omenti

THE FUTURE™

I'm certainly not a futurist.  Oh - there are some things I can predict with reasonable accuracy: that one of my ferrets will beg for a banana next week and next year, when an eclipse will happen somewhere, roughly when the Sun goes into its red giant stage...  The easy stuff.  Throw in people and culture and all bets are off.  I've made some informed predictions that were heavily dependent on technologies I knew a lot about that seem precent now, but if I'm honest and look at my old lab notebooks.. well..  I'm batting 200 at best.¹

 

Since then I've learned a bit more.   New business ideas can appear and develop rapidly, sometimes in a year or two.  Big technology leaps usually depend on basic research and are less frequent appearing at  twenty to forty year intervals.  They're often difficult to notice early on and are accompanied by widely negative and positive projections.  Then there is culture.  We - our basic needs, desires and dreams - evolve at a very slow rate.  Typically thousands of years.  Understanding this is critically important to thinking about the future.   I like to identify what preoccupies people and where future conflict is likely.

 

My model of the near term - say up to twenty year - future involves four areas.  There are probably more.  

    ° what is technically possible (understanding the combination of multiple technologies and a bit of the basics is important.)

    ° what is economically feasible and what are the externalities

    ° regulations and standards

    ° people, culture and social acceptance

   

There's a forest and trees problem.  You have to understand why a certain product or service is popular to see if it's something fundamental or if it's just a manifestation of the possible.  A few years ago people were running around playing Pokemon Go.   Many got excited about augmented reality games and saw this as the future. In fact it was a fad that quickly died out.  It was made possible when the quality and user cost of wireless networks and smartphones got to a point where enough people had them to allow a novel experience.  The underlying importance was the convergence of a good enough network and smartphones.  

 

When a wheel is invented you have to sort out what is a bicycle and what is a hula hoop.  We have a lot of hula hoops.

 

About ten years ago a few of the titans of Silicon Valley pronounced privacy dead.  Lots of people agreed.  I'm guessing almost none of them had any understanding of what privacy is and how it has developed over the past two hundred years.  It's very complex but anyone making decisions needs to understand the history and conflict and why modern notions are still unsettled.   Now we see two huge chastened firms claiming to go all in on privacy (I don't trust one and only partly trust the others).  I'll go out on a limb and claim it will still be a major issue at least two decades out.. probably more.

 

A few words on externalities, but it can get involved.  You can think of great projects that make enormous financial sense on longer time scales that are problematic.  Dealing with climate change and proper sanitation are two excellent examples.  Technology exists to solve both, but the people who benefit most are not those who invest.  

 

Prediction is difficult.  It takes a smart multi-disciplinary team and a rigorous process. You need to understand the past. There can be good success with the bicycle and hula hoop class questions.  Identifying new wheels are likely to be a once in a career issue if you're lucky.    All of these things are well above my pay grade.  I'm continuously reminded how simple physics is.

 __________

¹ In 1992 using, Moore's law and the notion that the Internet and wireless were so desirable that hundreds of billions in infrastructure investment would happen, I suggested in 2017 people would hold a piece of glass in their hand and have have a video connection with a friend halfway around the world and that "call" would effective be free.  The hardest part, in my mind, was the battery.  There were a few other seemingly clever calls, but more than a few duds.  At least there's the realization that I, along with many colleagues, did better than the very expensive futurists the company hired,

 

 

 

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

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

 

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

    RrdD

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

With that, on to little r:

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

attacking global warming with deep insight from a brewery

The 1970s were marked by two dramatic energy disruptions that shook the world.  Petroleum became much more expensive and a geopolitical weapon. Small cars suddenly became popular and American drivers began to look to countries that made them.  In the US large sums flowed into energy R&D.  Much of it went into shale oil, but alternate energy labs appeared.  Electricity from wind and solar were far from practical, but there was a mini-boom in solar hot water heating.  It turns out you need solid engineering if you're going to water running in panels on your roof.  Unfortunately there was a lot of poor engineering, short module lifetimes, and water damage. 

 

Since then we've seen dramatic reductions in the cost of electricity from wind and solar energy.  Expanding these sources to levels needed to deal with global warming is extremely challenging - too challenging given the current political climate.  It's important to remember that electricity is just a way to move from a generator to a load.  It's very practical, but also ephemeral.  Storage is expensive as is the infrastructure to efficiently move it from where it's produced to where it's needed.

