Engineering Life

Artistry Across Media or My Three Favorite Film Adaptations

2012-01-15T20:46:00.000-08:00

With The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey due out in theaters soon (er or later), a lot of fans are debating the merits and demerits of Peter Jackson's film adaptations of Tolkien's works - a debate with which I am intimately familiar, having argued the demerits frequently and fervently in my younger, more impassioned days. I'm not going to take up that argument again (I'm getting too old for this sort of thing), but I would like to reply to one of the most common rebuttals to arguments against the films.

"You can't make a film exactly the same as a book - that's why they call it an adaptation. Things that work in books don't work in movies - like you can't show the characters' internal monologues on film."

I'll agree with your premise, but disagree that the license of adaptation can excuse all of the choices made in the production of the films. What a truly good adaptation does is embodies the spirit of its source in a new medium - it shows a deep knowledge of and respect for its source, and gives its viewers the same feeling upon watching it that the book gives its readers upon reading. With that ideal in mind, I give you an annotated list of my favorite adaptations, which may help to elucidate my expectations.

Sin City
Director Robert Rodriguez refers to his film as a "translation" rather than an adaptation, so it may not be quite fair to admire it as a pinnacle of the art of adaptation, but the translation is really quite impressive. Impressive not because the graphic novels were used as the film's storyboards, or because nearly every line of dialogue came from the novels. From the casting to the coloring to the set design, every step of production (which often involved groundbreaking production techniques) was calculated to be the graphic novel on film. Some would say it didn't make a very good film, but I do not think that its failures were due to the failure of the adaptation. I think that watching the film is every bit as good as reading the graphic novel, and if you (like me) have trouble getting your eyes to follow the action from frame to frame on the page, watching the movie will give you fundamentally the same experience.

The Silence of the Lambs
The book was a surprisingly literate crime thriller that developed who should have been a throw-away creepy villain (for that's about all he was in Harris's previous novel, Red Dragon) into a truly chilling, memorable character. The film, through skillful directing and impeccable casting, turned it into an unforgettably tense psychological thriller and elevated Hannibal Lecter to the very top of his profession. The increased effectiveness of the film did not come from changing anything significant about the plot or even the characters; I think it had more to do with the ability of film, at its best, to draw out more tension than literature. I estimate the film and the book as perfectly level in terms of artistry - no masterpiece, either of them - but the film strikes me as slightly more effective.

No Country for Old Men
This book was incredible. The film was every bit as good. I do not think it's a coincidence that the film recreates the book almost scene-for-scene (and occasionally line-for-line), but that fidelity is not its most impressive fear. Somehow the Coen brothers manage to translate McCarthy's iconic literary style into a visual style that works every bit as well. Most of the book is written in a down-to-earth, simple vocabulary, but the lexicon McCarthy uses to describe the landscapes sent me to a dictionary several times. Much of the film was filled with wide, sweeping vistas saturated with color and texture. In the book, the characters boots garner frequent mention as a sort of representation. . . well, a great many things. In the film, likewise, we have many shots centering on boots, and an entire scene about Llewellyn buying boots. Even the narration from Tommy Lee Jones matches the italicized chapter-openings, if not word-for-word (though, if I recall correctly, it sometimes does) then at least in tone. Once again, I would rank the artistry of these two works as perfectly equal. If I like the film more, it is only because I've seen so few films as good, when I've read many books as good. If I like the book more, it is only because I generally prefer reading to watching movies.

And those are all the adaptations that I've really liked. Adapting a good book can be done faithfully, though faithfulness has more to do with respect for the source material than with actual fidelity. Speaking of respect for source material, one last thought about The Hobbit films: If they really were made out of love and respect for the book, wouldn't they be subtitled "There and Back Again" and "A Hobbit's Holiday?" To invent a new subtitle implies that you really split this into two (when you managed to fit The Return of the King into one film) to make more money at the box office.

A point on political rhetoric

2012-01-14T20:02:00.000-08:00

I really hate the cliche "A rising tide lifts all boats."

In economic terms, GDP growth does, in fact, provide a lot of opportunities all across the economy, but it's hardly the only economic goal worth pursuing. Specifically, the policies this cliche is often quoted to support are designed to favor yachts over dinghies.

Proposed Alternative: "A rising sea level will give some ocean-front property, and put others underwater."

Capital Gains vs. Income

2011-12-10T19:52:00.000-08:00

I'm watching the Iowa Republican Presidential Debate right now, and one of the candidates (I believe it was Gingrich, but I was out of the room and my voice recognition isn't quite that sharp) said he supported 0% capital gains tax. It sounds great from a "let's get people investing" perspective, but does it really make sense? I don't think so. In fact, I spent a good bit of time fretting about it this morning in the shower.

With most of our production automated or offshored, the real value in the global economy is increasingly created by investment rather than labor. The role of humans, and especially Americans, is increasingly to provide volition strategy, and discretion to large sums of money. The labor that we can neither offshore nor automate is mostly low-value, low-paying service work. The entire concept of an income tax, though, is based on the foundation of a large, prosperous middle-class of wage employees. They no longer exist.

If our economy is mostly driven by entrepreneurs, investors, and businessmen, why are we still trying to run the government out of the pockets of the non-existent employees?

The Government is Still in Our Hands

2011-07-08T15:50:00.000-07:00

One of the dominant memes in recent political commentary (at least at the popular level) as been the failure of the two-party system. The ongoing (as of July 8th) standoff in congress over the debt ceiling is indicative of a larger trend in which party interests are placed so far ahead of national interests that, in the words of Sen. Chuck Schumer, "the best way to win is hurt the country as much as possible."
Say what you will about our founders' intentions, but political parties are a terribly convenient way to ensure voters that their vote will count -- an independent legislator who was elected for his stance on a particular set of issues has almost no way of actually taking action on those issues in a legislative body of hundreds. The system has failed in a number of ways, some almost coincidental and some deeply structural.

