omenti

you're here because dinosaurs didn't have good telescopes

Sixty six million years ago - the end of the Cretaceous period  - an asteroid or comet struck the Earth near what is now Chicxulub, Mexico creating a crater 150 kilometers in diameter.  Huge tsunamis that rose hundreds of feet as they approached coastlines.  Worse, firestorms swept the planet and the oceans underwent a sudden and deep acidification.  Food chains collapsed on land and in the oceans and with them three quarters of plant and animal species vanished.  

Arguably it was a bad day.

If the non-avian dinosaurs only had evolved larger brains perhaps they would have made it to the point where they had good astronomy and a good enough space program.   But nature keeps moving on and the massive change allowed other lifeforms to evolve including us.  In retrospect it was a great day for the human race.

 

Could it happen again?  That one's easy -  100 percent probability.  Fortunately we're at the point where we have astronomy and a space program so it makes sense to think about risk and mitigation efforts.   

 

In 1994 a comet called Shoemaker-Levy 9 broke into 21 major pieces and struck Jupiter.  It had been captured by Jupiter's gravity and had been orbiting the planet for about three decades it put on a show that would have devastated life on Earth.

 

An Earth strike would be different and Jupiter's large size makes it a more likely target it did ring alarms and people started thinking about the probability of something big enough to do serious damage hitting the Earth as well as what could be done about it.  After all - we had telescopes to figure out likelihoods and rockets to do something about it. 

 

On the 1^st of July, 1770 we came very close to a major extinction event - one that probably would have included humanity among the erased.  Lexell's comet came with six times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. Cosmically speaking that's a near miss.  New comets tend to appear anywhere between a few months to a year before they could be dangerous.  But there's much more than just comets out there. 

 

NEOs - Near Earth Objects - are comets or asteroids that come close to or pass through Earth's orbit.   They range in size from a few meters to several kilometers.  Small ones are common and tend to fragment or disintegrate leaving only small pieces for collectors and scientists.  Moving up the size scale you pass through city killers to objects capable of global devastation.  Fortunately the big ones are fairly easy to spot, but over ninety percent of the estimated city killers have yet to be cataloged.

 

A program to funding the construction and operation of new survey telescopes along with retrofitting existing observatories was kicked off about ten years ago with the US and EU taking part.  It's relatively inexpensive and has made some progress, but the Trump Administration cut funding.  

 

So what can you do?  With enough advance warning you can evacuate regions for objects in the city killer size range.  Moving up the size scale means using rockets to intercept the threatening NEO.  What to do with it is non-trivial and depends a lot on its composition and size.  That's an interesting subject for a future post if there's interest (hint: you probably don't want to nuke it) , but an important step would be expanding missions to asteroids of various sizes to learn about their makeup.  In addition to insurance there are technical and scientific benefits that are probably justification enough.  

 

Perhaps it would help us think about preparation and mitigation - the next pandemic and global warming will both make their presence known with much higher probabilities in the next few decades.  

 

 

 

 

frogs, pots of water and the slow application of heat

A few weeks ago Om posted a piece on Apple's new laptop based on their M1 chip.  It's one of those huge transitions that gives Apple a much higher starting point  for desktop and laptop machines - machines that are still very important to many of us. They've been working on this for at least ten years as part of their smartphone silicon effort. People like Horace Dediu and Om (and even a non-technologist like me) have noted the progression of Apple silicon and wondered if it would be deadly to Intel.  For me the biggest surprise has been the software effort - writing was all over the place for on the silicon side. 

 

Zoom's emergence represents a pot that had been slowly warming for decades coming to a sudden boil with pandemic-fueled heat.  It's frustrating with a terrible UX and UI, can be iffy on highly asymmetrical Internet connections that are slow upstream (cable modems for example), causes enormous frustration for many, but it's better than other tools and works well enough.  Last week I described it as the modern equivalent of the <blink> markup in html during the early days of web browsers like Mosaic.  People think it's cool at the time, but it will be laughably primitive down the road.   