 

Electricity demand represents about a fifth of the world's primary energy supply.  This will grow with electrification in transportation, but the numbers are so staggeringly huge that it will be awhile before the needle moves.  Solar, wind and nuclear are the primary non-fossil fuel sources.  Two are growing and one is shrinking.  But even if all electricity came from clean sources it would just be a fifth of the primary energy supply.  

 

Thermal energy demand is larger at a bit more than a third of the supply worldwide. Space and water heating, industrial processes, cooking and so on.  In homes it's much higher than a third usually running above sixty percent.  Thermal energy can and is electrified, but you have to deal with the inefficiency of making, transporting and then converting the energy. Wouldn't it be neat if you could do it directly without the intermediate step?

 

You can and you have.  All of us have sat inside on cold sunny days next to the window enjoying the heat.  Insulated homes and insulating windows can dramatically drop external energy requirements.  Solar hot water heating is dramatically better than it was forty years ago and is required by code in a few regions.  But what intrigues me is the direct mechanical production of heat.

 

An apple rolling off a dinner table hits the floor with about a joule of kinetic energy.  The energy unit is named in honor of the son of a prominent brewer and followed his father into the family business.  The family had money and the young James Joule was tutored by John Dalton and a few other great scientists of the day.  Science became his hobby and passion.   In the 1840s he built early electric motors to see if it made sense to replace the brewery's steam engines.  It was far too early, but he established himself as a solid amateur scientist.  With this mindset and approach he set himself to was understanding the economics of brewing.  It would change the world.

 

He worked in many areas, but this most important work was on the convertibility of energy from one type to another.  The caloric theory of heat was accepted wisdom - basically heat was conserved and couldn't be created or destroyed.  While wrong, it led to the creation of some rather beautiful mathematics.  Joule found something deeper and more accurate -  that energy could be converted from one form to another.  As it happened brewers had the best thermometers allowing careful measurements to figure out what was really happening.  He mechanically did work to water by stirring it and showed a unit of work heated the water by the same unit.   The energy increase of the water by heating was equivalent to the work done by the mechanical stirring.   He had made the leap to the conservation of energy and created the basis for the first law of thermodynamics.

 

It's neat to think about a simple extension of his apparatus.  Put a mechanical stirrer inside an insulated box and spin it with a wind turbine.  Mechanical energy from the wind is directly converted to heat and can be used for home hot water or space heating.  

 

The sketch is just a simple version.  Vertical axis turbines aren't that efficient, but that may not be a major issue. While big turbines are more efficient,  it is impractical to move hot water far enough to make it practical.  The natural size of these units may be home with a small turbine or, where district heating is popular, a medium sized wind turbine.

 

The back of the envelopes are interesting.  A cubic meter of water (a metric ton or 1000 liters or about four average bathtubs) can hold up to about 90 kWh of heat energy.. enough for a two days for a family of three or four.  It's fine if the wind is intermittent.  When it blows, heat is added to the water.    Getting the size right for a household and location would require a fair amount of experimentation and modeling, but this is the sort of work that would probably be crack for mechanical engineering grad students.  It's a great exercise in systems optimization.

 

Here's a simple simulation for a small half meter radius turbine in a location with an average wind speed of 16 miles per hour over two days.  The first graph is wind speed.  The second is the mechanical power delivered to the mixer in the water.  Note that power increases quickly with windspeed (you know this if you've held your hand out of a car window or biked into the wind)  The last is the water temperature given good, but not fantastic insulation.   The water gets hotter and keeps its heat in spite of a very bursty power source.

 

There are a lot of ways to tap energy.  The direct conversion of mechanical energy to heat is particularly attractive given the enormous worldwide heat use.  This may be a good technique in some cases and there are undoubtedly others.  It's not very technical - heavens - it was easy in the 1800s and it's remarkable no one stumbled on it earlier - the technical capability to do this goes back about a millennia.   Now we have the capacity to measure and model as well as utilize a wide range of materials and construction techniques.  It may be interesting again.

 

There are a variety of mechanisms to deliver energy in some practical form for us to use.  Many are more efficient as centralized sources and some are better at smaller scales.  This is one that works best when highly distributed. 