Mickey Edwards has some suggestions on how to fix the party system. I have a couple of my own ideas, much more sweeping changes to our voting system intended to ensure the viability of mulitple parties. One of the biggest reasons our national political environment has stabilized in a bi-polar power struggle is the mechanics of one-vote-per-person and winner-take-all districts. No matter how many people vote for a third party, the party will not win any seats unless their voters have a majority in one voting district. Therefore, at least at the national level, very few voters ever bother to vote for third-party candidates. The British parliament, and perhaps many other parliaments, use a proprtional distribution so that the ratio of MPs by political party is equal to the ratio of voters by the same.

Another interesting method of tallying votes could be to give each voter one fewer votes than the number of candidates declared in the race. Under the current system, the only way to vote against a candidate is to vote for her most likely opponent. In the proposed expanded voting technique, which should be familiar to viewers of some reality-TV competitions, voting against a candidate would mean casting one vote for every other candidate. Voters could also vote for two candidates equally, or one preferred and one backup, or any other combination they chose.

All of these reforms seem a long way off and unlikely to ever be passed under our current system. In the meantime, it seems like the only way to break the Tea Party stranglehold on Congress is to vote in a lot more Democrats in 2012, who will proceed to wield their power with impunity until 2014 when the republicans get put back in office. I propose an immediate, powerful fix in the form of a pledge, to be taken by as many voters as possible all across the country:

I pledge to cast no vote for any candidate for any elected position in the federal government from any major political party* until such time as serious measures have been undertaken to correct the shortcomings of the party system.

Will you take the pledge with me?

*"Major political party" can easily be defined as a party which controls at least one third of the seats in any governing body -- not that it's likely that any part other than Democrat and Republican will fit this definition in the foreseeable future.

More Things That Conventional Engineering Analysis Would Never Tell You

2011-07-07T15:02:00.000-07:00

As promised, today I'll write about our nation's food supply and how attempts to "engineer" it wound up drastically reducing the quality of our food.

Sometime in the first half of the 20th century (I'm a little fuzzy on exactly when and how it happened, but I expect that the Depression and WWII had a lot to do with it), food production and distribution reached a sort of tipping point and consumers traded fresh, natural products for processed, frozen or canned. The promise of drastically longer shelf life, lower prices, easier preparation, and year-round availability made the choice a simple one. Frozen vegetables and canned fruit replaced fresh, ground (and even instant!) coffee replaced whole beans, Jiffy Pop and later microwave popcorn replaced whole kernel, margarine and other hydrogenated oils replaced butter.

Half a century and more later, many consumers are turning back to the more natural, fresh, locally produced products for a variety of reasons. It has become known that vegetables lose a great deal of their nutritional value rather quickly after picking, and even more quickly upon cooking. Hydrogenated oils have recently been shown to contain trans-fats, practically unknown in the natural world and detrimental to human health. Consumers attitudes and preferences toward food also seem to be changing, with more emphasis being placed on quality than on convenience.

At thanksgiving last year, my grandfather was recounting the process behind a cup of coffee in his childhood: buying whole beans, roasting them, grinding them by hand at the beginning of the week, brewing them in a mesh sack in a pot. When I told him that I had begun grinding my own beans, he was mystified. Why go through so much effort when I could just buy coffee grounds? A new generation of coffee drinkers is finally realizing that coffee loses its flavor very quickly after grinding, and opting to buy whole beans again and grind them ourselves just before drinking. Some even choose to roast their own. Improvements in "kitchen gadgets" -- countertop electric coffee grinders -- has made the process much easier and quicker than it was 70 years ago.

The case of coffee is illustrative of a much larger trend: that of decentralization or even deindustrialization. The cost and convenience benefits of mass production came at the cost of drastically reduced quality and utterly no individuality, but now these benefits are being realized at smaller scales that return some of the humanity to our products. The beauty in coffee is in the complexity of the organic molecules produced upon roasting of the beans. Their very complexity ensures them a short lifespan. Mid-century attempts to industrialize coffee roasting and grinding robbed coffee of the very thing that made it appealing to humans' complex sensory system, and the same case could be made for a wide range of food products. Now that we have tried the industrial strength approach and found its limitations, we are free to return to an older model that offers more value. When we bring back the old habits, though, we bring them back with a modern expertise and fewer of the hassles that led us away from them in the first place.

Experience Tells Us What Engineering Cannot

2011-07-04T09:00:00.000-07:00

Here at the beginning of the 21st century, as our society struggles to move beyond the information revolution into a more complete, holistic post-industrial society, I notice a regressive trend in many areas of society. Now that we have applied several different levels of technology to some of our problems, we are capable of comparing the results and making informed decisions about their relative effectiveness. In many cases, technologies and techniques that were once prematurely considered obsolete are now being reintroduced (often with modern improvements) because they have proven superior to their supposed successors. Some good examples:

Streetcars
Whole bean coffee
Popcorn
Fresh produce
Windows
Sidewalks

In the late 19th and early 20th century, every town that could manage it was installing an electric streetcar system. These streetcars generally ran on rails embedded in existing roads and received power either through the rails or from and overhead power grid. Electric streetcars reshaped American cities, leading to the development of some of the first real suburbs. In the 1930s and '40s, however, practically all of these streetcar lines shut down (except for those in New Orleans and San Francisco). Their demise is closely tied to the rise of the automobile, though government tax incentives and oil company takeovers contributed. Electric streetcars were generally replaced by diesel busses that ran directly on the roads. Busses required a smaller initial investment (because they did not require the laying of rail) and their routes were more flexible. They seemed to have no downside.

