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After Globalism

2026-01-23T00:00:00Z

As I write President Trump and NATO Secretary Rutte have announced a framework of a deal on Greenland, which makes it a fun time to step back and think more broadly. Since it's entirely likely that Greenland will soon be displaced by something else, here's a brief reminder of the last week:

The Greenland saga is a telling example. On Saturday Mr. Trump issued his demand to own the icy island and he vowed to impose tariffs on Europe to compel a sale. Opposition built over the holiday weekend, and financial markets cast a decidedly negative vote on the tariffs and threats on Tuesday.

Members of Congress spoke against the use of military force in Greenland, with even GOP leaders expressing doubts. One Senator told us that, if Mr. Trump had gone ahead, Congress would have voted to cut off funds for an invasion, and with veto-proof majorities. European leaders also made clear that taking Greenland by force, military or otherwise, would break the NATO alliance.

And what do you know? On Wednesday in Davos, Mr. Trump issued his familiar criticisms of Europe’s weakness, many of which are accurate. But he disavowed the use of force. And by the end of the day he had canceled the tariffs and claimed victory over what he called a “framework” deal over Greenland that he said will make everyone happy. wsj

No one is saying this, but what if we have in China, Covid, Trump, tariffs, and now Greenland, the natural emergence of a post-globalist order?

Briefly recounted, we have in the rise of China a systematic exploitation of international markets, one that has not been corrected by those markets. This has been built on the fiction that it does not matter where something is produced, leading to a race to the bottom on labor and environmental standards for reduced production cost. When Covid19 came around and we had to scramble to locate basic medical supplies, it revealed to a worldwide audience how precarious our long supply chains had become, and how dependent we now are on Chinese production.

These vulnerabilities 'required' massive stimulus to bridge which predictably led to inflation. There followed the Inflation Reduction Act, which did little to actually tame inflation since it added even more money to the supply, but did fund many elements of Progressive Democrat's failed Green New Deal. Beyond medical supplies, Covid also significantly disrupted chip supply, hence the CHIPS Act to subsidize construction of new domestic chip fabs. Neither the IRA nor CHIPS succeeded on anywhere near the timescale their boosters claimed possible because both were loaded up with irrelevant tending toward mendacious requirements on how the funding could be spent, and what diversity, equity, and inclusion standards the grantees needed to attain.

While we suffered Biden's befuddled ineptitude, Trump prepared for his second term and hit the ground running with a slew of executive orders that served to quickly shake up the status quo. As dramatic as most of these were, the majority were constitutionally defective in attempting to solve problems that were only solvable by Congress. How did he try to solve China's assault on our productive capacity? Through tariffs on international trade of manufactured goods. But due to Congressional sclerosis these were not levied in a robustly legal way, but by stretching executive power in a way that will likely be invalidated soon.

The past year's application of significant tariffs has shown, however, that our economy can survive a post globalist world: prices haven't responded to tariffs nearly as much as doomsayers claimed. The institution of tariffs is obviously most felt in their immediate aftermath, fading slowly as the market discovers how they affect prices until finally incenting new domestic production capabilities that replace those lost internationally. Americans can get back to work again, and wages can rise, but only if we let the market deliver it.

This is what post-globalism may look like: the destruction of international 'markets' and the rise of subsidiarity within nations. Why would we prefer to trade in goods when instead we can share ideas and then build it ourselves, locally adapted. That is, if we can share ideas we do not need to trade manufactured goods; I don't care where Bananas come from but I would like the entirety of our pharmaceutical supply to be produced within our legal system.

Globalism failed to curb Chinese excesses or reform its politics, it failed to knit the world into one economic system with converging societal standards. Premised as it was on a vague notion of the end of history, it lacked the structure to bind nations together into real mutual dependence and shared prosperity. Many European minds are still groping in this direction, but their inability to understand sovereignty and national difference, let alone ameliorate these shows how poorly designed this era has been.

Trump's impulsive actions on Greenland show, poorly, the other path, that instead of international markets and treaties, security requires national sovereignty. (There has been no specific proposal for Greenland; for simplicity I'd make it a full-fledged state and not some awkward, intermediate territory. And that precedent would pave the way for the admission of Canada... ) Without being part of the same nation, the territory can never fully participate in the economic, political, and cultural systems that bind that nation together. Globalists tried to paper over this deep integration with treaties far above the daily lives of constituents, it failed; the better way is old-fashioned nation building with all of the benefits and obligations that entails.

This would be a serious change in direction, one I don't think Trump is capable of conceiving nor executing, but some in his administration may be working in this general direction. Regardless, this project will fail if Congress and other American institutions remain as sclerotic as they have recently been. There is too little can-do and far, far too much can't- and mustn't-do.

One thing that we need to do is to adopt a faster, more overt form of capitalism where our explicit goal is to accurately price as many things as we can, to turn first to pricing mechanisms in solving problems rather than bureaucratic forums.