 

 

finding the best physical user interface - mini post

The photo shows Katie at a seminar yesterday afternoon. A question came up and in answering it, she's doing some hell-for-leather astrophysics.   Usually scientists in cartoons,  television or movies are depicted as working at a whiteboard filled with either gibberish or something out of a textbook.   Sometimes science advisors bring a bit of authenticity, but generally there's a gap between reality and what's shown (I'm sure the same is probably true for any field depicted by outsiders).   The television show Big Bang Theory is a partial exception.  A particle physicist from UCLA consults to add a bit of reality to the dialog as well as most of that goes up on their whiteboards or posters.  But it doesn't capture reality and that's interesting.

 

 

 

Physics and astrophysics have periods of rather intense play.  You try out ideas and follow them for awhile.  This is usually done with paper and pencil or, particularly in collaborations, on a slate blackboard with chalk.    There are a number of shorthands you just can't quickly produce on a computer in a satisfying manner.  Sometimes when you're following an idea a four by eight foot blackboard isn't enough. Some of the markings get erased almost immediately while others may be important and live for months or longer.  White boards and magic markers fail on the long term ..  they just don't erase easily enough as the markings tend to permanence.  The markers lack the artistic expressiveness of a quality chalk like Hagoromo Fulltouch Chalk and their solvents smell bad if you're standing at the board all day.  There are only a few companies in the US that sell quality slate boards and most of their business comes from physics and math departments.  And, like a quality pencil on good paper, there's the feel.

 

I understand why others don't like chalk or pencil and paper, but slate and chalk appears to be a nearly optimal technology for the sport of physics.  It raises the question of what is best suited for a given field and how good it really is.  I find it necessary to decouple the frontal cortex a bit to let the imagination flow. This just seems to work better with paper and pencil and slate and chalk for me.   Even young mathematicians and physicists appear to follow the same convention.  It may well be that something better will come along..  I've seen people try artificial realities where you can add computer simulations, but the jury is still out as the tech is primitive.   My experiences with augmented and virtual realities have been disappointing.  

 

But what about your field?  Have people found an optimal interface or are they still looking?  There's a subfield of human computer interaction that looks at that - it's particularly important for remote work. It turns out most of us communicate person to person with much more than audio and just our faces.  We adapt and use what's around, but can we do better?  

 

Art and photography are highly dependent on interface and experience ..  I'll probably write about some very unusual cameras that might surprise you.  My sister is an artist and photographer and will tell you about her frustrations with the computational tools she uses.  It's very difficult to get into a state of flow with many.

 

Pianos, cellos, drums, beat boxes...  auto-tuners?  Sometimes it's in the ear of the beholder.

 

And sports...  it strikes me as interesting that so much of the planet's attention is focused on moving a ball between two contestants or groups of contestants.  An invention that independently arose in many cultures.  Here the interfaces and experiences are often highly tuned.  Although computer gaming is large and growing, there's something lacking.

 

 

η and cooking meals on car engines

eta

 

Greek letters are used to symbolize so many things that they are almost Rorschach tests.   For me it represents a term in a few very different equations  and a type of particle...  anyone else is likely to see it differently.  You need some context to sort out what it means.  But if you want something that touches all of us - the most general and possible important use - I'll defer to engineering where it represents efficiency.

 

Efficiency can be a bit subtle.  It seems simple  - how much you get out of something divided by how much you put in.  Take a car with an internal combustion engine.  The energy it takes to move it down the road some distance divided by the energy in the gasoline it burns is the efficiency of your car.  Under average highway conditions it's somewhere between 25 and 30 percent.  Energy isn't created or destroyed - it just changes form when work is done.  In this case you get some useful work - moving your car - but the rest goes into heat the engine has to get rid of, heating the road a bit, some noise and so on.  

 

In this fashion you can measure the efficiency of any process that converts energy from one form to another.  One of you is a volleyball player.  The efficiency of a human running around in the sand is something under 25%.  Jumping is roughly the same.  The measure here is how well the muscles convert the energy they're given into work.    A Tour de France cyclist is somewhere near 25% - human muscle efficiency are similar to a car with an internal combustion engine.

 

But it's not that easy.  What if I want to measure how much work a volleyball player does moving in the sand?  Now there's a lot of energy being lost to the slippage of the sand under her feet.  You can measure this in principal, but you can keep asking questions.  For the car you can ask how much energy did it take to mine the oil, turn it into gasoline and ship it to your tank .. what is the well to tank efficiency?   And if you have an electric car what is the efficiency of making and transmitting the electricity and now efficient is the charging process.  Oh - and if you buy a car in the first place how much energy did it take to make it?