In very few cases did bus systems ever come close to providing functional mass transit to their cities, and most analysts assumed that their failure was due to the popularity of private autos. In 2001, however, Portland built the first modern streetcar line in the country, and its success surpassed the expectations of its most optimistic supporters. In its first year of operation, Portland's new streetcar attracted 1.4 million riders, and the numbers increased steadily until 2009, topping out at over 4 million per year. Property values along the lines increased more than enough to pay for the initial construction. Following Portland's lead, several other cities across the country have rushed to reinstall electric streetcars in their city cores that should have already been served by bus.

What makes streetcars so much more attractive than busses? To be sure, their historical charm contributes to their popularity. Streetcars evoke an era before the the politics of racism and drug violence destroyed our inner cities and the reputations of their bus systems. But busses also smell like diesel, generally have high beds, and offer a rough ride on their rubber tires. In the subtle details like engine vibrations and noise, streetcars offer a much more comfortable ride. In addition, the visibility and relative permanence of streetcar rails make trip planning less daunting to riders and reassure property owners of the value of their location. An engineering analysis of the two systems would almost always favor busses, but humans are not disinterested rational decision-making commodities that need to be carted from place to place. We want a good experience; we want to enjoy what we do, even if what we do is travel to a destination. Streetcars offer a better riding experience, and that small difference seems to be just enough to convince us to get on a public transportation system instead of driving our own car.

More analysis to come on the other list items, but probably with much less narrative.

Changes of Scenery

2011-06-18T08:02:00.000-07:00

In the fall, I'll be starting a Ph.D. program in Materials Science and Engineering. I'm excited about it. I don't yet have any real idea what research project I'll be working on, but Marco Rolandi's group is doing some very interesting things at the interface between microfabrication and materials engineering. That's the exact realm I'm interested in, so I'd say his group looks promising.

What else looks promising: Seattle's public transportation infrastructure. I've already planned out a path for us to get from thee airport to our hotel and from our hotel to our new apartment the next day, and they're both very straightforward and painless routes. Easier than driving in Dallas!

A Handful of Thoughts on Nanotechnology

2011-03-28T12:47:00.000-07:00

Have you heard of the chemical industry? It has developed mostly since World War II to a little fanfare from a few places, but its effects on life in the developed world have gone mostly unremarked-upon. It is because of this development (some might call it a revolution) that we have useful plastics. Ponder plastics for a moment.

The chemical revolution gave us not just useful plastics, but our entire modern approach to domestic problem-solving: buy chemicals! Practically all household cleaning products, most personal hygiene products, and even the modern pharmaceutical industry all spring directly from the chemical revolution. Chemistry has solved a whole host of problems we never knew were solvable: our clothes no longer have to come out of the dryer hard and scratchy, or even electrically charged; malodorous organic molecules no longer need be left to float freely in the air, assaulting our nostrils; washing our hair no longer must leave it dry and frizzy. Our societal mastery of molecular reactions has given us a vast toolbox from which to draw as we attempt to improve our lifestyles.

The least that nanotechnology has to offer would put it on the same scale as chemistry with regard to its effect on our lifestyles. Nanotechnology, like chemistry, is a vast toolbox from which we will be able to draw when we seek solutions to our problems. Like chemistry, nanotechnology will give rise to new classes of structural materials, new approaches to medicine, and new ways of controlling our environment. Nanotechnology's fundamental limits have often been argued, but even by the most conservative estimate the field could bring about just as much change as did chemistry.

The most that nanotechnology has to offer would put it closer to the scale of the industrial revolution. I leave you to ponder that thought for a while.

Put the Brakes on $4 per Gallon Gasoline at the Pump!

2011-03-10T20:06:00.000-08:00

Repost from Facebook, which explains the more casual tone:

(I stole my title from David Vitter, whose strategy was "Drill more wells in the Gulf of Mexico!!!!")

You want my opinion on how to end our dependence on foreign oil? Eliminate the volatility of energy prices stimulate our high-tech sector? Impose a gasoline tax to pin the price to $4 per gallon. Use the proceeds to create an emergency fund to subsidize gas in the event that the price ever rises over $4, then give put the rest into the existing DoE grant structure for R&D in renewable (solar, not biofuel) energy.

Why $4 per gallon? As far as I know, prices have been that high only once before - summer of 2008, I believe. When they got that high, demand actually started to drop a little. So setting the price there might begin to reduce demand, but not enough to grind our economy to a halt. If we set it too much lower, we might not break even. But at $4 per gallon it's easy to compute the cost of a tank, gas stations can take down their signs, and everyone's happy. Right?

Why use the existing DoE grant structure? Because our need for investment in renewable energy infrastructure needs to be completely independent of this "taxidy" (that's a portmanteua of the words "tax" and "subsidy" in case you were wondering) program. If our DoE programs aren't good enough, we need to fix them before we start pouring all this money in, because the money that's being distributed through there now needs to be handled just as wisely. This should also prevent a lot of the political fighting over how the money will be used.

