omenti

finding your tools

In the tenth grade I asked for a single Christmas present.  At nearly thirty dollars it would be larger than normal plus there would have to be an upscaling of my sister's present.  I wasn't hopeful, but it actually happened. A Pickett N4-ES slide rule.  I spent an enormous amount of time playing with it.  A few things come with heavy slide rule use:  the ability to do estimates in your head - particularly involving orders of magnitude and an instinctive feeling for how logarithms work. Both of those skills are still with me although I rarely use a slide rule these days.¹  There are other tools that you develop a feeling for through a lot of play - Mathematica and Maple come to mind.

 

 

We all use tools.  They're often connected with and change with technologies although some of the simple good ones never seem to change much.  It's interesting to sit down and make a list rating them on a love/hate scale.  

 

Some of us build our own.  Engineers excel - a good friend was working on a certain class of problem in computer science when he started at Bell Labs.  His director took him aside and suggested maybe he should create a computer language to give himself the tools to work on the other problem.  It turned out building and improving the language became his primary focus and a much richer path than the original problem area.m That language is a tool used by millions of programmers every day.

 

And there are tools that have caused frustrations to millions.  Too many user interfaces are great examples of not understanding fundamental issues. Automotive touch panels are a favorite example of mine. They don't provide feedback and require too much attention from the driver.  I was delighted to learn cars with these interfaces won't get good safety ratings in the EU beginning next year.  Perhaps we'll see a some thoughtful physical interfaces.

 

In physics Feynman diagrams are important. In the late 40s and early 50s he and a few others revolutionized the field with quantum electrodynamics which led to more general field theories.  The most accurate theories in all of science describing much of the universe.  Feynman was disturbed by a few issues and wanted something that felt more Newtonian.   He came up with a way of describing interactions that could be summarized with what looked like doodles. The approach wasn't the right approach, but the diagrams provided a way to make calculations much simpler and to think about underlying processes.  Simple calculations could be done thousands of times faster and more accurately and, more importantly, the technique shifted how people think.  Frank Wilczek wrote an excellent description in Quanta. 

 

Of course computational hardware and software of all types have become important tools individually as well as embedded in complex systems.  We tend to find those tools that suit our own needs.  What you find useful and even delightful may not be on my radar and visa versa.   I tend not to recommend much to people when I don't know their use cases - which leads me to the reason for this post.

 

Several people have asked for primers as well as my take on generative AI (which many simply call AI, although that's inaccurate).  I'll skip the primer - you can find those in a hundred other places, but I've had a bit of experience.  In the past year I've served on two committees that made recommendations on gAI student use in college.  I think we made some good progress, although it's clear there will be changes over time.  I've also used several of the tools - free and subscription - and have formed some initial impressions.  I'll break them down into useful, take it or leave it, and not worth the effort.  

Useful

Non-technical translation. Corresponding with people who don't speak English and reading posts and articles.  There are mistakes, but there's enough context to get the gist of what's going on

 Scraping text and even equations from images.  (the text part is built into OS X and iOS)

Transcription .. some errors, but again context saves you

Entertainment - I've seen people lacking artistic skills have a lot of fun making images.  The same for non-writers looking for frameworks to start.

Some of Apple's local gAI looks useful with the emphasis on local, but that's still a work in progress and I have no experience.

 

So-so

Formatting LaTeX .. it's far from perfect, but save a bit of time. 

Translating literature .. something is lost over a good translator.  There's also a good deal of sexism and racism 

Playing with ideas as a part of learning.  I haven't used this much, but ran into it several times in gAI student use. I'm on the fence, but it might move up to the next level.

 

 

Not so good

Search - what were they smoking?

Technical programming..  it takes more work to debug and integrate with existing software than writing from scratch. 

Summarizing anything technical..  it's often difficult to find the mistakes as it "lies" smoothly

Physics and math problems.  It gets well-known examples, but beyond that is wrong

Re-writing pieces..  some love this, I found it a big fail. 

Some bad experiences with gAI chatbots

A number of ethical and energy use/pollution/privacy issues.  I think there are large risks associated with LLMS . not super intelligence in the guru, but serious risks now.

 

I'm no longer paying for a subscription or actively using services like ChatGPT.  I'll be following along, but I wasn't able to find a tool worth my time on a regular basis .. at least not enough to counter the ethical issues I see.   Of course I recognize everyone will have their own cases.  And back to the slide rule - to find if the tool really fits, you have to spend a lot of time playing with it!