 

Remote video tools will get better and may change some habits. At the same time others are recognizing the importance of face to face. One university I work with just completed a survey that found 0% of 1600 students said they'd prefer in-class instruction to remote leaning when the pandemic quiets down.  Already there's a lot of experimentation on campuses and in some businesses.  An animation company saw productivity crater and is working on a better than Zoom suite of tools for internal use. The university I mentioned has found messaging apps like Discord excel in spaces that Zoom handles poorly.  And perhaps we'll get better Internet connectivity.  Price to performance in the US is abysmal, 5G is a largely marketing joke, cable modems are too asymmetrical (upstream is slow) to support serious video conferencing, and the digital divide has widened the already huge education gap.  There's a lot to fix.  It's like cycling - you need to sort out infrastructure and culture along with adding bikes.  

 

I'm confident tool improvements will come but serious leaps need to be taken and I don't have great confidence in the major players.  What I'm more worried about, at least in the US and Canada, is infrastructure. A friend is moving from Colorado to North Carolina and needs a very solid Internet connection.  The only advice I could give was to find cities that offered good fiber connections that we're from telcos.  That mostly narrowed it down to Ting, which left only a few cities. The movement of people from cities to rural and suburban areas is constrained by many forces - this is one. 

 

On to something else..

 

I've argued that virtual reality wasn't very important and augmented reality meant much more than projecting information in your field of view - and that Apple had just introduced their first AR product. 

 

In a way glasses are AR devices - they help you see more than you normally would. The same for microscopes, telescopes, stethoscopes, I have built bat detectors that let me augment my world by adding a bit of theirs, ... the list is long.  But back to my comment about Apple.   I have to admit I was wrong.  Apple's first AR product was the Apple watch, although they didn't know it at the time.  At first it was more of a fashion statement with a weird assortment of apps.  After a few years they learned what it was for.  People saw it as something for improving their health and fitness. Exercise, heart monitoring, and even the state of your body. Jutta has an app that interfaces with other hardware for diabetes management.  We're talking about life altering AR.   The area is growing rapidly and we won't even think of it as AR because we're used to its Hollywood manifestation.  Of course Alexa, Siri and other voice driven interfaces are AR.  They augment our local information space.  Apple's EarPods are just a portal you wear.  There's still a place to visual AR, but the pot's already boiling.  AR is here now.

 

Of course we should think about how these things fit into our lives. That's a serious area I'm not terribly confident about - at least if tech is making the design choices.

 

 

green flight

Two years ago the Environmental Protection Agency reported aviation accounted for about three percent of the nation's CO₂ emissions, or about twelve percent of transportation.  The international figure is about two point five percent.  These may not seem huge, but they've been growing steadily and, post pandemic, should continue their growth.  Making matters worse is the global warming contribution from the cloud-like contrails produced by the jet engines at altitude.   It's difficult to study, but indications are the contribution may double the global warming impact. 

 

A number of approaches have been suggested and are in various stages of testing.  Moving to bio-fuels isn't the greatest solution as growing and producing biofuels has issues and you're still producing contrails.  In the short term some airlines will move to it, but that may be part a PR and carbon credits game as much as anything. 

 

Electric airplanes exist and there are even a few (very) sort haul commercial flights.  The problem is the specific energy of the battery - how heavy is a battery per unit of energy storage.   Turbine fuel stores about eighty times as much energy as a safe lithium-ion battery of the same weight.  Airplanes frequently carry large amounts of fuel - the weight of fuel burned on a cross country trip is greater than that of the the passengers and crew.  The range of a battery powered airplane is severely limited even after accounting for the great efficiency of an electric motor.   We could get a lot closer with exotic batteries that aren't anywhere close to reality, but even then you're talking about a propeller driven (slower) aircraft. 

 

Hydrogen often comes up as the perfect clean fuel - the combustion product is just water.   Although it's the most common element in the universe and accounts for most of your body's atoms, we need hydrogen gas and that's extremely rare on Earth.  Hydrogen gas (H₂) must to be produced and it takes a lot of energy to create it - more than you can get out of it.  Most of it is produced from a petrochemical process that involves carbon emissions.  This is called black or grey hydrogen and, if you manage to capture most of the carbon emissions it's called blue hydrogen.  What you want is green hydrogen - hydrogen produced using electrolysis with electricity from wind, solar or nuclear power.  That seems like a nice use of excess intermittent power. 

 

It's important to think of hydrogen as an energy storage medium - a non-rechargeable battery of sorts.  It has a very low - essentially unusable energy density at atmospheric pressure.  You'd need impossibly large tanks (think about Hindenburg sized tanks) or you can compress it or liquify it and shrink your tanks to something more manageable.  In gas form at a very high but probably safe pressure it needs about five to ten times the volume of  jet fuel. Liquid hydrogen gets you down to about three and a half times the volume.  