Why not biofuels? Because they're not sustainable, folks. Corn-based ethanol, by most measures, requires more energy to produce than you get back from burning it. That's right, its thermodynamic efficiency is negative. But its political efficiency is impressive, because Iowa is a swing state or something like that. Or because Monsanto has a powerful lobbying arm. . . Other biofuels may be more efficient than corn, and noncompetitive with our food supply, but they still can't really compete with solar energy. Solar energy won't power our cars any time soon, but once we have a cheap, stable electrical supply, getting the energy into the cars won't be nearly as difficult. Trust me on this; I know a lot more about emerging technologies at the fundamental level than you do (assuming you're a politician reading this note.)

That's the plan, and it should work until gas prices level out near or over $4 per gallon. At that time it shouldn't be too difficult to pass a rate hike to the existing program. Now we just need to elect a congress with the political will to enact this legislation. Here's a hint: David Vitter has got to go.

Cracking the Whip

2010-09-14T09:10:00.000-07:00

Last fall I went on a mission trip to the other end of the state with a group of twenty or thirty people. We traveled in a convoy of about six or seven cars. On the way back I was driving at the rear of the convoy, and I noticed that I was frequently falling behind and having to drive ten or fifteen mph over the speed limit to catch up. At one point, the car in front of me was pulled over for speeding while trying to catch up with the preceding car, and later in the trip a tire on my car blew out in the same situation. I wasn't happy.

Being a good engineer, I put my mind to the problem to figure out why it was happening. The lead car driver swore he wasn't speeding, but the cars in the back definitely were.

The phenomenon involved is similar to cracking a whip. If the second car falls behind at all, it will have to speed up slightly to catch up with the leading car. It will start pulling ahead of the third car, which will then have to speed up even more to catch the second car. As this pattern is repeated down line, the cars in the back suddenly find themselves falling behind and having to go much faster than the average speed of the convoy in order to close the distance. It's an emergent behavior of the convoy system as individual drivers try to make decisions about driving while following the rules of the convoy :"keep the car in front of you in sight."

If the whip-cracking phenomenon is a result of the convoy rules, it can be ameliorated by changing the rules. I propose two techniques for solving the problem: an elegant solution and a practical solution.

The Elegant Solution:
Subtract half the number of cars in the convoy from the speed limit. The resulting number is the maximum speed of the leading car. Each subsequent car is allowed to drive 1 unit (mph or kph) faster than the car preceding it. If all cars follow their speed limits under all but the most extreme circumstances, each car will be able to catch up with the car in front of it (albeit slowly) while keeping the maximum speed of the last car within a reasonable range of the legal speed limit.
Example:
A convoy of 10 cars is driving on an interstate with a legal speed limit of 70 mph. The lead car drives no faster than 65, car 2 66, car 3 67, and so on so that the 10th car drives no faster than 75. The average speed of the convoy is 65 mph, and as any car falls behind they can catch up with the car ahead of them by driving 1 mph faster.

The Practical Solution:
Use cruise control! If any cars do not have cruise control, put them at the back of the convoy. Emphasize strongly to all drivers that they should set cruise control at the legal speed limit and LEAVE IT ALONE!

I haven't tested either of these methods yet, but I intend to in a few weeks as I travel with another convoy.

Mix-and-Match Careers, or How to Find Work in the New Economy

2010-08-18T18:15:00.000-07:00

Richard Florida has been writing for The Atlantic for at least several months now (I started reading in April or May, so I can't reference anything earlier) about his ideas: the Creative Class and its influence on cities and regions in the new economy, and how the new economy will replace the old. He's got a lot of interesting ideas; you should read a sampling of his articles. His latest is about projected job growth in metro regions across the nation, correlating projections to a few characteristics of the regions. The highest R^2 value (strongest correlation) he finds is for the inverse relationship between projected job growth and percentage of residents in the "working class."

"This suggests that the structural forces that are reshaping the U.S. economy from an industrial to a more idea, knowledge, and human capital driven post-industrial economic system will continue to deepen. "

If you've read anything by Florida, this is no news. Consider it required background for the rest of this post. The recession didn't usher in the knowledge economy, but it is striking a death blow to the product economy.

Another recent article from The Atlantic, this one by Derek Thompson, enumerates four interrelated crises that are keeping unemployment at a 50+ year high. Point II is that businesses, uncertain about their economics future, are unwilling to commit to hiring new full-time employees, so they make up their labor shortage with contract work, consultants and part-timers. The result is that contract work is in less of a shortage than full-time, salaried positions. Anecdotally, I've heard my brother has been turning away web design contracts lately because he has enough work.

I don't expect this trend to reverse when the economy picks back up. Companies needing creative workers could probably actually benefit from a high employee turnover, because it would bring in a steady stream of fresh ideas. Contracting out work instead of hiring full time employees would give companies an advantage of being able to change the composition of their workforce quickly and easily by hiring different contractors. If an online service needs designers and developers at the beginning, content creators and support staff after launch, and more developers to expand, they don't have to hire and lay off in cycles. Instead they can just contract out everything. Thompson had actually written about this trend several months ago, so go read his article on the rise of part-timers for more explanation.

As Thompson points out in that older article, the idea of accepting various contracts instead of a full-time career can be appealing to twenty-somethings. I see it as imperative that college students and recent grads, or anyone else starting a career anytime soon, give up on the idea of finding fulfillment in a 9-5 job with a salary and benefits. You may be able to find one of those if you search enough antique stores, but they are unlikely to give the creative class the experience that we seek. In the words of Aesop Rock, "we the American working population hate the nine to five day in, day out when we'd rather be supporting ourselves by being paid to perfect the pastimes that we have harbored based solely on the fact that it makes us smile if it sounds dope." We don't want a career, we want a life.