 

I find a few other flavors that come under the heading of AI extremely useful!  I'm very curious how many people will pay serious money for gAI tools?

 

 

__________

¹ I'm of the age where the best things I've owned need to go to close friends and old students.  The slide rule went to a student of mine under the condition that she learn how to use it.  She did and still does. 

creativity in film and beyond

Unburdened by the plastic wrap so common to art books, it was sitting  in the bookstore and was reminded how much I wanted it.  A copy of The Art of WolfWalkers. Ten minutes of delight, but it was too spendy for this trip.  

 

 WolfWalkers is the third in a set devoted to Irish myth from Cartoon Salon - a tiny studio in Kilkenny, Ireland that has won respect from Pixar, Disney Animation and Studio Ghibli.  It's on Apple TV+ if you like amazing animation. 

 

Animation studios and art schools are amazing places.  Years ago they seemed like black boxes that took stories and turned them into animation.  More recently I've been involved with one and am wobbled by the amount of creativity and work play that goes into the most simple moments.  It's always a team effort spread among disciplines and years.  

 

After a few months I finally bought the book. Just wow!   Here's a video of a roundtable the before the film was released.  It was my introduction to the film (although not to the myth or its historical offshoot as Kilkenny is an ancestral home). 

 

It's worth writing about as (a) some of you may enjoy and even love it and, (b) creativity in the era of generative AI  is something I've been spending time on this past year an animation studio and two universities.  Signals have emerged. 

 

The New Yorker published a must-read piece on AI and Art by Ted Chiang.  Given my experience with animation studios, a music conservatory and physics and math, I'm in conditional agreement.  I do see a place as a tool, even in the creative arts, but more as a tool to relieve drudgery rather than become 'thought'.  I use it to organize references in papers as well as to create simple programs that involve freshman level programming for simple but time-consuming tasks.  I stay far away when precision and accuracy are needed and I don't see the creative spark. 

 

Film studios, musicians, and artists worry about wholesale theft of their work in the short term and the potential, if these tools improve, that we'll see more 'art' of lower caliber largely because human-created art is too expensive.  I think the later isn't possible with generative AI - at least not for quality work.  That doesn't mean real art won't be forced out by economic pressures. 

 

As for schools I worry teenagers may take the easy way out in pursuit of easy grades and free time. They'll be cheating themselves.   The world has no need for more high school essays, but that isn't why they're assigned. On the other hand student can learn about tasks these tools can help them with.  That's going to be more important in college.  I've been on two task forces and some schools are developing solid measures as well as the ability to change with time.  The guiding light is "are you teaching them how to think?"  

 

Clearly we're in a fascinating time.  I think we'll see some real carnage in the industry and use cases before signals we probably haven't thought about emerge.  But in the meantime we have beautiful art.   If you haven't seen WolfWalkers, you're in for a treat!

 

 

a legend

Adm Grace Hopper is of the heroes of early computing.  In addition to making fundamental contributions to software, she was one of the few who started to realize what technological change impacted people.  Recently some of the security folks - notably Bruce Schneier and Steve Bellovin - learned about a general talk she gave at the NSA in 1982.  They hounded the NSA to declassify and publish the talks and here they are!  They give a sense of what the world was like then and you can sense her brilliance.   This was a year before ARPANET cutover to TCP/IP, which many consider the real start of the Internet (although it goes back 13 years earlier in one form or another).  Perhaps there's something you can take away.  

Side story: About 12 years ago I found myself spitting into the wind trying to deal with climate deniers who lacked a technical background.  One of her papers gave a good description of what we now call sealioning. It was a good enough argument to convince me to move on and try other channels.  She also wrote about dealing with people like Trump who use bullshit asymmetry - what is known as Brandolini's law these days.  A very wise woman indeed!

 

 

 

seeing like a data structure

A must read if you have any interest in the continuing arc of society and technology.  Seeing Like a Data Structure by Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier is a great place for thought, discussion and personal action.  I'd recommend it to anyone who creates, uses, invests in, manages is a product or a raw material of technology or some combination of these interactions.

Separately if you want to treat Google search like a tool rather than being used by their machine, you can bypass their ad placements and GPT generated descriptions by going here for your Google searches.  Invoking the 2004 interface.