 

Engineering is all about finding an optimal solution to several problems that generally interact.  You could convert a turboprop or turbofan to burn hydrogen and see where that takes you.  Turboprops seem to be workable on short haul routes (1,000 km or less) with small passenger loads (under 100 passengers).  They'd be slow and fly at lower altitudes than today's jets.  Turbofans present a number of problems - at altitude they're making contrails and the range and payload isn't great.  One needs to think a bit out of the box.   

 

You might use a hybrid jet fuel/hydrogen engine that climbs to cruising altitude on jet fuel as fuel consumption is much greater in that phase. Then the switch to hydrogen fuel is made when the engines are throttled back at cruise altitude.  You could also design a lifting body aircraft that has a lot of internal volume for liquid hydrogen fuel tanks without being too large for conventional airports.  Tricks might get you across the US with a few hundred passengers, but flights across the Atlantic or Pacific would require something more. 

 

The prop-driven airplanes present other opportunities. A fuel cell converts hydrogen to electricity and electric motors are more efficient that jet engines.  There are a number of little problems that can be overcome, but a fuel cell propeller airliner may just be a short to medium range solution.

 

I didn't go into the NOx problem.  The high heat of combustion in a jet engine creates nitrous oxides when the nitrogen in the air is heated to high temperatures.  That's a problem - particularly at the high altitudes jets fly at and burning hydrogen won't fix it.  The way around it is to use fuel cells and electric motors, but that's for lower altitudes and slower speeds.  There isn't an ideal solution - you just hope to reduce as much as you can.  

 

Airbus is working on the problem - or at least they were before the pandemic.  I can believe the target date for the propeller aircraft, the lifting body is probably more than fifteen years out.

There may be a near term niche for hydrogen powered flying vehicles.  Agricultural and inspection drones are much larger than hobbyist drones.  They're limited to half hour flight times with batteries, but new fuel cell drones with small high pressure hydrogen tanks have appeared in Korea.  They can fly for hours and that may be the first practical opening for aerial hydrogen.

 

why you can watch I Love Lucy

A few days ago Om and I were talking about some technologies.  I mentioned I sort of predicted one with reasonable confidence about twenty years out.  It seemed a bit too scifi on the surface, but other people in research agreed it could happen if a lot of money was spent.  It seemed desirable, so why not?  There was only one major roadblock and that turned out not to be roadblock at all.  It needed a much better battery than anything we knew about.  A lithium-ion battery was in the ball park at the time, but we had no idea Sony was playing with the technology at the time. We were equally unaware of the fundamental work in university labs two decades before.  

 

It's interesting to think about areas of technology under rapid development and the importance of missing technologies. Television is a great example.

 

Television has been around for a long time.  Philo Farnsworth's all electronic television in the 20s was probably the most important breakthrough.   The lens of a camera focued an image on a photosensitive plate while an electron beam was scanned row by row across the imaged area.  A signal of strength that varied with the brightness of the region the beam was on would be transmitted as a radio signal to a television receiver.  The receiver had a cathode ray tube that, in lock-step with the beam in the camera,  scanned a piece of glass coated with a phosphor that would glow when the beam hit it with a brightness that changed as with the signal the camera was sending. All of this was done at about thirty frames a second - good enough that your mind perceives motion.

 

Television was such a great name - viewing a moving scene at a distance as it happened.  Shortly after WWII a few television networks sent their television signals between cities and then across the country.  Even though the receivers were expensive it quickly caught on and the networks were spending serious money on production. But there was this problem with time zone.  You put a program on at 6 PM in New York City and the television receivers in Los Angeles would display the image at 3 PM.  Not exactly good for creating the largest potential audiences.

 

Electronic recording would fix the problem, but wire and tape recorders were just getting good enough for audio and television signals had about a thousand times as much information.  It just wasn't possible.   The solution seems a bit crazy now - point a film camera at a television monitor and immediately develop the film. Eastern and Central time zones were live, Mountain and Pacific were delayed by two hours.