Want to increase competition in some industry? Fund the development of data sources and models that de-risk the industry, flattening/commoditizing existing players while creating room for true difference to emerge.
Want better supply chain data? Negotiate to buy it! (We don't do nearly enough with the tax data that we have, and yet for all the time we spend on taxes the questions are terribly uninformative.)
Want to hedge on data center energy consumption? Project the future cost of power and work now to de-risk a portfolio of choices for future generation. Tomorrow is coming, why are we so asleep at the wheel?
Want to control PFAs contamination? Don't regulate them out of production, as they do have real industrial uses, but identify and price the risk of environmental remediation and communicate that price to customers as well as producers. It should be more expensive to throw out (recycle) a Teflon-coated pan than a cast-iron one! Teflon saved me time cooking and cleaning, make me pay (the actual, transparent cost, not some harebrained fee)!

Lastly, how does faster capitalism inculcate a stable global order? Well it's said that the best way to win a battle is to choose a battlefield that advantages you and weakens your adversary. The yearnings of the human heart are universal, but their satisfaction is attempted in many ways by different cultures. I think the Christian West has a lot of things right, more so than other parts of the world. I think this shows up in the happiness of our lives, the wealth of our communities, the character of our children, etc. We win by showing how our practiced beliefs lead to fulfilled lives, and how you can come to enjoy them too. Post-globalism we don't have to compete on material goods, we can produce domestically everything we need priced according to the resources, productive capacity, and environmental and labor standards we've chosen. We don't have to fight wars, since any nation can produce the goods it desires (...yes this is a stretch but taking material scarcity off of the table would do a lot to permit all nations to pursue higher things, to evaluate how they are achieving existential fulfillment).

This is to say that just as the advent of the airplane immediately showed that the old ways of doing things (transportation, trench warfare) were not the only ways, so too can the elucidation of societal dynamics by the market show new paths to prosperity. By traipsing across borders globalism muddled the differences of different societies, reinforcing and distorting certain aspects (designed in California, made in China) to the detriment of the whole. Only by respecting these differences and working within them can we hasten the dawn of tomorrow.

PreReview

2025-11-11T00:00:00Z

I was reading this article which mentions review-buying and ended up re-reading my post on "If I Were eBay" and had some additional thoughts.

My conclusion there was:

These are all free features of online commerce and, rather than overburdening the customer, are actually ways to decrease customer purchase risk while also learning more about the market dynamics. This is a very crucial point: the customer's frustration in composing search queries is mirrored by the seller's frustration in understanding why those customers eventually bought what they did. Markets are complex, it is eBay's job to help both seller and buyer understand each other and come to terms. To the degree that customers are unable to evaluate and understand product risk on Amazon, there is room to compete. So, if I were eBay I would focus on users, explaining market dynamics and telling them how we've engineered our marketplace to maximize their satisfaction.

Save me from wading through pages of crappy knockoffs to find the thing I'm actually looking for, and I might not mind the absence of 2-day shipping! Voila. The job of the marketplace is to decrease purchase risk, not to increase it by obscuring actual selection and hiding real differences.

Stepping back, the way that most online marketplaces work is that the customer discovers their need for something, does some research on/off-site to better understand their need and what might satisfy it, eventually buys an item, receives it, uses it, and is occasionally prompted to leave a review, whereupon this journey might be narrated. There are many motivations for customers to leave reviews, but they are unequal, leading to reviews by only a subset of customers with highly variable motivation and irregular quality. All useful reviews can be seen as contributing information lacking in the product description provided by the seller.

Can the situation of product listings and reviews be improved in 2025? One observation is that the a generic review is composed of:

initial expectations about the product performance, that the purchase is intended to solve a particular set of problems,
results thereof, and
experiences with the product that were unknown or unpredictable before use.

Reviews mostly solicit 2), because they are often written in-the-moment of ire or joy. But 1) is worth soliciting as it encompasses market evaluation, how various customers compare various products.

Now that we can have AI shopping assistants, 1) becomes a conversation that is beneficial to the degree that it accurately summarizes the products and their comparative value. Pulling in external reviews is an initial source of content, but the true value emerges post-purchase, where the platform can incent review conversations. In these the AI would ask several gap-filling questions of the customer, with follow-ups, with the goal of informing the pre-purchase conversation of this and other customers. This would more naturally and even-handedly generate 2) and 3), while greatly if temporarily preventing review fraud.

[See this on X(https://x.com/benc0nrad/status/1988262164352631201)]

Gitting Long In The Tooth

2025-11-11T00:00:00Z

Obligatory XKCD 1597

Git's dueling roles

Many are aware of git's tedious CLI, complex footguns, and other warts, but as a mostly-solo dev, what most annoys me is its orientation to code review rather than writing.

There are typically two kinds of git users: contributors and reviewers. Contributors figure out things and implement them, while reviewers check that the contributions will merge nicely into the rest of the codebase, having their intended effect while not breaking other things. While these roles can be performed by the same person, viewing them separately shows that git's UI is strongly oriented to the latter.

This is most clearly seen in branching and committing, where branches get a terse name while it is good practice to make a lengthier commit message describing all of the work done. The problem is that terseness when opening a new branch can leave that branch without a clear goal. Obviously there is a strong element of developer maturity, process, and rigor here that should supply for any absence or weakness of a tool, but I think its fair to call attention to these two roles and to desire that an essential tool like git, or its successor, correctly models how it is used.