I expect that to find success in the new economy, creative workers will need to adopt an entrepreneurial spirit and treat themselves as a one-person company selling a service: their own skills. This approach will give creatives the opportunity to apply their creativity to a variety of problems, limited only by their own ability to market themselves. If you can convince a client that you are qualified to do the work, you can do whatever work you want. This mix-and-match approach is very appealing to me, and I expect it is appealing to many of my creative friends who have no idea which sort of "career" they should look for because they are skilled at and interested in so many different things. Another free anecdote: My wife exemplifies this crippling diversity of skills; her blog is about the five careers she wished she could follow.

Creatives, develop your skills. Discover how they can be used to benefit others, because the whole point of this thing we call a "job" is to allow others to support you in exchange for a service with which you can provide them. Learn how to market yourself. And don't let anyone try to tie you down to doing one thing for eight hours a day, five days a week.

Housekeeping

2010-06-19T09:43:00.000-07:00

Or, as Eric Drexler calls it, "bloggy blogging."

First, new layout:
I changed the layout using Blogger's new(ish) template designer. I'm still not really doing any design, per se, because I have enough web designer friends to know that I'm not a web designer. But at least it looks different, and perhaps a little more interesting now.

Second, update on Idea a Day:
I kept the idea journal for two or three weeks, which was long enough to get me back into the habit of having ideas, capturing them, and trying to develop them at least enough to put them into words. It was also long enough to realize that an idea a day is way to often to expect good ideas that could actually be realized. It was a good exercise, though.

Third, some thoughts on someone else's big idea:
There's an article in The Atlantic this issue about economist Paul Romer's plan for neo-colonial charter cities, administered by developed nations using land in the poorest countries on earth, as a way to pull people out of poverty by giving them economic opportunities. In Romer's view of the world (which seems to be pretty enlightened, considering how influential he was as an economist and how successful as an entrepreneur) what separates rich countries from poor countries is not geography but rules. If the rules of rich countries were instituted in poor ones, the result would be the creation of wealth. I had seen Romer give this talk at TED a while ago, and was fascinated by the idea. I'm currently reading "Confusion," the second volume of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, which focuses mostly on the role of commerce in ushering in the modern age during the end of the 17th century. While the importance of commerce in wealth creation is now almost a trope, it's worth remembering that it wasn't (and isn't) always considered so important. The rules Romer talks about are mostly rules to encourage free trade. It's worth pointing out that most of the criticism aimed at his charter cities questions the likelihood of their social and political success, but Romer's goal was never to develop "ideal" or utopian cities. The only goal of his charter city plan is to provide economic opportunities in otherwise dead economies, thereby giving populations a chance to pull themselves out of poverty by moving to the cities. He makes it very clear that the way for the population of the city to address shortcomings of the political (or by extension, social) shortcomings of their charter city is to simply leave and go somewhere else. He's emphatically not saying that these cities will become desirable places to live comparable to London or Zurich. He's merely saying it will be a whole lot better there than living in a slum in a city whose economy is crushed by ineffective policies.

Fourth, upcoming posts (if I get around to them):
I've been thinking a lot about urban development lately, often inspired by a feature in the last issue of The Atlantic (hey, it's a good magazine) on the future of the American City. I've been applying a lot of those ideas to Ruston, Louisiana, which has been going through a big planning and development push over the past couple of years. I'll try to blog about it in the coming days or weeks.

Idea a Day

2010-05-02T23:19:00.000-07:00

I decided today that I'm going to start keeping an idea journal. My goal is to write down one idea every day as a creative exercise. They don't have to be especially well-formulated, though they should be practical in some manner. We'll see how it goes; if it goes well, I may start a separate blog for the ideas.

Today's idea: crowdsourced financing for independent musicians to record their music.

The Apple Strategy: Pay attention to what matters

2010-03-02T23:16:00.000-08:00

It is common knowledge that Macbooks are significantly more expensive than comparable PC laptops. A quick glance at the Apple store demonstrates just how much more expensive. A 17" Macbook Pro starts at $2499. For comparison to PCs, a 17" Alienware Gaming PC with the same processor, same amount of memory and better video card will cost you $2124, more than $300 less. And everyone knows Alienwares are overpriced. The upgrades to a Macbook Pro are particularly overpriced: Bumping up your processor speed by .2 GHz will cost you $300 extra. Seem a little pricey, especially since a Core 2 Duo from Newegg.com at 3.0 GHz only costs $167.99 in the first place. And that Memory upgrade? 8GB of memory for a Macbook Pro only costs $470.99, and they'll charge you $600 to put that in instead of 4GB, which is probably worth $100-$200 itself. (Similar upgrades to the Alienware cost substantially less, though they still seem quite overpriced to me).

What lets Apple charge so much for their products? Duh, it's supply and demand. Supply is limited by their monopoly, demand is driven up by. . . what, exactly?

What makes Macs so popular? That question has been plaguing PC manufacturers for several years now. Sure it has a lot to do with their flashy advertising campaigns, but it's mostly because all of design focus went into the input and output systems: the components with which users actually interact.

Think about it: all of the input devices on a Macbook Pro are extra-high quality and well designed. The microphone, the webcam, the keyboard, the touchpad; they're all far superior to anything I've ever used on any PC laptop. The speakers as well have much better sound reproduction than any other laptop speakers I've heard. The case design is, of course, legendary. So even though their computing hardware is nothing special (their high end laptops are still using the Core 2 Duo, for crying out loud!), consumers perceive them as being top-of-the-line hardware. (I could write another entire post on their software). It's all about the interface, my friends.