 

At first these kinescopes used  16mm film.  Once used most of the film was thrown away it degrades and is a fire hazard..  By 1954 television kinescope delayed broadcast became the largest consumer of movie film eclipsing Hollywood and the home movie markets combined. A bit before  I Love Lucy became a huge hit show.  Lucile Ball demanded higher quality so a switch was made to 35mm.    The larger format was so expensive and had to be stored in newly constructed fireproof facilities.  An archive began to emerge. 

 

A few years passed and Ampex came out with a video recorder able to handle the flood of information. - a monster that used two inch wide tape.  An expensive and initially temperamental monster that used two inch tape, but dirt cheap compared to the  kinescope process.  It quickly became the standard for time zone delay. The curious thing is that the television people didn't see tape as an archive medium.  For a few years none of the tape delayed shows remain as the expensive tapes were reused until they wore out.  No one thought long term storage was important.

 

The last part is interesting.  We don't think of television as remote viewing - rather it's a video stream that might be live, time delayed, manipulated,  archived, or all of these. 

 

Oh .. the prediction from 1993?   You will take a flat piece of glass out of your pocket and have a video conversation with a relative in India and the "call" won't cost anything.  We knew how to code video, mobile radio would easily have the bandwidth in 15 or 20 years, multi-touch screens were in the labs, lcd color screens and lcd cameras were only going to get better, the price of bandwidth was going to crater (our corporate management didn't like that message) ... Moore's law on everything but the battery.   Note:  I've made a few good predictions, but looking back at my old lab books can be an embarrassment - you tend to forget the dead ends.  

 

 

moving from noun to verb

About a week ago Apple announced its latest Watch.  While it isn't a major leap, Horace and Om wrote great pieces about something more significant - namely what it does.¹  The first few iterations were a bit muddled - now it has become a wearable assistive technology.  That's significant.

 

Assistive technology invokes images of wheelchairs, braces, crutches and so on..  adaptations to make life easier for those people with physical problems.  It's a mistake to think that way.  All of us use these technologies  (I'll ignore the distinction between assistive and adaptive) ..  utensils, chairs, shoes, door knobs, screw drivers - all of these count.  Many of us wear eye glasses - a technology that compensates for a deficiency that would be a serious handicap if not corrected.  Some people have artificial joints and pacemakers - implantable assistive technologies that are always worn.   It begs the question of who gets to be called normal and who makes the decision.  I've written about that, so back to the Apple Watch.

 

At the beginning of the nineteenth century town clocks were an adaptive technology that gave people in emerging industrial cities a sense of common time to allow for synchronized work.  Less expensive models for the home became a necessity for workers who could afford them.  People who couldn't employed a variety of other techniques including "knocker-uppers" - people you would pay to make sure you got up in time.  Towards the end of the century the need for standards and a more global time synchronization emerged - railroads were the first big driver.

 

Railroad time is to the time of the future. The Sun is no longer to boss the job. People—all 55,000,000 of them—must eat, sleep and work as well as travel by railroad time. It is a revolt, a rebellion. The sun will be requested to rise and set by railroad time. The planets must, in the future, make their circuits by such timetables as railroad magnates arrange. People will have to marry by railroad time, and die by railroad time. Ministers will be required to preach by railroad time—banks will open and close by railroad time—in fact, the Railroad Convention has taken charge of the time business, and the people may as well set about adjusting their affairs in accordance with its decree… . We presume the sun, moon and stars will make an attempt to ignore the orders of the Railroad Convention, but they, too, will have to give in at last.
—Indianapolis Sentinel, 21 November 1883

 

Synchronizing clocks turns out to be an interesting technical problem. A Swiss patent clerk named Albert Einstein specialized in clock synchronization patents by day while thinking about time more deeply after hours.  

 

With atomic clocks - some orbiting in GPS satellites - we now have very accurate time synchronization available anywhere on Earth.  It's available in your smartphone and your Apple Watch with much better accuracy than the display requires .. very accurate time is much more central to communication and location determination. 

 

So just how important is a watch as something you wear to tell you the time - the watch as a simple noun?

 

There are still synchronizations for connecting with people, transport, broadcasts and so on.  Some of that requires less synchronization.  Some of the most creative work is poorly synchronized much of the time.  Television has become streaming video at your convenience and much of radio has turned into podcasts and streaming audio.  So why wear a thick $400 piece of hardware on your wrist?