After git

So, how would I like to work with Git or its successor? A starting point is to "Always know what the next thing to do is" and this leads easily the small, edible task detailing advocated in Basecamp's Shape Up.

Suppose I cannot schedule my time and can only expect small increments; how can I get any work done? Similarly, what if my organization like really believes in fungible tasks, that all work is interchangeable, requiring as little specialization as possible. These extremes suggest a highly atomic workflow, where tasks are progressively broken into smaller and smaller chunks in an applied shaping process.

What tools may enable productive work in this manner? This scenario quickly shows that narrating around the work is as essential as actually, eventually, doing the particular task. Whereas other workflows skip this narration and leave it inside the developer's head, here it must be written out because the developer is so limited. Clearly needs guidelines to ensure the narration actually communicates the necessary context on down the chain. AI may be able to assist this elucidation.

Focusing in, my real question here is how can git support this microtask workflow? It might look like this: At the start of the day you sit down to git and review the existing branches in some project. Under a branch title, the first commit is of a shaping brief, describing the task and its connection to the rest of the project. (This branch was created from some other branch by the creation of this shaping document.)

Now, checking the branch out transports you to some prior state of the project, one reflecting the environment the brief was written in. While reading the brief, the first question is whether the context is still accurate and whether it can be updated to the current project state. That is, the minimal work is not to score but to merely move the chains, to update the brief to the current project status as much as can be known. If the context has changed in a major way, updating may be inappropriate without greater exploration of the original motivation and objectives. In this case some translation may be needed, likely in a subsequent branch that closes the original.

(Here I'm basically linking branches to GitHub issues, placing the normal issue stuff in the summary document on the branch. This links the place where the work is done, the branch, with the work the work that is done, and the motivation for that work. Instead of treating issues as a separate thing that can be referenced, and that exist outside of the repository, this is entirely within, aided by some git automations.)

Now after the context has been updated to the present project state, that is the work reshaped to present, the work can actually begin, leading to either the implementation as sketched in the brief or a further subdivision into smaller parts and other branches, a breadth-first shaping process.

And that is basically it: work gets done by either doing more design or completing the designed task. Committing the work triggers a standard review, checking first that the commit followed the design brief and works, and second that it actually does integrate with the larger project in the expected way.

Also important is that the initial checkout is a clocked event, locally and on the remote, as are any commits closing the branch and reviews. This provides built-in time and resource tracking.

What comes out of this is, I think, work of higher quality, not because it is technically better but because the work is surrounded by its context, ostensibly improving maintainability and project coherence.

I think the next step here is to define the contemplated workflows and task templates, tbd. Thanks for reading, please send me any comments!

A Time to Build Anew

2025-06-26T00:00:00Z

Here are some highlights from a book I recently read. I found these parts interesting while reading, though they may not make the most sense in isolation. These are put here to aide my recall of the book and to give you the barest of encouragements to read it too.

A Time to Build Anew by Todd Hartch, 2021.

Page 3

...I will focus on three related issues that together help to explain the contemporary Catholic situation: first and most important, the challenges posed by modernity; second, Vatican II and the flawed Catholic response to modernity; and, third, the nature of social and cultural change in the past century. Modernity receives the bulk of my attention because it is the root issue. The heart of the problem is not, as many Catholics believe, Vatican II, but rather modernity itself. As important as the Vatican Council (1962-5) was, both for good and for ill, it was itself a response to larger problems, which we could describe broadly as modernity, and the closely associated processes of industrialization and urbanization. These large-scale developments, far more than the Second Vatican Councils's suggested reforms, represent the biggest challenge faced by Catholicism since the Reformation, and possibly since the Muslim invasions of the seventh and eighth centuries. Taking modernity not in the chronological sense but as the progressive disenchantment of the world, often characterized by secular forms of political power, flattening of social hierarchies, market economies, and the nation state, it is clear why its rise posed a challenge to Catholicism.

9

...Vatican II emhpasized the special vocation of lay Catholics, not to the ambo or the head of the communion line, but to the worlds of family, commerce, politics, culture, and all the many forms of human life outside of the doors of the church. They were supposed to transform their environments and to be witnesses of Christ to all those around them. In fact, they did much worse in this area than the generations before Vatican II, who created vibrant Catholic subcultures. The "crisis of Vatican II" is thus less a crisis of the council's teachings, than a crisis of faulty explanation by the ;hierarchy and faulty implementation by the laity. The most neglected aspect of Vatican II is the mission of the laity, which is a key theme of this book.

10

...a society characterized by continuous scientific discoveries and continuous technological developments will also be a society characterized by rapid social, economic, and cultural change. .. Once-important customs vanish, while new ones, unimaginable to previous generations, come to seem normal, even natural. In reality, a new technology takes generations to evaluate. What does it do to family life? What are its political implications? How, then, should it be limited? But in industrial society over the last 200 years technological change has come so quickly and so persistently that little such evaluation has taken place.