Compact Flourescent Lamps: A Study in Complexity

2010-02-08T14:34:00.000-08:00

In 2005, my father and I became obsessed with CFLs. I do not remember where we first heard about them, but after reading a few of the bold claims made we were infatuated with the idea of reducing power consumption while greatly increasing the lifespan of our lights. Though they were several times as expensive as incandescent bulbs, they promised to last about ten times as long, while saving 75% of power consumption. This, we told each other, was innovation at its finest: a technology that benefits consumers in multiple ways without requiring so much as a lifestyle change. He set out on a quest to replace every incandescent bulb in our house with a CFL.

Shortly after installing the first CFL, we noticed that the quality of light was significantly different. A room lit by a single CFL took on a sickly greenish or yellowish tint, depending on the specific lamp. A little disappointed, but not daunted, we continued replacing lights until, about 6 months after we installed the first CFLs in the house, one of them failed. It burned out. It died. Weren't these lamps supposed to last for several years? Maybe it was a fluke, we told ourselves. But it wasn't. Several more lamps failed within a year of installation.

If their lifespan wasn't significantly better than that of an incandescent lamp, suddenly the high installation cost looks a little more off-putting. With one of the lamps costing about $3, replacing them every year (or more frequently) could get quite expensive. My dad was upset, and basically gave up on the technology, switching back to incandescent lamps. I couldn't stop asking the question, "why?"

I knew that our experience must be somewhat atypical. If these lamps really had such a short lifespan, it would be common knowledge and the Australian government would think twice before passing legislation banning incandescent bulbs. No one seemed to be talking about this lifespan problem, however. I did a little bit of digging, and found out a few simple facts about the lifespan of flourescent lamps. First, their lifespan is greatly reduced if they are cycled on and off frequently. In our domestic setting, I expect that our lights went through a lot more power cycles than those of most businesses or even most houses. We had several young children living at home at the time who were constantly moving from room to room and had been taught to turn off the lights when they left a room - good advice regarding incandescent lamps. Flourescent lamps are also sensitive to temperature and humidity. Living in south Louisiana, our temperature and humidity were certainly above average. In addition, nearly all of our lights were in a base-up configuration common to overhead fixtures. This configuration has been demonstrated to decrease the lifespan of the lamps by increasing the operating temperature of the ballast. The conclusion I came to was that the combination of frequent power cycles, high temperature, and high humidity combined to reduce the average lifespan of our lamps just enough to cause a few outlying failures after a year. As far as I know, some of the CFLs we installed over 4 years ago are still fully functional, but the handful of early failures were enough to turn my dad off of the technology. He has since moved on to an infatuation with LEDs, which is probably a story for another post.

The experience of the CFLs taught me a number of valuable lessons:

First, it taught me the fundamentals of technology marketing. People want a better product, which usually means a cheaper product. More importantly, they don't want to put a lot of effort into getting their new product; they've been getting along just fine without it and can keeping going that way if adopting it is too difficult. We wouldn't have dreamed of replacing all of our light fixtures with tubular flourescent lamps, but since we could install CFLs as easily as incandescent lamps, we were willing to try them.

Second, it taught me about statistics, and human interpretation of statistics. The handful of early-failing lamps, while representing a significant deviation from our expectations, did not prove that the lamps were not economically feasible. They did destroy my dad's faith in them. If you're going to make promises, you'd better be able to live up to them.

Third, it taught me about innate complexity. George Whitesides (who I got to see at last year's ACS National Meeting) defined simplicity as "it's impossible to f**k it up" (at the end of this talk) which sounds to me like a good working definition. Applying that criterion to CFLs and incandescent lamps, what do we find? In an incandescent lamp, a current is passed through a filament, where ohmic resistance causes it to heat up and emit radiation. Bring in a materials scientist (or Thomas Edison with a lot of time on his hands) to choose a material that emits the right frequencies of radiation at an appropriate voltage. Seal the whole thing in a vacuum, and it's ready for use. Flourescent lamps are a bit more complicated. Not only does the radiation have to be converted from ultraviolet to visible by flourescent phosphor, the flow of electricity through the mercury vapor requires a ballast to regulate the current; not the most complex circuit ever designed, but a lot more complicated than the ohmic contacts needed for an incandescent lamp. In the final analysis, it is this complexity that stops flourescent lamps from pushing their incandescent competitors from the market. Their complexity increases their price, and though their lifespan is officially longer they have more failure modes, which makes them easier to f**k up.

The Sorry State of Science Reporting

2009-08-06T11:58:00.000-07:00

I've been reading the news almost religiously for most of the summer, from three sources: National Public Radio, British Broadcasting Company, and Al Jazeera. Yes, I realize this makes me sound incredibly liberal. Contrary to my expectations, I do not feel like a more responsible global citizen than I was before. While I enjoy reading about what is happening in the world, it has not brought any greater sense of connectedness. If anything, it makes me feel less connected with my surroundings. However, that is not the point of this post.

Every day on NPR's site, if not also on BBC's, I look through the Science and Technology categories hoping to find something that catches my interest. After all, I am very interested in both science and technology. However, all of the stories filed under the science category are about
a) Swine Flu
b) Climate Change
c) the dubious findings of some pyschological or, at best, neurological study that show humans behave like X because of gene Y that evolved to help our ancestors do Z.

All of the posts filed under Technology are about the iPhone.

The Discovery Channel's lineup reveals similar trends: Animals, The Environment, People vs. the Environment (or is that Man and Wild?), Mythbusters, etc.

The Science Channel (run by the same company) isn't much different, with more focus on Space and manufacturing/construction.

I happen to know that huge, exciting discoveries are being made in the worlds of particle physics, chemistry, nanotechnology, robotics, computing, etc. Why are none of these being documented by the popular media? Surely the same people that figured out how to make popular tv out of the manufacturing processes of everything from chocolate bars to safety pins can make a thrilling show about molecular cars or parallel computing.