 

You wear it because it is becoming a verb.  It's stuffed full of sensors and watches you.  A growing list of health, exercise and motivation related functions.  Complex computations turn thousands of dollar of tech in a doctor's office or researcher's lab into a few one dollar sensors and software.  And all of this can be networked.  I'll mention Happy Bob - a Type 1 Diabetes app by one of you (Jutta Haaramo) that is making the lives of thousands of diabetics easier.   This is only the beginning.    The Watch overlaps a bit with the iPhone, but they mostly fill very different functions - wearable is a big deal.  It's important to note the Watch still has a lot of headroom for growth. 

 

We humans have been expanding and augmenting the basic human body for over ten thousand years and the process is accelerating.   It's exciting, but we should be thinking more deeply about what it means as well as who is normal and who decides.

__________

¹ Oxygen saturation wasn't difficult to add - it exists elsewhere.  What is important is the watch can keep a record.  A General Practitioner friend is currently testing one. If it takes good readings he's going to recommend it to patients who are in the at risk categories for Covid-19 - cheap insurance. 

That said I think the major improvement was the addition of an ultra-wideband chip. I wouldn't buy a device just for that as this is preliminary work for something that could be very big, but it's good to know new iPhones and Apple Watches have the capability now.

normal?

About six months ago I found myself spending a lot of time thinking about finally returning to normal and if there would be a new normal.  That line of thinking evolved into the question of what normal is - what activities are considers normal, who can participate in them,  who is normal , and how society sorts out questions like that.  Some I had puzzled out before and had even worked on, but many new questions came up.

 

Normal populations of people are a fairly construction dating to the 1800s when people began to study people as groups using techniques taken from astronomy.   We tend to think of populations fitting in a bell shaped curve -  "normal" distributions.  Height is the usual example.   A few people are very short, most fall within certain boundaries of the bell curve and a few are very tall.  This shouldn't really matter, but the made world is not flexible enough and excludes populations at the tails.   Cars, bicycles, clothes, chairs, restrooms and so on aren't made for the very tall or very short.  A few readers happen to be very tall.   Nothing fits and resorting to custom manufacture is often necessary.  It's a tax on being too tall. Short people arguably pay a stiffer tax which is nothing like that those with physical and mental challenges bear.

 

In the 1950s aircraft design was evolving rapidly.  The US Air Force needed a standardized cockpit.  Well over 100 measurements were taken on over 4,000 pilots to determine what was average so a "golden cockpit" could be easily specified.  Unfortunately the data designed cockpit was a disaster.  Skilled pilots were making lethal errors.    A young analyst - Lt. Gilbert Douglas - cracked the problem by asking if it was possible "average" didn't exist.  Douglas looked at a midrange of pilot heights - something like 5'7 to 5'11 and created an average pilot for the ten most important cockpit measurements allowing for what seemed to be a reasonable 30% variation.  Then he went back to the measurements of the 4,000 real pilots looking at these ten measurements.  Not a single real pilot was average.   The golden cockpit was abandoned and new cockpit designs were created allowing for a broad range of adjustments.  

 

Mechanically simple, the new cockpit adjustments for everything important were just simple assistive technologies.  All of us use assistive and adaptive technologies.  Glasses, oven mitts, hammers, utensils, baseball bats -  I remember a physical anthropologist saying "the human animal is coextensive with its tools"  We are now adding electronic adaptations with varying degrees of success. 

 

Why is it we see adaptive technologies for those who doesn't fall into the normal classification in the same way we look at glasses or  running shoes?  Why are some people excluded from the made world?   Who makes the designs?  What questions does the design process ask as does it go deep enough?   Do the solutions have utility, significance and even desirability and beauty?

 

"Normal" is a privilege most of us inherit that blinds or biases us to those outside the bell curve.  The view from the tails of that curve tell us just how unfinished the world is. 

 

What interests me at the moment is the question of individuality and independence. Some people have a difficult to impossible time making it in the world without the help of others.  Some are forgotten and even warehoused.  How they are treated often depends on societal norms and often the wealth or lack of wealth of their families. Some designers work on these issues.  I'm not a designer, but have had a bit of first had experience.   Independence is often the end goal, but now I wonder if that's correct?  With the isolation many of us have been experiencing I have to wonder if the best designs might be hybrid.  Enough independence, but also enough real human interaction.   Dignity requires both. Having to deal with aging parents taught me how awful loneliness is for so many.  How can designs integrate dignity and shared humanity? 