16

As rational creatures, human beings have the god-like ability to know the truth, to magnify goodness, and to let beauty shine. At the heart of our current cultural malaise are failures to seek the true, the good, and the beautiful, due largely to modernity's insistence that reality is simply "neutral", rather than full of truth, goodness, and beauty.

35

The importance of [Frederic] Hart's view is evident in his response to a question about whether the money spent on the National Cathedral might have done more good if given to the poor. "To serve the poor", replied Hart, "you must have a value system in place that makes that important. A cathedral is a repository of that value system."

65

Although the professors [at the University of Kansas' Integrated Humanities Program] were Catholics and Thomists, they taught neither Catholicism nor Thomism in the classroom, the former because they strove to teach literature and not to proselytize, and the latter because they did not think their students were ready for it. .. The issue was not just that Thomas's Summa had been written for students who already had mastered philosophy, Scripture, and the seven liberal arts--the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy--which almost no American college students had done, but that they had not even started on a more elementary program of memory, singing, dancing, nature study, and gymnastics that was the necessary preparation for the liberal arts.

80

...the enthusiastic response of IHP students was so different from the usual response of American university students to academics that it frightened parents, administrators, and other professors. Particularly worrying were the conversions to Catholicism...and the handful of IHP students who went on to become monks.

83

The truth exists and can be known. People know this at a deep level and rejoice in it. From the Catholic perspective we can say that they actually were made to know the truth and they can in fact know the truth. The modern university is doubly disappointing in this vein. First, it is thoroughly Cartesian--ready to doubt anything and to criticize everything, holding nothing sacred, at once overwhelmed by endlesss administrative requirements and anxious never to be fooled or misled. Second, it is thoroughly devoted to means rather than ends, and these means are relentlessly administrative and bureaucratic. Students in the Cartesian administrative university find themselves in a complex impersonal system that produces a commodity called "education", characterized not by love for truth or the human person, but, rather, by procedural rigor with an undertone of angst about meaning.

95

On his [Dominic Legge] knees in the chapel, he grappled with God, afraid even to ask what God wanted, for fear that God would ask him to become a priest, and thus ruin his career and plans for marriage and family. He realized, though, that if he avoided the question and went on with his life, he would be saying, in effect, that he knew better than God. Once he did open himself to God, he felt joy and peace rather than fear. .. Over the next year, despite some frustrations and confusions, he came to believe that God was in fact calling him to the priesthood, not to test him or torment him, but out of deep love for him.

120

...those who enjoy homilies full of personal anecdotes and moral truisms would not defend them on the ground of profundity but rather for being amusing and entertaining. In short, the defenders of folk songs and light sermons argue according to categories that either are not part of the Church's understanding of the liturgy at all, or are subordinate to higher aims that have been laid out in great detail by the Church.

135

The trend toward secularization evident in many Catholic colleges after the Second Vatican Council hit Stupenville particularly hard. The opening Mass in fall 1973, with only six students and eight professors in attendance, exemplified the spiritual and demographic trajectory of the college. .. When Michael Scanlan, TOR, was invited to become the new president, he was, in fact, noticeably depressed and unconvinced that he should take the position. [p136] .. Where most Catholic colleges were succumbing to the pressure to become more like secular institutions and to hide or soften their doctrinal and spiritual distinctiveness to attract students, Scanlan took the opposite approach: "You don't always need to join the pack. Don't panic and simply become like everybody else. I would rather emphasize that you take a fresh approach and fresh proclamation of the mission". [p143] It was simply wishful thinking to believe that a college full of students with no special interest in Catholicism being taught by faculty with no special commitment to Catholicism would somehow come to appreciate the Catholic intellectual tradition, just as it was wishful thinking to believe that they would emerge as paragons of virtue and Catholic devotion after spending four years in fraternities and sororities indistinguishable from those at secular schools. [p143-4]

184

In an essay that indicted Smith and Duncan Stroik for "paranoia and self-righteousness", "noisy posturing", and a lack of intellectual rigor, [Michael] DeSanctis argued that American Catholics could no longer accept the kind of church buildings that Notre Dame's architects [Smith & Stroik] wanted to build. Over the past few decades, Americans had been shaped by "the modernist eye for practicality", which had given them "strong, handsomely appointed buildings with decent restrooms, coatrooms, diaper-changing rooms; proper planning-and-primping-and-feasting-and-mourning rooms, all conceived with the same care as the room reserved for divine worship". Despite his strong words, DeSanctis was making the case for the importance of Notre Dame's new approach. His emphasis on the practical, the mundane, and the functional; his uses of "handsomely appointed", rather than "beautifully adorned"; and his admission that the restrooms and coatrooms had been designed with the same care as the sanctuary: his own words pointed to ta domestication and horizontalization of architecture that could not help but produce drab and pedestrian structures.