The difference between the way I use a pc and the way my grandfather, a retired electrical engineer who spent his career designing and programming computerized test systems, uses a pc is significant. I get things done faster and more efficiently. He knows far more about the inner workings of the computer. He's written programs at the assembler level on punch cards. But I grew up with mouse-based user interfaces and file systems, and they're as natural to me as riding a bike.

If the next generation of children in this country could grow up seeing simulations of molecular structures, interacting with them in games and educational programs, they could develop an innate understanding of nanomechanics. Just as gravity and magnetism are fairly intuitive to beginning physics students, so Van der Waals interactions or very-low-Reynolds number fluid flows could be intuitive for the next generation of engineers and scientists.

Right now, no one is talking about these topics. When nanotechnology is brought up in the news at all, it is usually with either a vague sense of foreboding or an undefined promise of amazing things: "Now with nanotechnology!" We need science journalists who break the trend of reporting on psychology and medicine for the sake of human interest. We need science journalists who will act as translators between scientists and citizens without dumbing down the science of talking over the collective head of society.

Drive-Through National Parks: Cars as Interfaces Between Humans and the Built Environment

2009-05-31T07:52:00.000-07:00

On Friday AJ and I were in Vicksburg, MS looking for a scenic grassy area, possibly with an interesting history, as a venue for our picnic. She had a vague memory of the battlefield (National Military Park) from an elementary school field trip, so we decided to check it out. We found the entrance, paid the $8 entrance fee, and followed the sign that said, "picnicking only at Tour Stop #12 and Cairo Museum." About four miles later, we realized we were stuck in a nightmare of '50s car-culture-meets-'00s -SUV-culture: a drive-through national park being appreciated by aging baby boomers who remembered the park from their childhood and suburban parents trying to introduce their kids to the nation's (south's) history without ever leaving the comfort of their car.

I'll spare you the agony of being stuck behind 2 mph crawlers reading about the exploits of the 108th Infantry Division and Logan's Farthest Advance. In my ire (magnified by hunger as our picnic sat untouched in our trunk), I began thinking of cars as an interface between humans and the built environment. They were invented as a means of transportation, which became a lifestyle, and an environment was built to accomodate this lifestyle. The environment was built with the expectation that its users would n0t only have cars, but prefer to stay in their cars as much as possible. What started as an empowering tool soon became a necessity, as car-culture and auto-centric design created a positive feedback loop.

I'm not the first person to notice this by any means. But I'm not trying to publish original research, I'm just writing a blog. My question is this: if this is a desirable architecture (relying on cars as an interface), is the interface designed properly for human interaction? The ipod taught us the value of ergonomic interfaces. Do cars meet the requirements of human-centered design? How about this: are you comfortable interfacing with the world through a car? In practice, most of us are because it's what we know. But in theory, do you like that idea? I don't.

Americans aren't going to stop using cars in the next 10 years. They will continue to interface with their surroundings through them, but I propose that the built environment should offer its users a choice of interfaces. Make them car-, bike-, and pedestrian-friendly (not to mention wheelchairs) . It's been done before, including by Randy Brown at Village Point East, where he put a parking lot in front and a sidewalk leading to the back (or perhaps the other front) from a nearby residential neighborhood. It can be done, and it has been done, and it is being done. I just wish it was a lot more common.

Conceptual Calculus

2009-05-19T22:19:00.000-07:00

When I was in high school, roughly a senior, it came to my attention that there was a set of ideas known as calculus that was somehow related to change over time (until then, I had always thought of calculus as an intimidating and far-off college class that made sure only intelligent, hardworking people became engineers and scientists). While reading Feynman's Six Not-So-Easy Pieces I encountered dy/dx notation for the first time and was thoroughly stumped in my attempt to follow his derivations. I made it my goal to learn calculus by whatever means possible, and set off to the library. I read through a variety of textbooks, David Berlinski's A Tour of the Calculus, and part of an OCW calculus course, but in the end my attempts to teach myself calculus were stymied. I learned the power rule, encountered the quotient rule, learned more than I ever wanted to know about the inner personalities of functions (thank you, Mr. Berlinski), and learned that derivatives could be used to describe how things change, but I was still no closer to understanding what a derivative was.

This breakthrough wouldn't come until I was a freshman in college, taking Calculus I: Differential Calculus with a math teacher who had retired several years before. He spent the first lecture explaining how far the Greeks had gone without ever figuring out how to a) find the slope of a curve at any point and b)find the area inside any shape. He then explained how the Cartesian coordinate system enabled mathematical representations of the shapes with which the Greeks had been fascinated, and then digressed to the topic of limits. Within three or four lectures, we had a secant line of a curve described mathematically, then found the limit as the section of the curve marked off by the secant line approached zero. Before I knew what was happening, we had found what the Greeks in all of the glory only dreamed about. We had taken a derivative! I became so obsessed with the limit definition of a derivative that I wrote it constantly on chalkboards in random classrooms, on every page of my notebook, and possibly on a bathroom stall. . .

The rules that applied to derivatives and made them easy to compute didn't interest me much (except for the chain rule - I was fascinated by the chain rule), but the limit definition opened up the whole world to me. I could now understand Feynman, and the rest of the world. Anything that changed, really. Of course, it takes the fundamental theorem to really put it all together, but that came soon enough.