 

 

smart cities aren't

The chocolate chip cookie recipe arrived at my office a few weeks after I left Orlando.  I baked a batch a few days later - they were exactly like the ones I had in the board room.  Incredible.  And then there was the room's Coca Cola machine.  Not only did it have a knob to adjust the syrup percentage, but the crystal glasses were already iced.  It was my first visit to a Disney theme park - not that I hadn't been given an opportunity.

 

My twelfth birthday present was tagging along with my father to a training session in Los Angeles.  Friends and relatives had my time all mapped out - Disneyland, Hollywood, and so on - but were disappointed when I turned all of it down.  Somehow I had talked them into letting me visit the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the planetarium at Griffith Park, and the museum at the La Brea tarpits.  Disney just didn't seem to have much to offer.  And somehow, a few few decades later, I found myself spending time visiting major customers of our company to listen to their problems.  Disney was a big customer.

 

Disney was designing the Town of Celebration and were looking for "cool" technologies.  We were interested in it as a test bed and potential showcase. Over the course of about a dozen visits I ran into a good deal of technological  and social cluelessness along with smatterings of seriously interesting ideas.  The Disney Imagineers were great and through them I met Randy Pausch of CMU who was also asking questions about Celebration. (If you haven't heard about Randy, check out his last lecture.  It's the best thing you'll do today.)  The executive class wasn't in the same league.

 

A few projects took flight, but most on their list weren't available or practical (sensing someone's health via their toilet:-).  Celebration was supposed to be a model of the New Urbanism movement, which sounds like a good idea on the surface, but you need social glue to make it work and that didn't exist.  So a town was developed and Disney exited as political problems surfaced.  On the other hand I had a preview of what was to come from an anthropologist who was studying the project.  I also learned that Waffle Houses aren't very vegetarian friendly. 

 

A call from an old friend who disappeared to Googleland years ago brought all of this back. He had been with Sidewalk Labs - Google's urban technology arm.  Their goal is to somehow improve life using Google technology.  It sounded like an underpants gnome affair. 

 

The first project was going to be sited on Toronto's waterfront.  In addition to high tech offices there would be residences with Jetsonish features like pneumatic tube trash collection, heated streets to melt snow,  autonomous vehicles, and a digital panopticon to measure and project as much as they could about everyone and everything.   Some rather intense local opposition developed. Who knew Canadians might worry about digital privacy, data ownership and the monopolistic nature of the design.  Opposition increased as it became clear Google would be the main beneficiary until the corona virus appeared giving Google an excuse to exit. (for those interested in an analysis this paper by Teresa Scassa of U Ottawa is excellent.)

 

For about two decades a few large corporations have been interested in the "smart" city.  It's a rich topic to think about.  How is information gathered, who owns it, who processes it and who owns the processed information? How does the information interact with people?  (I was told Google wanted to predict potential criminality in conjunction with the police). Who defines benefits?  Who decides what makes people "happy"

 

I suspect top down approaches are doomed to failure - modern day versions of the company town where you're always being watched.  A more interesting question is what is possible from the ground up and what is possible that isn't data oriented?  We're going to see an explosion in sensor technology with a lot of rich companies pushing to exploit opportunities.  Thinking deeply about the evolution of cities and suburbs is more important than ever.  This place may be interesting as it isn't so top down and its technology is more distributed.  

 

A final comment. My gut feeling is one of the best ways to improve urban life involves removing cars and moving to active and public transportation as much as possible. It's a different use of the term "smart", but I think some Nordics are moving in that direction.   Some tech is involved, but it's mostly physical  infrastructure, laws, public education.  But that's just one person's opinion.

 

lightning in a bottle

Last week I had my first face to face group meeting since early March. Seven of us set up lawn chairs in a distanced circle on a beautiful lawn.  Apart from not being able to hear each other without speaking up and needing something better to draw on, it was wonderful.  I could talk about the out of band signals that face ot face conversation has, but something else struck me.  Our group tells stories and listens.  We have a real dialog - our group is smarter than the smartest individual. 