205

In 2015...the Historic Charleston Foundation invited architect and urbanist Andres Duany...to Charleston for a...report on Charleston's architecture, more specifically on the mediocrity of much recent Charleston architecture and its failure to relate harmoniously to its surroundings. .. In some of the public meetings Duany took a compative stance, asking why so many new buildings looked like they could have been built in Atlanta or Charlotte and denoucning the modernist Clemson school of architecture. He said the city's architects not only did not understand the place where they were working, but even had "contempt" for the city's residents and wanted "to be liberated from the historic constraints". He challenged them to embrace their locale and develop its native genius, not ape the styles of other cities: "Charleston cannot be a net importer of architectural ideas. Charleston has to model its own genetic material, which is considerable and sophisticated. And Charleston has to become an exporter of architectural ideas. The world is fascinated by Charleston. Charleston is the greatest influence of my own work."

The heart of the matter was that the city's architects "are not loving Charleston" and "they're trying to make it something else". He rebuked the preservationists for opposing almost every form of development except for "geriatric monoculture" that disregarded the needs of families and young people. He criticized the fire marshal for allowing gigantic new firetrucks to determine the size of streets, rather than finding trucks that fit the streets that already existed.

212

G.K. Chesterton['s]...idea that orthodoxy is the true adventure bears repeating because it is continually undermined by the nostrums of public culture, which glamorized rebellion and novelty and denigrates tradition. Heresy and accommodation are both boring, stale, and sterile because they are not based on truth and therefore cannot grow and reproduce; they can only tear down. .. If you want meaning in your life, the last thing you should do is disconnect yourself from your people, your place, and your history, much less the spiritual traditions of the Church founded by Christ himself. If you want meaning, embrace tradition; if you want life, submit yourself to truth.

215

A third issue in these stories is institutionalization. When something goes well, whether it is an artistic endeavor or an academic pursuit, the natural consequence is the desire to institutionalize it [the process by which it was achieved], that is, to make it last. Since we love the good, we want the good to continue. Such a desire is natural and praiseworthy, but it always comes with temptations. I am influenced here by Ivan Illich, who describes two kinds of institutions, the manipulative and the convivial.

The manipulative institution attempts to guarantee results and, in doing so, gradually becomes coercive and counter productive. The classic example is the mandatory public school system, which, starting with the noble intention to impart an education, ends up with a compulsory twelve-year conveyor belt that has come to seem more and more like a prison system and that produces people who have credentials but little love for learning, knowledge, or truth.

The convivial institution, on the other hand, is humble and modest, providing a framework that serves the desired end, but never presumes to guarantee it. The convivial institution has few rules, little bureaucracy, and a high degree of freedom, because it is devoted to serving persons, not producing results.

Build

2025-06-17T00:00:00Z

Build by Tony Fadell, 2022.

Page 15

"If you make it, they will come" doesn't always work. If the technology isn't ready, they won't come for sure. But even if you've got the tech, then you still have to time it right. The world has to be ready to want it. .. I think of this as the General Magic problem. We were trying to build an iPhone years before it was a glimmer in Steve Jobs' eye. .. You couldn't jam a Rolodex into your pocket or purse, so Palm was the right solution for the time. It made sense. It had a reason to exist.

General Magic did not. We started from the technology -- focusing on what we could create, what would impress the geniuses at our company -- not the reason why real, nontechnical people would need it. So the Magic Link solved problems that regular people wouldn't have for more than a decade.

59

The customer is always right, right? Except customer panels can't design for shit. People just can't articulate what they want clearly enough to definitely point in one direction or another, especially if they're considering something completely new that they've never used before. Customers will always be more comfortable with what exists already, even if it's terrible.

69

So here's how to deal with people like me, how to talk down a hurricane: ask why. It's the responsibility of a passionate person -- especially a leader -- to describe their decision and make sure you can see it through their eyes. If they can tell you why they're so passionate about something, then you can piece together their thought process and either jump on board or point out potential issues.

81

If the mission you're excited about is growing dimmer because of internal politics or poor administration or leadership churn or simply bad decisions, don't be shy. .. Talk to everyone. Not watercooler talk or internal gossip, not just complaining with no solutions. Come with suggestions to fix the intractable problems that you and your team face. .. Get up as high as you can and let them know what the issues are. You'll probably quit anyway if these issues aren't solved, so you have nothing to lose.

82

I remember we had a huge all-hands meeting at Apple once... And a guy stands up during Q&A and starts asking Steve Jobs why he didn't get a raise or a good review. Steve looks at him in stunned disbelief and says, "I can tell you why. Because you're asking this question in front of ten thousand people." He was fired shortly thereafter.

96

People often get excited about making something with atoms--they dig into the design, interface, color, materials, textures--and instantly become blind to simpler, easier solutions. But making anything with atoms is incredibly difficult-it's not an app that you can copy and update with a click. The only time hardware is worth the headache of manufacturing and packaging and shipping is if it's critically necessary and transformative. If hardware doesn't absolutely need to exist to enable the overall experience, then it should not exist.

Of course, sometimes you do need hardware--it can't be avoided. But when that happens, I still tell people to put it away. I say, "Don't tell me what's so special about this object. Tell me what's different about the customer journey."