 

These questions are part of the necessary context to sort out how much carbon we dump into the atmosphere.  Bottom-up calculations like these are extremely difficult - I spent three months doing one for a telecommunications company - but they illuminate where areas for improvement exist.  Serious global warming models use top-down measurements which are much easier to get right.  They just gloss over a lot of the detail. 

 

My sister had an Easy-Bake toy oven when she was about seven or eight.  It looked like a real oven and used  two 100 watt light bulbs to generate about 350°F to bake little cakes and cookies.  It may have not been the safest toy, but the light bulb as a cheap heating element was genius.

 

Electric lighting  is extremely inefficient.  Incandescents convert about three percent of the energy they use into visible light, CFs average around eight percent and the best LEDs maybe fifteen. Most of us have replaced our incandescent lights with compact fluorescent or led lights to save energy.  But if your goal is baking little cakes or heating the room a bit, inefficiency becomes useful -- the cheap waste heat is put to use.

 

The best fossil fuel and nuclear power plants are about thirty five percent efficient.  The waste heat can be circulated as steam or hot water and used to heat homes, businesses, run industrial processes - even grow hothouse produce in the Winter.  When you add up how the energy is used the effective efficiency of the co-generation plant can rise to sixty to eighty percent. Denmark is the world leader when it comes to doing it at scale - nearly all businesses and housing developments use so-called district heating.  

 

Even your car, assuming it isn't electric, uses co-generation for heating and defrosting.  Of the four gallons of gasoline you burn to go thirty miles or so nearly three heat up the engine block or down the tailpipe as waste heat.  Your car heater taps this powerful water heat (much more powerful than your home water heater) and there are other ways to use the resource.  My father would wrap hamburger, chopped onion, carrots and potato in aluminum foil and tie it to the engine manifold of the old Ford Falcon on our yearly trip to Utah.  Eighty miles at seventy miles per hour was about right in early June.  The downside was the foil wrapping wasn't great plus sometimes it burned.  But as a child of the depression he saw it as a free oven.

 

This kind of thinking can lead to the lowest of the low-hanging fruit when it comes to using less energy to get our work done.  The rub is most of this heat is below the temperature of boiling water and it is increasingly difficult to use heat energy as it gets colder.  When you extract heat energy from something it gets cooler.  The maximum efficiency is the difference between the original temperature - final temperatures divided by the original temperature.¹  You have to get clever if things are cool.

 

Waste heat is good for hot water if you have the infrastructure.  Data centers, sewage treatment plants, industrial air conditioning and refrigeration are good sources.( Cooling is very inefficient and generates an enormous amount of waste heat.²  On a hot Summer day AC increases the temperature of NYC by about 2°F!)  Beyond hot water there are specialized engines that work with fairly cool (boiling water temperatures) to generate electricity.  They're not sensible everywhere, but industrial applications that can use them to reduce power costs and lower carbon emissions at the same time. With realistic carbon taxes these approaches would explode in popularity.

 

On the horizon are a variety of methods of mining low grade waste heat turning it directly into electricity.  Some are used now -- thermoelectrics are the go-to method for generating power from heat in space - any spacecraft with a nuclear generator uses them.  And some developing world stoves generated electricity to charge lights and phones.  They're getting better and cheaper, but are still aways off from general use. Thermoacoustics, thermovoltaics, and thermoionics are other promising approaches that are being looked at- the sort of thing DARPA-E was focused on until the current administration came in with a buzzsaw.  But this is a very exciting area.  Imagine the potential for cutting back on fossil fuel power plants by half without impacting power output.

__________

¹ It gets a little technical and I'm simplifying, but the highest efficiency of a heat engine is the Carnot efficiency which is  (T_h - T_c )/Th where T is degrees above absolute zero.  So the efficiency of going from boiling to room temperature is about (373-273)/373 - about 27% .. in practice it will be much lower.  For an efficient engine you want a very high working temperature and a very cool heat sink.  Cars need radiators and power plants use super heated steam.

² Apple and Facebook are leaders on datacenter waste heat capture.

the critical edge in a major sport

The other day I was in a Manhattan library wearing the t-shirt of my undergrad school.  As luck would have it someone noticed it.  She was from the same school - her Ph.D. was in mechanical engineering - and a most interesting conversation followed.  It turns out she happens to work on suspensions for one of the more famous Formula One teams. 