Now I'm coming to my point. You've already impressed me with your patience, so hold on a little longer. It is my opinion, based on my experience with Feynman, that a truly well-educated person needs an understanding of calculus, at least of differentiation and integration and how they relate to each other. Conventional wisdom says, "most college students can't even pass algebra; if you add calculus to the general education requirements no one will ever graduate." The real difficulty in learning calculus, though, is in remembering the rules and knowing how and when to apply them. Differentiating isn't too bad, but when you get to integration and all of the glorious guesswork involved there, it becomes taxing on even the most intrepid math student. My rebuttal is this: there is no reason for the average well-educated person to be proficient at integrating and differentiating (what one of my math teachers referred to as "computational ability"). In fact, due to the prevalence of computer algebra systems, I would argue it's hardly necessary for engineers to be proficient at any of this, including solving DEs. So, what's left? Merely the concepts.

Conventional wisdom would then say, "you can't learn math without solving problems." Can't you? How many engineering students truly come to an understanding of the Wronskian after finding a dozen pairs of linearly independent solutions to a DE? They merely learn to apply algorithms efficiently, something a computer will always do far better than them. I'm not arguing that engineers shouldn't solve problems, but I'm arguing that business majors, social scientists and the like should be introduced to the concepts of calculus without being expected to solve many problems.

My proposal is this: develop a "Conceptual Calculus" course that covers integration, differentiation and the Fundamental Theorem in a non-computationally-intensive way, to be taught in one semester to non-science majors who have a basic understanding of algebra. This course could (should) then be introduced as part of the core curriculum at universities (or liberal arts colleges, more likely) dedicated to producing well-rounded individuals capable of understanding topics across disciplines.

Portfolio of Passions

2009-04-28T20:43:00.000-07:00

Today I found a new website called "Academic Earth." As far as I can tell it's a collection of videos from university websites, with some of which I am already familiar (MIT's Open Course Ware, Stanford's eCorner). It's an interesting aggregation, and one I may find myself frequenting. I'm already becoming sucked into the TED phenomenon, as I got sucked into MIT World several years ago.

One of the videos I watched was Randy Komisar talking at Stanford about finding your passion. His main point was that the question "What is my passion?" will paralyze you, as will the question "What's the end goal?" Instead, he said, you should ask yourself about your "portfolio of passions" and your next step.

With that in mind, I made a list today of my passions. It may not be exhaustive, and it's in no particular order.

1. Science - the scientific method, the scientific community, and the process of creating knowledge.

2. Engineering - designing useful things, especially with a human interaction-centered approach.

3. Nanotechnology

4. Architecture/Urban Planning - a similar concept to 2. but on a much larger scale. The way people interact with their surroundings has an even bigger impact on their lives than the way they interact with their "things."

5. Education - I strongly believe the system (US public schools) is far from ideal. I have no idea how to fix it, but Woodie Flowers has some good ideas. Google him.

6. Post-industrialism - The Information Age is only beginning, my friends. I hope to elaborate greatly on this in the future.

Now I just have to figure out how to synthesize these passions into a meaningful direction. Suggestions appreciated.

237th ACS National Meeting, Salt Lake City, UT

2009-03-26T17:13:00.000-07:00

Went to ACS nat'l meeting in SLC Sun-Tues. Good meeting. Snowed Mon morning, mountains looked great. Sorry no pictures; no camera.

Angela Belcher (MIT), gave keynote address Sunday pm. Talked about challenges applications of nanoscience, focused on own research engineering nanotubes using bacteriophage viruses as templates. Very straightforward speaker made it clear nanoscale science technology will revolutionize many fields through applications. Nothing we didn't all know, but is nice to hear someone "important" say it. After keynote address, she and Paul Weiss (Penn State, editor-in-chief ACS Nano) participated in panel on careers in chemistry, both spoke of being very satisfied with careers. Dr. Weiss: “I work with some of the smartest people, I choose my own projects, and I get to satisfy my curiosity. This is the best job in the world.” (Forgive errors in quotation from memory, wasn't taking notes). Definitely reminded why I love science. Weiss seems brilliant. Might like to work with him some day.

Heard Nate Lewis give his energy future talk Tues morning, running through energy scenarios quickly analyzing “alternative” solutions, disproving them all. Concludes only solar makes any sense. Brilliant man. Friend Jordan joins his group in summer.

Sat in on Small Chemical Business Symposium Tues pm. Heard George Whitesides (Harvard), Robert Grubbs(Caltech) et al talk about commercializing research. Whitesides talked about local ecosystems supporting entrepreneurship, maybe 6 (Silicon Valley, Hwy 128 in Mass, Austin, Seattle, etc.) I knew they existed, didn't know how important. Should look into. Grubbs, Nobel Laureate, was working on catalyst, commercialized, then commercialized multiple applications of said catalyst. Developed polymer with extraordinary tensile strength, other properties. Should look into. Remembered corollary life goal: join their ranks.

Upcoming: musings on Woodie Flowers, education reform. Maybe more verbose.

Greetings from Salt Lake City

2009-03-21T21:39:00.000-07:00

I'm attending the 237th annual ACS national meeting from today until Tuesday evening, so expect a post or two on that. Also coming up: my response to a lecture by Woodie Flowers on a whole range of topics, especially personalized learning through new media.

first post!1

2009-03-15T12:56:00.000-07:00

Requisite introductory post goes here:

This blog will host links and musings on things in which I am interested. Specifically, it will focus on applications of engineering (in the broader sense of the term) to modern challenges: from urban planning to industrial design to nanotechnology to virtual reality. It will highlight human-centered design and the intersection of creativity and rigor in problem-solving. It will likely be succinct.

The author reserves the right to modify both the content and the intent of this blog at any time, with or without warning.