98

[in the early days of Nest] Everyone was obsessed with the thermostat--crafting the design, the AI, the device UI, the electronics, the mechanical bits, colors, textures. They thought carefully through every element of installing it, how it should feel when you turn the dial, how brightly it should glow when you walk past. The worked tirelessly on the hardware and software making sure the device itself was perfect. ..

The thermostat was important, of course, but it occupied only a tiny fraction of the customer journey:

10% of our customers' experience was the website, advertising, packaging, and in-store display...

10% was installation...

10% was looking at and touching the device: it had to be beautiful so people would want it in their homes.

70% of the customer experience was on people's phones or laptops...

100

Your product, marketing, and support have to grease the skids--continually communicate and connect with customers, give them the answers they need, so they feel like they're on a smooth ride, a single continuous, inevitable journey. To do that right, you have to prototype the whole experience--give every part the weight and reality of a physical object. Regardless of whether your product is made of atoms or bits or both, the process is the same. Draw pictures. Make models. Pin mood boards. Sketch out the bones of the process in rough wireframes. Write imaginary press releases. Create detailed mock-ups that show how a customer would travel from an ad to the website to the app and what information they would see at each touchpoint. Write up the reactions you'd want to get from early adopters, the headlines you'd want to see from reviewers, the feelings you want to evoke in everyone. Make it visible. Physical. Get it out of your head and onto something you can touch. And don't wait until the product is done to get started--map out the whole journey as you map out what your product will do.

100

The packaging led everything. The product name, the tagline, the top features, their priority order, the main value props--they were literally printed on a cardboard box that we constantly held, looked at, tweaked, revised. The physical limitations of the box forced us to zero in on exactly what we wanted people to understand first, second, third.

107

Every product should have a story, a narrative that explains why it needs to exist and how it will solve your customer's problems. A good product story has three elements:

It appeals to people's rational and emotional sides.

It takes complicated concepts and makes them simple.

It reminds people of the problem tha's being solved--it focuses on the "why". That "why" is the most critical part of product development--it has to come first. Once you have a strong answer for why your product is needed, then you can focus on how it works.

109

[Steve Jobs] used a technique I later came to call the virus of doubt. It's a way to get into peoples heads, remind them about a daily frustration, get them annoyed about it all over again. If you can infect them with the virus of doubt--"Maybe my experience isn't as good as I thought, maybe it could be better"--then you prime them for your solution. You get them angry about how it works now so they can get excited about a new way of doing things. .. Before he told you what a product did, he always took the time to explain why you needed it.

124

If Nest had only disrupted hardware--if we had just built the Nest Learning Thermostat alone--we would have failed. We needed to disrupt the sales and distribution channel, too. At the time, regular people didn't really go out and buy thermostats. You could get them at a hardware store, but they were intentionally complicated so you couldn't install them easily yourself. And they weren't sold online so you couldn't comparison shop and see the steep markup HVAC technicians would charge you. .. For every upsell of a fancy new Honeywell thermostat, the HVAC would get a nice little bonus for a job well done. Sell enough thermostats and Honeywell would send you on a Hawiian vacation. This was an entrenched market where the existing players had done everything in their power to keep out competitors.

135

In the very beginning, before there are customers, vision is more important than pretty much anything else. But you don't have to figure out your vision all by yourself. In fact, you probably shouldn't. Locking yourself alone in a room to create a manifesto of your single, luminous vision looks and feels indistinguishable from completely losing your mind. Get at least one person--but preferably a small group--to bounce ideas off of. Sketch out your mission together. Then fulfill it together.

136

Typically your vision is so much greater than what materializes in V1. .. When do you tear yourself away from what you're making and just...stop? Ship it. Set it free. See what happens. Here's the trick: write a press release. But don't write it when you're done. Write it when you start [working on V2].

141

It was only with the third version that we understood all the pieces well enough to create the right V1 device. But we would have never reached that third design if we hadn't given ourselves hard deadlines with the first two--if we hadn't cut ourselves off after a few months, resent, and moved on. We forced as many constraints on ourselves as possible: not too much time, not too much money, and not too many people on the team.

143

Generally any brand-new product should never take longer than 18 months to ship--24 at the limit. The sweet spot is somewhere between 9 and 18 months.

143

But even if it takes ten years to research a question, regular check-ins along the way ensure you're still chasing the right answer. Or still asking the right question. Pre-V1 launch, that heartbeat is entirely internal. You're not talking to the outside world yet, so you have to have a strong internal rhythm that pushes you toward a set launch date. This rhythm is made of major milestones--board meetings, all hands meetings, or project milestones at certain moments of product development where everyone, engineering and marketing and sales and support, can pause and sync with each other. This might happen every few weeks or every few months, but it has to happen in order to keep everyone moving in lockstep to the external announcement.

150

...there are three stages of profitability:

Not remotely profitable: With the first version of a product you're still testing out the market, testing out the product, trying to find your customers. Many products and companies die at this stage before they ever make a dime.

Making unit economics or gross margins: Hopefully with V2 you can make a gross profit with each product sold or each customer who subscribes to your service. ..

Making business economics or net margins: With V3 you have the potential to make net profits with each subscription or product sold. That means that what you take in in sales revenue outstrips your business costs, so your company as a whole makes money.

