmenting technologies that have been created by someone else and all require different approaches. Enjoyment of the process and the final product may not be aligned and that can be a good thing.

 

Om and Bryan use photography to augment how they see the world around them.  My sister does the same with her paint brushes and canvas as well as photography.  All of these people use machine learning embedded in their cameras as part of the creative process, although they may carefully control its use. 

 

There may be great value in using an LLM to help with a programing task or organizing information.   If we're lucky we have the freedom to select the most appropriate technology for the task.  But we should consider these choices carefully.  What's bad is when a technology with bad side effects or even harm is used without our knowledge and consent. 

 

 

 

bondi blue

a minipost

Ask elite beach volleyball players to name their favorite beach and Bondi Beach often comes up.  The sand isn't world class, but the water - that amazing blue - can take your breath away.  There's a bit of a controversy on pronunciation, but I've heard an Australian player go with bond-eye.

 

About twenty five years ago Steve Jobs had to bring Apple back from its near-death experience.  There wasn't much in the way of in-house new technology, but Jobs had Jony Ive as well as his own taste.  They went with the iMac.  A strangely shaped, but very cute, little computer with a semi-translucent bondi blue case.  Pundits noted there wasn't anything new except design and pronounced it and Apple dead on arrival.  Apple sold enough to buy time for for the transition to an operating system and later a processor migration (one of two!), all the time working on "company-killing" products like a portable music player and a smartphone. 

 

The surprise success of the iMac set off a tidal wave of design element copycats.  Suddenly everything from routers to hair dryers sported translucent cases - often in bondi blue.  As far as I can tell the new design language didn't case a sensation in any of the non-Apple markets.

In the past month I've seen partly thought-out plans to include LLMs like ChatGPT in some way into existing or newly dreamed up products.  None of them were clearly articulated. Somehow ChatGPT or an equivalent would supply the appropriate magic.  LLMs have become the new bondi blue (bondization?)  There are clear usage cases as well as those that aren't.  I suspect a lot of money will be burned with a single digit survival rate .. sort of what one sees during Cambrian explosions.  

 

I won't comment here on the dangers of these technologies other than noting regulation is necessary with a well-defined "open", ownership of rights to all training data, evolution of regulation, etc.  History across many industries tells us industry shouldn't be involved in its own regulation.