 

Formula One may be the most form of auto racing. Four wheels hanging out in the breeze and an open cockpit, its roots go back to Grand Prix racing about ninety years ago.  After WWII it was associated with some of the most famous car makers and drivers.  It has enormous popularly worldwide with something like a half billion people following any given race and over 300 million fans who follow most of the season. Good drivers make in the eight figures and some have career earning exceeding a billion dollars.  A massively important form of sports entertainment larger than the NBA and NFL combined. 

 

F-1  technology side has made huge advances over the years.  Thanks to tire, suspension and aerodynamic advances the cars can corner with lateral accelerations over six times that of gravity.  That's more than an astronaut experiences during re-entry and on par with the limits of a jet fighter.  Top speeds are on the order of 240 miles per hour on relatively twisty tracks.  Teams spend a lot of money - she said an average team might have 100 engineers, technicians, physicists and mathematicians - over a third with Ph.Ds. - working on every little bit of vehicle performance.  Cars get much better during the racing season not making improvements every race means almost certain failure.  She said a few American universities major talent suppliers - notably Caltech and MIT - but England is the real ground zero for car design and tuning talent from a half dozen schools.  

 

So there's this question.  How much success is the driver and how much is the car?  The feeling is the driver, even though operating a car under such conditions probably is an athletic performance, is less important than the car.  Put a great driver in a lesser car and they might improve the performance of the car a bit, but they'll never win.  A lesser driver in a great car probably won't win, but will place much higher one might expect.   But there's a human story and sport is all about human performance.  You probably won't see much interest in autonomous cars zipping around a circuit even though they might outperform humans.  

 

But there's another story.  The master designers and aerodynamics people are very important, but there are enough very good ones and enough viable approaches that the top half dozen teams are on fairly equal footing. the most important person on the team, and sometimes it is two people, is the strategist - usually a mathematician or physicist. 

 

The cars are rich data sources sending hundreds of channels of telemetry for analysis giving the state of almost anything you can image about the car.  Additionally tracks, weather, cars, tires, competition and tactics and strategy are all modeled ahead of time.  Variables are thrown into the mix that makes the strategist even more important.  Tires are a good example.  There are three levels of grip... the grippiest tires wear very quickly, the least grippy more slowly. You have to use at least two during a race meaning a pit stop with a tire change is necessary. Additionally there are two types of rain tires.  It's an exercise in modeling and game theory sorting out how this will play out. The most consistent factor in winning races appears to be the strategist.  Three of the top ten are women.

 

As the sport changes to stay relevant hardcore fans are being challenged to examine some of the race data during the race .. there's thought about making it part of the race itself, but keeping the competition level high and the fans engaged is the key point.   One thing she mentioned is heart rate and blood pressure telemetry from the pit chief as a car comes into the pits at 70mph stopping a few inches away as he has a few seconds to make the swap.  

 

There are a lot of interesting things you can say about this type of data and its analysis.  The fact that some believe understanding it is more important than the driver speaks volumes. Some of the teams monetize this by letting their largest sponsors in on their technics of dealing with rapid change and strategy and tactics.  A few of the analysts have been loaned to these sponsors for non-trivial sums to look into their businesses. 

 

It makes you wonder about other sports.   It would be interesting to create a plot with understanding of athletic performance (including psychological elements) along one axis and understanding of strategy along the other.   Understanding hydrodynamics created a revolution in swimming along the first. A deep data and model driven understanding of strategy has driven Formula One performance along the second.  How much potential does a given sport have? 

 

 

 

 

smoke rings, sports and beyond

Canals saw explosive growth in England during the first few decades of the Industrial Revolution allowing raw materials like iron and coal to fall in price by as much as eighty percent.   Improving canals became a major industry - they became straighter with locks and aqueducts coming into wide-spread use to deal with changes in elevation.  Then, around 1840, railroads became the thing and many of the canals were purchased for their right of way.  The expansion of railways led to two of the more dramatic financial bubbles in history, but that's another story.  The story here is about something really interesting that happened just before the railroads started taking over.