 

 

 

 

 

the story of the soil

a minipost

My Dad worked with three of the Native American Nations in Montana for much of his life. In the process he became close with the Blackfeet people and was a friend of Chief Earl Old Person.  He told a story of walking with the chief along an experimental area scientists and environmentalists had tired to return to its native state after decades of a near mono-culture dry farming.  The project, overrun with non-native weeds, was a failure. 

 

The experts had carefully identified what wasn't native and laboriously removed it.  Then they brought in once native plants and seeds and expected nature to take over.  Initially the  plants did well, but over a period of a few months they began to fail.  The next year saw them struggling and plants they had eradicated along with non-native weeds began to appear.  Three years out, when Earl and my Dad were walking through the area, it was mostly non-native weeds and a few examples of plants they had removed.

 

Earl explained, with some frustration, this wasn't an isolated case.  Western environmental science 'knew' much more than the Blackfeet who had been in the area for thousands of years.  He paused and offered:

They never asked the soil for its story. 

Years later my Dad learned some soil scientists were brought in and discovered the mono-culture had changed the makeup of the microorganisms in the ground. In fact it would be impossible for the original plants to thrive in the otherwise rich soil.  The original group didn't know the story of the soil.

 

This pretty much sums up my frustration with techno-solutionism.  People develop hammers, see everything as a nail and rush in armed with wads of  money and a singular focus.  But they don't know the story of the soil.

 

 

the correct tools for the job

Every now and again I'm asked to be an outside member on a thesis committee.  Every school I know of requires a member from outside the department and often outside the university.  They're a lot of work, but they can be a lot of fun.  At first you run into the imposter syndrome, but you can ask questions to clarity from the candidate as well as their advisor and even other people in their department.  It's a neat window into an area you didn't know much about.

 

But you're there to bring your expertise and offer constructive criticism

 

About 20 years ago I was on doing this at a nearby Ivy.  The candidate was excited by the work and very articulate, but as I came up to speed it was clear their statistical interpretation was just wrong.  A few questions revealed they didn't know the basics and they should have had at least a year of statistics and a good probability course.  Not knowing how to drive, they used a commercial statistics package.  (the graphs were very pretty) I told them they'd have to do it right or not have it in the thesis.  This turned out to be a problem.  The defense was in three weeks.  Their advisor agreed and the candidate spent the next four or five months learning statistics and reworking the thesis. The final defense was flawless, but I could tell they weren't happy having lost all that time,    Then, a few years ago, I got a call out of the blue.  It was the candidate, now a professor at UCSD.  He thanked me for holding his nose to the grindstone - "it was one of the best lessons I had in college.."  You don't get calls like that often.

 

In the last few weeks I've spent time with some other folks interviewing professors and students to get a sense of modifying the school's honor code as well as general instructions to students and faculty.  It's clear this is an on-going effort as people learn and technology changes, but the experience reminds me of being an outside examiner. It's also clear the purpose of education at this school is to inspire students to follow a path of mastery rather than achievement.  It's pretty clear that a lot of  AI (I use the term loosely as it's mostly a marketing term at this point) is being used without much thought of costs vs rewards.  Sometimes these tools are appropriate and sometimes they're wrong.  Here's an analogy I proposed:

Almost everyone has a microwave oven now. Most of us use them to cook frozen meals, reheat leftovers, boil water, pop popcorn etc and some interest uses like cooking corn on the cob have emerged. They’re extremely useful in these domains. When they were less common - the  period from the 60s through the mid 80s - manufacturers pitched them as general cooking tools that save time. Cook pot roasts, chickens, pies, etc.. there were special tools like temperature probes and browning trays, but the physics just doesn’t work and people generally gave up after a few attempts. Currently AI, in particular GAI, is like the early microwave ovens. It will take time for people to discover the best tasks for it. We’re still at the cooks your whole Thanksgiving dinner - or at least it will next year stage.

Without going into my personal experiences I offer an example of a serendipitous learning when a wrong tool turns out to work.  At least it was serendipitous to me.. the person who pulled it off knew exactly what she was doing.  First find a recording of the Preludio of Bach's E Major Partita for Violin.  It's very famous so there are any number of good recordings - I like Isabelle Faust's interpretation, but your mileage may vary.     After you've listened, try this version by Tobie Miller.   She takes some liberties, but you can tell who wrote it and her playing is lovely.

