A Surprising Journey

I enjoy reading Carl Zimmer's articles on science. He has a way with words and ideas and gives the reader a wonderful insight into nooks and crannies of contemporary science. This bit from an article in the NY Times shows how a career in science can be full of surprises:

At the studio Mr. Pell helped Dr. Wainwright and his colleagues build models to test their ideas about biomechanics, creating models of spinal cords, muscles, jaws and dozens of other animal parts. “These models can physically surprise you,” said Mr. Pell. “They can show you things that you didn’t think of before you built them.”

One of Mr. Pell’s biggest surprises came when he tried to make a simple model of a swimming fish. He built a rubber tube with a rounded front and then stuck a rod a quarter of the way down its length. When he put the tube in water and turned the rod back and forth between his fingers, it generated a wave with its tail. While making a new version of that tube, Mr. Pell accidentally nicked the tail end. That new shape, he discovered, caused the water to flow in a different pattern around the tube, creating thrust.

Mr. Pell, Dr. Wainwright and their colleagues got a patent for the design and started a company called Nekton to develop products from it. First, they turned it into a commercially successful bathtub toy. But when the Navy discovered Mr. Pell and his colleagues could get fishlike thrust from something without any moving parts, they encouraged him to get into the business of building underwater robots. Mr. Pell and his colleague at Nekton ended up making a highly maneuverable yardlong robot called the Pilot Fish.

“We started out as a toy company; we ended up as a defense contractor,” said Mr. Pell.

We need a world in which people with the quirky skills and interests needed to create have free rein to create. Innovation makes us all wealthier. Sadly our institutions are set up for rote learning and text book skills and not dreams and innovation. We need to "breed" more eccentrics and dreamers.

Low Tech Solutions for a Better World

I don't enjoy people lecturing, sermonizing, or hectoring me to sign up for their vision of a better world. I prefer it when people simply show what they have and let you decide for yourself.

Here's some stuff by an interesting guy named Willis Eschenbach on a cheap tech way to get safe drinking water for the billion poorest people on earth while finding a real use for old water bottles:

One of the joys of writing for this blog is that I can promote good ideas. Here’s one I just came across, thanks to a commenter on another post of mine. The idea is solar disinfection of water, or SODIS. Follow the link, lots of good info.

The idea is bozo simple. Put water into a clear plastic bottle. Shake it up well to oxygenate it. Put it out in the sun. Six hours in the sun and the oxygen plus the solar UV kills diarrhea.

I mean, how great is that? Now that’s solar tech I can get behind 100% … plus it uses up old water bottles. And doesn’t require any chemicals. Brilliant. Get the word out. Kids’ lives are at stake.

Why hasn't something like this been funded by Canada's CIDA or by the US's USAID. Oh wait a second... the real purpose of these "aid" bureaucrats is to sell surplus goods from the mother country, or sucker a poor country into dependency on some expensive good sold by the mother country, all done under the auspice of "aid". So a cheap technology that actually helps people never catches the bureaucrat's attention. Instead you fund "showcase" technology and other boondoggles.

An Excellent Lecture on 3D Printing

This video is a lot of fun but it is serious. This kid brings the house down with his lecture on 3D printing:


The video is from here and came with this blurb:

On Friday, February 11th, a young inventor named Schuyler, age 10, stepped on to the stage in front of a sold out crowd of 850 people at Ignite Phoenix and proceeded to explain why he loves his 3D printer, a MakerBot.

The delivery is perfect. He gave shoutouts to Thingiverse, the RepRap community and his local hackerspace heatsynclabs. Most importantly, he explained 3D printing in a clear and understandable way that any other 10 year old, or parent of a 10 year old, can understand.

Our mission at MakerBot is to Democratize Manufacturing and empowering young people with technology is baked into the DNA of MakerBot. Seeing MakerBot presented at Ignite in such a great way by such a great young person is super awesome! A huge congrats to Schuyler! So great!

What kid wouldn't want his own 3D printer? Come to think of it... what adult wouldn't want one as well?

Nifty Toys for Tots

This is an excellent toy for a kid...



I'm amazed that you can't buy a toy like this in the toy shops of the developed world. My cynical side says you can't because there isn't enough "profit" in this kind of toy. Instead of being able to sell some expensive and patented "rocket fuel" this thing runs on water and a simple candle. Cheap. Fun. Appropriately noisy and a wonderful action figure.

No expensive electronics, no batteries needed, no constant trips to the store to buy expensive supplies. There just isn't enough "profit" in this toy for it to make it to the shops in the developed world. Tragic.

Global Food Scare

The gloom-and-doom crowd is at it again. With the floods in Australia and problems with crops around the world, they are convinced that food riots will soon break out everywhere and you best pack your gun and head for the hills.