 

James Scott Russell found himself working on a large canal near Edinburgh, Scotland.  A newly minted engineer, he had been hired to investigate the movement of barges in the hope of making them more efficient.  Russell spent a lot of time observing and making measurements.  One day the tow rope between the mules and the barge snapped and the barge came to a sudden stop.  He watched in amazement watching mass of water in front of the barge's front bow 

“I was observing the motion of a boat which was rapidly drawn along a narrow channel by a pair of horses, when the boat sud- denly stoppednot so the mass of water in the channel which it had put in motion; it accumulated round the prow of the vessel in a state of violent agitation, then suddenly leaving it behind, rolled forward with great velocity, assuming the form of a large solitary elevation, a rounded, smooth and well-defined heap of water, which continued its course ong the channel apparently without change of form or diminution of speed. I followed it on horseback, and overtook it still rolling on at a rate of some eight or nine miles an hour, preserving its original figure some thirty feet long and a foot to a foot and a half in height. Its height gradually diminished, and after a chase of one or two miles I lost it in the windings of the channel. Such, in the month of August 1834, was my first chance interview with that singular and beau- tiful phenomenon which I have called the Wave of Translation.”

Afterwards he built a tank in a laboratory to conduct controlled experiments. In 1844 he published his results noting four things about these solitons.

° The waves are stable, and can travel over very large distances (normal waves tend to either flatten or steepen and topple.

° The speed depends on the size of the wave, and its width on the depth of water.

° The waves do not merge, larger waves overtake smaller ones rather than combining.

° If a wave is too big for the depth of water, it splits into two waves, one big and one small.

A few decades later  physicists began to work out the physics leading off in unimaginable directions.  But back to that wave moving down the canal.  If it was large enough you could surf on it.  And, with enough study and money you could build very repeatable waves to your liking.  It turns out a surfer named Kelly Slater did just that.  The December 17^th, 2018 issue of The New Yorker has a great article. 

 

It turns out solitons exist throughout the physical world - smoke rings, packets of light in fiber optic strands and much more.  On light packets - high speed data communication using optical fibers simply wouldn't work without solitons - the bits of information would blur into a muddle at high data rates. The math is a tad beyond the level of this blog - you'd see it in a second year undergrad physics class.  As people continued to work out why it is stable some insight came from that radical moment in 1953 when the computer went beyond a bicycle for the mind to becoming both a telescope and microscope.

 

Physics 101 classes usually have a vortex ring demonstration to illustrate some of the properties of vortex ring solitons.  Smoke ring guns are a lot of fun and fairly easy to build.  Turning them into a really great demonstration takes some effort. Dianna Cowern recently posted her version.  Her enthusiasm is pure wonderfulness.

Recipe Corner

 

The return of recipe corner - at least for today.  This was great last night

 Roasted Brussels Sprouts

 

Ingredients

° 1 pound Brussels sprouts - remove the outer leaves

° 1 medium sized onion - I had a sweet onion (Vidalia)

° 1 largish baking apple (Granny Smith) cut into half inch chunks 

° 1 tbl olive oil (doesn't have to be a great EVOO)

° 1/2 tsp grated nutmeg

° salt

° ground black pepper

° 1 cup apple cider

° 2 tsp butter

° 1 tsp brown sugar

Technique

° preheat oven to 350°F

° everything through the olive oil into a large baking pan.  salt and pepper to taste and toss to coat.  Cover with aluminum foil. 

° roast for about 25 minutes, uncover and stir

° temp up to 375°F and roast with no foil 'til the sprouts brown a bit - 10 minutes for me

° when the roasting begins bring the cider to a boil in a sauce pan over medium-high heat.  Add butter and brown sugar and stir 'til dissolved. Cook at a boil until it is reduced to the consistency of a syrup .. about 15 minutes for me.  I had about 4 tbl remaining. 

° Put the Brussels sprouts into a serving bowl, add the syrup and toss.. you probably need to adjust salt and pepper a bit before serving.

 

technology risks

Fast moving technology can create risks as well as opportunities.  Recently we saw the shutdown of London's Gatwick airport by illegal drone activity.  It almost surprises me this drone delivered service disruption has taken this long to happen, although it is a surprise it went on for so long. It’s a classic example of asymmetric economics - drones are cheap and expendable but the impact of their misuse is large and very expensive.  Completely  defenses are impossible and what can be mounted is usually expensive. 

 

Drone attacks been suggested and defenses from drones with geofencing, flying nets, to jamming guns to trained eagles have been tried with varying degrees of success.  Several were tried at Gatwick but all failed.  All of these can be effective against subsists of attacks, but it is easy to design around them.  Having a variety of good enough measures will be expensive and one suspects cottage industries supplying all of this like we saw in the wake of 9-11.    I don’t know if penalties are enough to keep some types away, but it may be the most effective tool. In any event drone regulation is going to see a big re-visit approximately everywhere now.