 

 

some surprises

About 35 years ago well drillers came to the Bourakébougou in Mali in an attempt to find the water table so the village could enjoy a more reliable source of fresh water.   They had given up on a dry hole when one of the drillers felt a breeze coming out of it. Peering in, he discovered smoking can be bad for your health.  The explosion and fire didn't kill him, but left him with painful burns.  The fire burned for weeks without smoke and was bright enough to light up many of the surrounding fields at night.   Weeks passed before the well was finally capped.  

 

About twenty years ago an African oil company bought the rights to the area thinking it must be some kind of natural gas deposit.  That turned out to be partly correct.  Analysis showed the gas was 98% hydrogen. That, of course, seened impossible.  Hydrogen is rarely associated with fossil fuel deposits.  It didn't seem like enough for viable production at the time, but an old car engine was modified to run on hydrogen.  It turned a small generator which produced electricity for lighting the village.  The head of the oil company started Hydroma with the goal of finding profitable hydrogen wells.

 

You've probably seen hydrogen associated with a variety of colors.  Brown and black hydrogen is produced by coal gasification and results in the emission of large amounts of carbon dioxide.  Grey hydrogen is made from natural gas using a steam reforming process that currently releases large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  Very dirty, but inexpensive and common ways to produce a clean burning gas.  Blue hydrogen is essentially grey hydrogen where most of the carbon dioxide is captured and stored.  Green hydrogen is produced using the technique you probably used in school when you were eight or nine - electrolysis.   It can be used as a storage mechanism for intermittent "green" power sources like wind and solar. There are a few other colors made from more obscure techniques, but the common thread is each technique recognizes that hydrogen is bound to some unrelated molecule and has to be split off.  Think of it was a battery of sorts.

 

There's a lot of hydrogen in the Universe - about 90% of regular matter or about 75% by mass. About 62% of the atoms that make up you - 9.5% by mass - happen to be hydrogen. When the Earth was formed, the gravitational pull wasn't strong enough to capture and hold any molecular hydrogen in the vicinity.  It had been assumed that small pockets could be trapped in the Earth, but these would be small. Bourakébougou was viewed as an unlikely exception.  It seemed likely hydrogen was produced in certain iron-rich rocks in the upper mantle where the temperature could be high enough to release hydrogen.¹  Entirely different locations than where one finds fossil fuels and therefore poorly explored.  

 

A few new mines have been found and characterized.  So far they're modest in size.  Current hydrogen demand is on the order of 100 million tons a year and these deposits are more on the order of tens of thousands of tons.   But recently geologists have projected the possibility of much larger amounts.  It isn't clear how much would be reachable or the cost, but there's excitement in what's being called gold hydrogen.

 

As a fuel, and gold hydrogen is a fuel, hydrogen has advantages and disadvantages.  Although hydrogen's energy density per unit mass is high, its  volumetric energy density is low making it impractical for current aviation technology.  It seems more useful for large transport - long distance trucks and ships as well as power plants, but green hydrogen as a battery may be more cost effective as well as being a natural battery for intermittent green energy sources.  Time will tell.   Gold hydrogen in potentially commercial quantities came as a surprise to me. 

 

The Universe is peppered with gravitationally assembled hydrogen fusion power plants - our Sun being the most familiar.  We use only the tiniest amount of the power that falls on the Earth and that, in turn, is only a tiny fraction of the star's power output. It's a question of capture, conversion and transmission.  We know how to do many of those things, but..

 

If you're lucky enough to be in the path of totality of the North American solar eclipse in about six weeks you might get a sense of the Sun's activity.  Up close it's much more dramatic. Here's a nice video showing 11 days looking out from a side mounted camera on the Parker Solar Probe - part of a mission of highly elliptical orbits that get closer and closer to the Sun.  A few months ago it came with 7.26 million kilometers of the Sun's surface and was trucking along at over 635,000 kilometers per hour at perigee - far and away the fastest probe humans have made. (it takes much more energy to move towards the Sun than away from it)   The video flies through a coronal mass ejection..  it's amazing stuff! (while I'm a fan of Beethoven, I think this is better appreciated without the music)

And finally the Seagull Nebula - a nearby cloud of mostly hydrogen.  It's too dim for our eyes, but is close enough to appear large in the sky.  It was one of the first things I looked for with the telescope I made as a teenager.  To see its real spender you need very long exposures - something unavailable to me in the day.  APOD is a wonderful site. 

__________

¹ There are a half dozen potential mechanisms.  This one, involving the mineral olivine, has been observed and is likely to be the most important.

 

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.