But here is reality:


I found that image in Andrew Revkin's blog on the NY Times. He documents an exchange he initiated between Vaclav Smil, the University of Manitoba analyst of just about every global risk and trend, and Lester Brown, who heads the Earth Policy Institute and has for decades warned of economic and environmental unraveling. I side with Smil:

There are always speculative food price currents and undercurrents but no end of days as so many of your fellow citizens, being the most scientifically illiterate people who ever lived, think. Just look at #1, China: imports less than 5% of its food and CONSUMES more food per capita than Japan!!!

Nothing has changed since I wrote that closing chapter of my 2000 feeding the world book: if China can do it, anybody (but Somalia) can [*]. Nor is India “starving.” Any food shortages are 95%+ a matter of poor or no governance, not any “extreme” climate and “gunwale inching”… Queensland does not grow wheat in any quantity, just check the wheatland map of Australia, and as always you newsie guys have exaggerated the story, both south and north of the state are open for business; no end of Australia.

There is much in this exchange to please both the doomsters as well as the those like myself who use Julian Simons, author of The Ultimate Resource, as a guide.

Steven Johnson on Inventions

Here's a nice video reviewing Steven Johnson's ideas on "where inventions come from". This is a promo for his soon-to-be published book Where Good Ideas Come From(coming out October 5th):



You can get another taste of Steven Johnson giving a TED talk from February 2003 about his book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software and his experience on 9/11:



And here is my take on his previous book The Invention of Air.

Requiem for a Summer Now Past

Here's a little Gershwin...



If you want to know what makes this octet unusual, read this posting by Jennifer Ouellette on the Cocktail Physics web site. It is a recap of the life of instrument maker Carleen Hutchins with a couple of YouTube videos stuck in. It is very nice. Go read the posting.

Doom and Gloom, Again!

When I was young, foolish, and idealistic, I easily fell for the doom-and-gloom scenarios. They all sound just plausible enough. And if you are civic-minded you want to get out there and "stop it" or "fix it". Only by being run through this idiocy a number of times have I become a jaded cynic unwilling to get caught up in the latest fashionable doom-and-gloom story.

Here's the current version given by Vincent Rossmeier in an article on Salon that reviews the book A Better Pencil by Denis Baron. Baron's book looks at the looming threat of "the Internet" to human civilization:

By now the arguments are familiar: Facebook is ruining our social relationships; Google is making us dumber; texting is destroying the English language as we know it. We're facing a crisis, one that could very well corrode the way humans have communicated since we first evolved from apes. What we need, so say these proud Luddites, is to turn our backs on technology and embrace not the keyboard, but the pencil.

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His [Baron's] thesis is clear: Every communication advancement throughout human history, from the pencil to the typewriter to writing itself, has been met with fear, skepticism and a longing for the medium that's been displaced. Far from heralding in a "2001: Space Odyssey" dystopia, Baron believes that social networking sites, blogs and the Internet are actually making us better writers and improving our ability to reach out to our fellow man. "A Better Pencil" is both a defense of the digital revolution and a keen examination of how technology both improves and complicates our lives.

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Historically, when the new communication device comes out, the reaction tends to be divided. Some people think it's the best thing since sliced bread; other people fear it as the end of civilization as we know it. And most people take a wait and see attitude. And if it does something that they're interested in, they pick up on it, if it doesn't, they don't buy into it.

I start with Plato's critique of writing where he says that if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember things. Our memory will become weak. And he also criticizes writing because the written text is not interactive in the way spoken communication is. He also says that written words are essentially shadows of the things they represent. They're not the thing itself. Of course we remember all this because Plato wrote it down -- the ultimate irony.

We hear a thousand objections of this sort throughout history: Thoreau objecting to the telegraph, because even though it speeds things up, people won't have anything to say to one another. Then we have Samuel Morse, who invents the telegraph, objecting to the telephone because nothing important is ever going to be done over the telephone because there's no way to preserve or record a phone conversation. There were complaints about typewriters making writing too mechanical, too distant -- it disconnects the author from the words. That a pen and pencil connects you more directly with the page. And then with the computer, you have the whole range of "this is going to revolutionize everything" versus "this is going to destroy everything."

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Computer socialization -- is this putting an end to face-to-face human interaction? Or does it let us expand our social networks when face-to-face communication is not possible, either because of geographic distance or some other barrier? Obviously, there are people who will reject these kinds of things out of hand and say the only meaningful communication is the one that I can have face-to-face with someone, who say calling Facebook "friends" friends is the end of the meaning of friendship.

On the other hand, I survey my students all the time about this, and there's confirming data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project that, in fact, what people are using programs like Facebook and e-mail and chats for is to reinforce friendships and to maintain friendships across distance. My students say I did this semester abroad and the only way I could keep in contact with my friends was through Facebook, and stuff like that. I don't think for most people it replaces anything. I think it extends it. But certainly, there are people who want to say, look I have 15,000 Facebook friends and look how popular I am.