 

This is a dramatic and very specific example, but there are so many others where the cost of attack is many orders of magnitude lower than the costs of damage and/or defense.  Russian interference in the 2016 American election may be the most dramatic example to date.   Coming down the road the Internet of Things opens up a serious Pandora’s box of opportunities for the bad guys.  Many, perhaps most, of these will be cheap with poorly written software and no mechanism for patching against attacks.  You really don't want these in your home where they can impact your life.  Add to this devices that spy on you..  Google, Amazon and Facebook offer hardware that takes information from your home and makes it the property of the company offering the services.  Thinking twice about these devices is prudent. 

 

It has been said that technology is neutral - it's all the application.  I don't buy that.  Some technologies are bad by design.  We need to be considering that much earlier on than we've been doing. The problems can't be eliminated, but perhaps they can be contained. Measures that can be taken with legislation and education.   A good example of education is the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Gift Guide .. it's a good starting point and may make you think twice.

 

 

hope for nature and humanity

In grad school I came across The Limits to Growth - a book by the Club of Rome. Basically a report on computer simulations of exponential population growth and limits of the carrying capacity of the planet for a number of resources.  It struck me as bleak and depressing suggesting zero population growth was our only path out. I was curious about their model and found issues with the underlying data set and models. It wasn’t possible to describe population growth trends with simple exponentials. Something else was going on. They admitted some issues, but swept it under the rug sort of claiming “correct” data would fit their model. It began to slowly eat at me.

 

A few years later  I found myself traveling to Princeton regularly as part of a collaboration. It’s a great place to run into people and ask questions.  Eventually I found some demographers and learned at their feet. They weren’t terribly impressed by the book. They freely admitted there were serious issues, some of which may be existential threats.  At the same time there were some extremely positive trends.. Instead of simple exponential models there are periods of development with different population dynamics.  At first I had a my doubts, but their models fit the available data and fit some emerging trends much better than the CoR report.  There are a  variety of models, but they mostly boil down to three main stages.

 

The first is a period where the death rate is very close to the birth rate - sometimes exceeding it, sometimes falling short. Humanity was scattered around the globe and regions would fade in and out.  Eventually with trading centers becoming stable with very low population growth. The death rates were enormous.. for a family to continue to the next generation you generally needed more than six children.

 

The second stage is marked by the introduction of sanitation and successful disease prevention. Death rates drop dramatically, but people still maintained extremely high fertility rates.   The sanitation and medical knowledge is quickly communicated to populations at a similar stage. This results in enormous population spikes.  In the US the core part of this stage was from about 1920 to 1970.

 

The third stage sees women gaining education, opportunity and control over their bodies and fertility. Incomes are rising and families begin to focus putting more into fewer children. The fertility rate drops .. often dramatically.  Think Japan and parts of Europe. 

 

Different regions of the world go through these at different times and rates. One of the huge drivers for the second and third stages is urbanization. At first it  seemed counterintuitive, but when you talk to demographers and read their papers it becomes clear the growth of cities is the rocket fuel that enables the rest.

 

About fifteen years ago I organized a small conference on this at Aspen. I left with great hope and enthusiasm believing that lowering some of the other potentially existential threats would only make this process easier. In my mind the immediate low hanging fruit was working on global warming. It could have been, but I didn’t understand the inertia and control of the fossil fuel industry.

 

I could go on and on about these demographic trends and had intended to, but it would be book length and others are more expert in the area. I may talk about it in the future. The next stage is cloudy I can argue for at least four very different paths .. some of them pretty awful. But I recently came across a nice discussion of the saving nature piece..

 

Now for the good part.  Sean Carroll of Caltech interviews Joe Walston - the senior VP of Field Conservation at the Wildlife Conservation Society.  Joe offers a better summary of these issues than I could in an hour of writing  It's a bit over an hour long, but worth it if you have any interest in demographic trends, why they happen and where they could go.

 

Finally it's interesting these trends appear to be society independent.  We like to think how different we are, but in many ways, for good and bad, we're the same.  I find that comforting.

 

 

 

the other scientific revolution of 1953 that radically accelerated knowledge

In the Winter of 1953 Francis Crick interrupted the lunchtime patrons of the Eagle in Cambridge to announce he and James Watson had discovered the secret of life.   In fact it wasn't far from hyperbole - they had discovered the structure of DNA and the world was forever changed.¹  Something else world-changing happened later that year.  Without it we  wouldn't have advanced past the technologies of the 1960s.  Surprisingly one of the people behind it thought it cute, but hardly worth publishing.  