 

Dialog was one of the terms the social science group I was associated with banned.  Many people equate dialog with debate.  My favorite way to communicate with small groups (often one other person) is to have a dialog.  We tell stories and listen to each other discovering and learning about each other and ourselves along the way. Both of us can be smarter than each of us as individuals.   Debate - where one person says something and the other challenges  - is the opposite of dialog.  It attempts to convince.  When people with different strongly held opinions engage in debate both parties are dragged into the mud.  Debate fuels emotion and happens to be easy to jump into and highly addictive.   It's a form of communication that is easily weaponized with the aid of machine learning to promote engagement and sell advertising. 

 

Social media platforms focus on social comparison, competition, competition, unsupervised debate and so on. Some allow isolated groups where learning and dialog can place, but tools rarely support that and these groups depend on excellent moderation to survive. 

 

Zoom and other conversation tools have a lot of warts, but allow open conversation that can be turned into dialog. They tend to use subscription models.  People have speculated on the design of real dialog platforms, but I suspect much of the magic is in the same category of picking the perfect members of a team.  My friends tend to be those I can have interesting dialogs with - those who I can learn from.  i only hope our conversations are half as useful to them.

 

There's a special kind of dialog.  The face to face meeting I mentioned had little breadth in educational background.  We get things done, but I've found a lot of creativity seems to happen after talking to or working with someone who is smart, but in a very different field.  The process of learning from them seems to populate and connect parts of your mind that had never connected. Two weeks ago I had a long conversation - a dialog - with someone who is very different.  Over the next week new thoughts came almost daily and one gave me insight into something I've been thinking about for over a decade.  Lightning in a bottle dialogs.  Are there ways to support them?  I suspect the answer won't come from technology.

 

 

 

 

 

sometimes you need one heck of a butterfly

In the early 60s Edward Lorenz was working on one of the first computational weather prediction models.  Many of the early explorers, new to computer programming, were getting bitten by limits of the machines and software.   Lorenz, the story goes, was running a numerical computer model to redo a weather prediction from the middle of the previous run as a shortcut. He entered the initial condition shortening it in a way he didn't think would matter given the accuracy it was measured to (say 0.504 rather than 0.504103)

 

"At one point I decided to repeat some of the computations in order to examine what was happening in greater detail. I stopped the computer, typed in a line of numbers that it had printed out a while earlier, and set it running again. I went down the hall for a cup of coffee and returned after about an hour, during which time the computer had simulated about two months of weather. The numbers being printed were nothing like the old ones. I immediately suspected a weak vacuum tube or some other computer trouble, which was not uncommon, but before calling for service I decided to see just where the mistake had occurred, knowing that this could speed up the servicing process. Instead of a sudden break, I found that the new values at first repeated the old ones, but soon afterward differed by one and then several units in the last decimal place, and then began to differ in the next to the last place and then in the place before that. In fact, the differences more or less steadily doubled in size every four days or so, until all resemblance with the original output disappeared somewhere in the second month. This was enough to tell me what had happened: the numbers that I had typed in were not the exact original numbers, but were the rounded-off values that had appeared in the original printout. The initial round-off errors were the culprits; they were steadily amplifying until they dominated the solution." ¹

 

Small changes to an input that was iterated many times created a big change in the output. He presented it at a conference causing someone in the audience to comment a single flap of a seagull's wings could change the weather forever.  Lorenz started using that in his talk changing it to the more poetic single flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil setting off a tornado in Texas.

 

The image resonated with many existing notions about complex systems including science fiction where a time traveler steps on a bug and returns to a vastly changed future.  From there it has managed to become an embedded concept - usually used to describe chaotic and large inefficient systems.  The problem is it isn't always true. In fact it's usually false.

 

Chaotic systems are often less sensitive to change than other systems.  Run a stream of water in your sink.  The motion in the flow is extremely chaotic - no computer could keep up with the details.  Stick your finger in for a second.  The overall flow changed while your finger was present, but quickly returned to its normal chaotic level almost immediately after you took it out. 

 

The climate system is extraordinarily complex. Predicting weather in advance has made incredible progress thanks to better models, hardware, and software.  It turns out there's probably a limit to how far models can predict based on fundamental changes in the atmosphere.  They aren't butterflies.  Butterfly wing flaps are quickly dampened out by thermal motions of the surrounding air.  To make a change you need big butterfly - a really big butterfly ..  the equivalent of several massive thunderstorms taking place in areas you can't predict ahead to the necessary accuracy.  A butterfly flap equivalent of several thermonuclear explosions.²

 

Inefficient complex systems tend to heal themselves.  The Internet, the way food used to be grown and distributed .. almost any large scale process before it was made "efficient" .. tend to be much more robust than efficient systems where "wasteful" redundancy has been removed.  I worry we're witnessing some of that now as the result of a large perturbation to numerous systems.