158

Far too many people expect profitability, for the product and the business, right out of the gate. When I was at Philips I watched most new product categories and businesses on their slate get cancelled--even for products that were almost ready to ship. .. They would die on the vine because the top brass were protecting themselves. Any execs joining the team always wanted a near guarantee that new products would make money. They demanded to be shown ahead of time that the unit and business economics of the product were sound. But that was impossible. They were asking us to predict the future with near 100 percent confidence.

163-4

But no matter where we went, we could not escape one thing: the [] thermostat. The infuriating, inaccurate, energy-hogging, thoughtlessly stupid, impossible to program, always-too-hot-or-too-cold-in-some-part-of-the-house thermostat. Someone needed to fix it. And eventually I realized that someone was going to be me. The big companies weren't going to do it. Honeywell and the other white-box competitors hadn't truly innovated in thirty years. It was a dead, unloved market with less than $1 billion in total annual sales in the United States. And after a failed green innovation wave in 2007 and 2008, green-tech investors had firmly turned away from energy-saving devices. A small startup filled with fresh faces and few connections wouldn't have the credibility to get funding. I could already hear the VCs sneer, "Thermostats? Really? You want to make thermostats? The market is tiny and boring and hard."

164

Since I deeply trusted Randy, I decided to test my idea on him an floated the idea of a smart thermostat. He offered to write me a check on the spot. I was exactly the kind of founder investors like. Four failed startups and years of professional disappointment had paved the way for a decade of success [iPhone]. I was forty years old, knew exactly how hard this was going to be and which mistakes not to make again. I'd worked on hardware and software at tiny and enormous companies. I had contacts, credibility, and enough experience to know what I didn't know. And I had an idea.

164

Your thermostat should learn temperatures you like and when you like them. It should connect to your smartphone so you can control it from anywhere. It should turn itself down when you're not home to save energy. And of course it should be beautiful--something you're proud to put on your wall.

165

He was a real partner who could hsare the load, who'd work just as hard as me and care just as much. We already knew how to work together and saw eye-to-eye on how to make products. I didn't need another middle-aged executive with decades of experience telling me what we couldn't do. I needed a real cofounder.

165

What we pitched to investors was a connected thermostat. But we knew the company we were builidng--it wasn't going to stop at thermostats. We would create a slew of products, reinventing unloved but important objects everyone needed at home. And, most importantly, we were going to create a platform. We were going to build the connected home.

172

The best ideas are painkillers, not vitamins. Vitamin pills are good for you, but they're not essential. You can skip your morning vitamin for a day, a month, a lifetime and never notice the difference. But you'll notice real quick if you forget a painkiller. Painkillers eliminate something that's constantly bothering you. A regular irritation you can't get rid of. And the best pain--so to speak--is one you experience in your own life. ..

Not every product idea has to come from your own life, but the "why" always has to be crisp and easy to articulate. You have to be able to easily, clearly, persuasively explain why people will need it. That's the only way to understand what features it should have, whether the timing is right for it to exist, whether the market for it will be tiny or enormous.

172-3

Once you have a really strong "why", you have the germ of a great idea. But you can't build a business on a germ. First you have to figure out if this idea is actually strong enough to carry a company. You need to build a business and implementation plan. And you have to understand if it's something you want to work on for the next five to ten years of your life. The only way to know is to see if it will chase you.

177

So I let the idea catch me. .. During this time, I'd also play a little game with myself and people I truly respected. They'd ask me, "What's keeping you busy now? What's interesting to you?" So I'd tell them I had an idea--maybe a great idea--and share a few details to get their reactions and thoughts and questions. .. Then as weeks of research and strategy began to come together, I stopped saying it was an idea and started saying I was building a product. Even though it wasn't quite true yet. But I wanted it to feel real--to get them, and especially me, to really dive to the details. I wanted to convince them and I wanted them to challenge it and I wanted to tell a story. ..

It took around nine to twelve months of making prototypes and interactive models, building bits of software, talking to users and experts, and testing it with friends before Matt and I decided to take the plunge and actually pitch investors.

178

...we didn't just present our vision when we pitched investors. We presented the why--told our story--and then we presented the risks. Too many startups don't know what they're getting into, or worse, try to cover up risks of failure. .. So we listed our risks: building an AI, compatibility with hundreds of different (and ancient) HVAC systems, customer installation, retail, and the really big one--would anyone even care? Would the world want a smart thermostat? The potential company-destroying problems--and the steps to mitigate them--went on and on. But listing them out, breaking them down, talking honestly about them, that's what ultimately convinced investors that we really knew what we were getting into. And that we could make it work.

196

...investors are swimming in pitches. .. You need some way to rise to the top and get their attention. The best way to do that is with a compelling story. ...most VCs won't be technical. So don't focus on the technology, focus on the "why". .. Pitching is hard. You'll need to constantly tune the deck up, change it around, tweak and revise. So you don't want your first pitch to be in front of the very top VC in your area. VCs talk to each other, so if one casts you aside, the others in that class may pass as well. .. Remember that you don't have to come in perfectly polished for that first meeting. You can say, "I'd l ike to give you an early look at this. Maybe it would be of interest to you. I'd love to get your comments on it."