 

But first a bit of historical context

 

The Manhattan project began with blackboards and experiments.  Individual researchers had their desk calculators, but it soon became necessary to work out how neutrons diffused when a critical mass of fissile material came together. A group of scientist's wives came together to perform the repetitive calculations.  Next came IBM card reading calculators and then von Neumann became interested in developments in electronic computing at Harvard, Bell Labs and the University of Pennsylvania.  There's a deep and rich history from this time on, but the important point was the meaning of "computer" was shifting from a woman with a mechanical calculator to an electronic machine.²

 

In 1953  electronic computers were still rare, mostly one-off machines that were expensive and temperamental.   It was still a world of research and development. A few people recognized practical applications, but the machines mostly weren't ready.  Except for physics.

 

Physicists were heavily involved in the birthing of electronic computers focusing on specific problems that tended to involve military projects or fundamental research to drive the hardware.  Fundamental research was seen as the tip of the R&D effort and was often funded from military budgets which were large enough to support these efforts.   Enrico Fermi  had an interesting idea.

 

He was interested in nonlinear systems thinking they might have something fundamental to do with entropy and why time only flows in one direction.  He, John Pasta and Stanislav Ulam conceived a simple toy problem - sixty four identical masses representing the atoms in a lattice connected end to end by little springs representing chemical bonds. Unfortunately calculating the restoring forces is a beast of a problem.

 

A linear system is one that can be described by a straight line on a graph.  Consider a spring.  Pull it twice as far and it exerts twice as much force. The same is true when you pluck a string on a guitar.³  Nonlinear systems have a more complex behavior.  With linear systems you just add up the contributions of each element without considering the others.  Nonlinear systems are nasty - you need to consider everything at once.  You might be able to calculate very simple systems with a few elements, but after things become very complex.

 

The three physicists wrote down a mathematical description of the physics. Think of it as a strange sort of string that you pluck and then listen to as time goes on.  Solving it would require a lot of computer time.  The big iron at Los Alamos was called the Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator, and Computer or MANAIC-1 for short.  It had been built for thermonuclear calculations, but this trio had an enormous amount of credibility and it was clearly fundamental research. 

 

The three had no experience with programming, but Mary Tsingou was a mathematical physicist who knew how to reason with  MANAIC-1.  She set to work creating a program that became an experiment simulating how the lattice behaved for sixteen, thirty two and sixty four "atoms" with various spring forces.⁴  

 

Imagine of the frequencies coming out of the system in terms of sound.  They had expected a pure note that would shift  over to more chaotic noises and finally the equivalent of just a hiss.  That didn't happen. 

 

The lattice was "plucked" and a series of overtones appeared and dissolved into each other creating a complex mixture.   Then the whole process reversed and the overtones disappeared in reverse order until the original pure note reappeared and the whole process started over again.  

 

 

Here's an illustration.  Consider the top graph.  The purple points are just the first vibration mode of a simple string - think of it as showing what would happen if it was just a simple string.  The system we're talking about with equal masses and springs is in blue.

 

Even this simple little problem that had baffled some of the greatest minds had a beautiful and completely unexpected result and a new way of doing science had been developed - the computational experiment.  The computer had become not just a bicycle, but rather a telescope for the mind.

 

Much of science is impenetrable without computer experiments like these.  It's so common, I've done thousands, that you tend to think it's natural.  But it had a beginning and without it much of what we've seen from science after the mid 1950s and the resulting technologies wouldn't have been possible.  Inefficient cars and airplanes, no electronic revolution, no cellphones, no ....

 

Fermi thought it was cute, but not fundamentally important.  That may be true for the hypothesis they tested, but how they did it changed the world.

 

__________

¹ There were many others who were in on this, but Crick and Watson weren't exactly the sharing kind.  Most notably the x-ray diffraction work of Rosalind Franklin.  But she was a women and died before the Nobel was awarded anyway.  

² George Dyson (Freeman Dyson's son) penned Turing's Cathedral.  An excellent and very readable history of the efforts at Princeton.  That may be the most important early thread as the computer architecture used today was developed there.  Much of the slightly later development came out of Cambridge in England. 

³ Sort of ..  you can get it to behave non-linearly, but for now consider a spring that behaves like F = kx where x is the displacement, F is force and k is a constant that tells you about the spring's stiffness.

⁴ I don't know for sure, but have been told she programmed down to the iron in machine language.