 

People often come away with the idea that you can manipulate a large complex system if you only can figure out what breed of butterfly to use and exactly when and where to turn it loose.  It's a fool's errand.  Instead you need to study these systems to learn if it is possible to steer them and how you might do it.  The real insight may be you need to change the system itself rather than its inputs.  

 

The same is true for complex efficient systems.  A very small change can crash them.  High efficiency can be the enemy of robustness. Of course systems can be too inefficient - the trick is to find the right balance to build robust systems.

 

________

It's easy to build simple systems where butterflies are very effective.  Lorenz's weather program was simple and easily influenced and it's really easy to find simple expressions that are hair trigger sensitive.³

 

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¹ E. N. Lorenz, The Essence of Chaos, U. Washington Press, Seattle (1993), page 134

² a few times 10¹⁵ J - several hundred kilotons to one megaton.  A large thunderstorm is in the ballpark.

³ I won't spell it out, but if you're comfortable with differential equations consider y'' - y = 0  (say y(t) is position as a function of time) with the initial conditions y(0) = 1 and y'(0) = -1.  The solution is simple and predictable.  

Now imagine you have a measurement error and y'(0) = -1 ± ε  where ε is small.  Different, eh?  :-)

 

 

n95s explained

an Omenti minipost

 

Before diving in consider the bad guy. Viruses are really small. Viruses (thousands) are transported in droplets. Large droplets (0.3 micron to millimeter size) come from talking, singing, sneezing and so on. There are also laerosol droplets under a tenth of a micron that also are byproducts of talking, singing, breathing and so on. The large drops fall to the ground fairly quickly, but can shoot a fair distance. The aerosols can hang around in still air for a long time.. sometimes hours.  

 

N95s aren’t a sieve of very fine holes - or even a series of sieves. They consider of several layers of fibers… sort of a gauze of fibers - I was reminded of cotton candy (spun maple candy if you’re Canadian). The goal is not to block particles, but rather get them to stick to a fiber. The neat bit of physics is micron and smaller sized particles stick to about anything due to the van der Waals force (there’s an attractive force at small distances like these. It’s one of the reasons why IC manufacture must be done in exceptionally clean areas.) Effectively a cotton candy mass of sticky spiderweb strands.

 

All you have to do is get the particles to touch a strand.

 

BIg particles .. larger than a micron .. have a lot of momentum and behave like objects we’re used to seeing fly through the air. Their trajectory is mostly a straight line. The fact there are multiple layers mean one eventually strikes a fiber - the really big ones (millimeter size) are blocked by several fibers like a conventional mask.

 

The tiny aerosol particles are small enough to be bounced around by Brownian motion following a random path that traces out a slowly expanding region. Their random path give them a high probability of bumping into a fiber.

 

The tough ones are the intermediate size — say 0.3 to 0.5 microns. They don’t move in straight lines like the large particles and don’’t bounce around like the aerosols. Instead they follow the airflow and smoothly streamline around the fibers (technically they have a very small Reynolds number). Mmany could get through .. perhaps more than a good standard mask would permit. But the N95 has a trick up its sleeve (if a mask could have a sleeve) The fibers are made of a special material that holds an electrostatic charge for a long time… you’ve probably rubbed a balloon and watched it collect small bits of paper. These particles (and the others) feel the charge from a distance a bit larger than the space between fibers and are attracted.

 

The mask is a roach motel for virus carrying droplets.

 

The N95 rating means about 95% of these intermediate particles are trapped by the mask along with nearly 100% of the larger and smaller particles. There are N97 and N100 masks, but they’re much more expensive,

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Why you don’t want to wear one.

They require a tight fit that isn’t easy to achieve and they aren’t comfortable, Beards are out. They have a port that lets you exhale.. they only protect you rather than others. The important feature of mask wearing is not so much to protect yourself, but to protect others.

They have a limited shelf life (the electrostatic charge wears off)

You should only use them once and then throw them.

If there were enough to go around the trick would be to wear a good fitting cloth mask over the N95 to protect others.