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We have, through the history of communications, this whole tension between giving people the tools to express themselves and regulating that expression: Who should be allowed to publish? Whose manuscript should be allowed to appear as a play in the 17th century? In London, you had to have government approval before you could put on a play. Shakespeare had to get that approval from the authorities. So what the computer does is subvert those traditional gate-keeping facilities. You don’t need an editor, you don’t need a publisher. All you need is a Wi-Fi and an Apple laptop and a place to sit at Starbucks and you’re a writer. And the funny thing is that you could put anything out there, and somebody is going to read it. Writers spend their whole lives looking for readers and now with the computer, readers are there. They’re just waiting for people to put stuff online. Does this dilute the quality? That’s a matter of opinion. Giving more people the authority to write – people are doing it and they seem to find things to say and they’re finding readers and that’s one criterion for successful writing: having an audience.

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There’s always been too much to read. Nobody read all the books at the Great Library of Alexandria. Nobody was capable of doing that then. Nobody is reading all that’s online today. What we need and what we always seem to get is a way to make this glut of information navigable. We need search engines, we need indexing, we need reviews. We have all this apparatus to find the data we’re looking for.

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The more people use technology, the more people communicate, the more people in power become concerned with how to control that use. There are two forces pushing against each other. Whether it’s government or religious organizations or schools controlling what children do online or parents controlling what their kids are doing with communication technologies or groups online self-organizing and deciding how to control what does and does not get expressed -- it’s similar to what happened when printing presses became a major means of communication or when radio and TV became major communication players. How do you license, how do you control what gets said on the air? There’s a lot of bad stuff online and there’s a lot of good stuff online, and it’s going to take a long time to figure out what standards and regulations are going to be acceptable that aren’t going to stifle creativity but that are going to give people some security as well.

I'm in the "freedom" camp. Regulation is a last resort. A truly civil society relies on individual good judgment, then on layers of social approval/disapproval by family, peers, community, nation, etc., and finally you invoke laws and regulation as a last defense against real dangers. But the mailed fist needs to come last to handle the incorrigible, not as a unthinking, immediate reflex to "control" people.

An example of control: I read recently an account of the tens of millions of "regulatory dollars" (lawyers, bureaucrats, company official, self-appointed moral censors) being spent on the one-second exposure of Janet Jackson's nipple during a wardrobe malfunction. That is so out of proportion to any "social harm" that it is ludicrous. Those tens of millions would be better spent feeding the poor. But instead they are sucked up by the rich and powerful as they sit and pontificate on how they will impose "morals" on society. But this presupposes that letting people starve to death is morally OK. It isn't. It just doesn't get the glamour press that Janet Jackson's nipple commands.

Shiller on Financial Innovation & Risk

Here is a very good interview of Robert Shiller on The Charlie Rose Show. The cover the housing crisis, Shiller's "Case-Shiller Index", his new book Animal Spirits, and financial innovations to manage risk:

Opportunity or Threat?

A number of people have been remarking that recessions/depressions are times of great innovation. Presumably when things get bad, taking a risk seems less risky. Or perhaps if you are unemployed, you might as well employ yourself by becoming entrepreneurial or getting serious about developing some idea you have.

Here is an interesting article by James Surowiecki in The New Yorker magazine:

In the late nineteen-twenties, two companies—Kellogg and Post—dominated the market for packaged cereal. It was still a relatively new market: ready-to-eat cereal had been around for decades, but Americans didn’t see it as a real alternative to oatmeal or cream of wheat until the twenties. So, when the Depression hit, no one knew what would happen to consumer demand. Post did the predictable thing: it reined in expenses and cut back on advertising. But Kellogg doubled its ad budget, moved aggressively into radio advertising, and heavily pushed its new cereal, Rice Krispies. (Snap, Crackle, and Pop first appeared in the thirties.) By 1933, even as the economy cratered, Kellogg’s profits had risen almost thirty per cent and it had become what it remains today: the industry’s dominant player.

You’d think that everyone would want to emulate Kellogg’s success, but, when hard times hit, most companies end up behaving more like Post. They hunker down, cut spending, and wait for good times to return. They make fewer acquisitions, even though prices are cheaper. They cut advertising budgets. And often they invest less in research and development. They do all this to preserve what they have. But there’s a trade-off: numerous studies have shown that companies that keep spending on acquisition, advertising, and R. & D. during recessions do significantly better than those which make big cuts.

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The academics Peter Dickson and Joseph Giglierano have argued that companies have to worry about two kinds of failure: “sinking the boat” (wrecking the company by making a bad bet) or “missing the boat” (letting a great opportunity pass). Today, most companies are far more worried about sinking the boat than about missing it. That’s why the opportunity to do what Kellogg did exists. That’s also why it’s so nerve-racking to try it.