206

There are two kinds of work/life balance:

True work/life balance: A magical, quasi-mythical state where you have time for everything: work, family, hobbies, seeing friends, exercising, vacationing. Work is just one part of your life that doesn't intrude on any other part. This kind of balance is impossible when you're starting a company, leading a team that's trying to create innovative products or services on a competitive timeline, or just experiencing crunch time at work.

Personal balance when you're working: Knowing you're going to be working or thinking about work most of the time and creating space to give your brain and body a break. To reach some level of personal balance, you need to design your schedule so you have time to eat well (hopefully with family and friends), exercise or meditate, sleep, and briefly think about something other than the current crisis at the office.

207

...do not vacation like Steve Jobs. Steve would typically take two weeks off, twice a year. We'd always dread those vacations at Apple. The first forty-eight hours were quite. After that it would be a storm of nonstop calls. He wasn't tied up in meetings, worrying about the day-to-day, so he was free. Free to dream about the future of Apple at all hours of the day and night. Free to call and get our thoughts about whatever crazy idea just occurred to him...

235

An interview isn't about carefree small talk. You're there for a reason. In an interview I'm always most interested in three basic things: who they are, what they've done, and why they did it. I usually start with the most important questions: "What are you curious about? What do you want to learn?"

267

To be a great designer you can't lock yourself in a room--you have to connect with your team, with your customer and their environment, and other teams who may have innovative ideas to bring to the table. .. You have to look at a problem from all angles. You have to get a little creative. And you have to notice the problem in the first place. That last point doesn't sound like a big deal. But it's huge. It's the difference between a startup employee and its founder. .. You can't solve interesting problems if you don't notice they're there.

273

Re the pain table for messaging architecture

The whole product narrative should be in there--every pain, every painkiller, every rational and emotional impulse, every insight about your customer.

275

A messaging activation matrix:

The msessaging activation matrix should guide where and when you include certain information so you don't overwhelm or undereducate your customer as they move through multiple touchpoints along the customer journey.

292

Rather than focusing on rewarding salespeople immediately after a transaction, vest the commission over time so your sales team is incentivized to not only bring in new customers, but also work with existing customers to ensure they're happy and stay happy.

307

And I said, "No way. We are not launching our new product [Nest Cam] with a picture of a strangled baby."

310-2

Nest was building a platform--an ecosystem of our own and third party products all controlled by one application--that would elevate the connected home into something truly magical. We were going to weave a tapestry of technologies that would fundamentally change what home could be. That was the vision, anyway. The vision that Google bought for $3.2 billion in 2014. .. In 2013...I knew that if they were eager to buy Nest, it meant that they could be getting serious about building smart-home hardware. And if Google was serious...the other tech behemoths could be looking into it, too. Nest had started this snowball rolling and now it was causing an avalanche. If we weren't careful we could quickly get buried.

Nest was doing really well, selling our products as fast as we could make them. We could have just kept building the thermostat--its impact had already eclipsed our wildest expectations. .. But we were dead set on building a platform--a large and meaningful one that could last decades--and that would require vast resources. Huge companies like Google or Apple with other highly profitable revenue steams and tons of products could quickly displace us with their own platform. All they'd nee dto do was to announce a plan to enter the connected-home space. It wouldn't matter if their platform was any good--when a giant company makes an announcement, that alone puts a thumb on the scale. .. I had seen too many successful products and platforms from little startups die when bigger players moved in and sucked up all the oxygen in the room. But by joining Google we wouldn't just be protecting ourselves--we'd be accelerating our mission. ..

Within hours of the activation, Nest tried to calm a wave of bad press by publicly declaring our culture and systems completely separate from Google. After that, there was organ rejection. The natural antibodies at Google detected something new, different, foreign, and did everything they possibly could to avoid or ignore it. The would smile and smile but the promised meetings, the oversight from Google management, the plans we'd made to integrate--they all started to fall apart.

312

In 2014, just before the Google acquisition, Nest spent around $250,000 per employee per year. That included decent office space, good health insurance, the occasional free lunch, and fun perks from time to time. After we were acquired, that number shot up to $475,000 per person.

329

...Steve Jobs...told us five months before the first iPhone shipped that it needed a glass front face covering the display instead of plastic. .. He realized plastic wouldn't cut it. If we wanted it to be great, it would have to be glass. Even though we had absolutely no idea how to do it. Even though he knew we'd all have to work nonstop until we got it right, sacrificing our time with our families, our plans and vacations. But Steve was a parent CEO. A pushy parent. A tiger mom. He knew if we kept pushing, together, we'd figure it out. The sacrifices would be worth it. And he was right. That time. But not every time. ... But if you aren't failing, you aren't trying hard enough.

333-4

Good CEOs...tell the board what's working but they're also transparent about what isn't and how they're addressing it. They present a fully-formed plan that the board can question, object to, or try to modify.

Bill Campbell...would always say that if there was any potentially surprising or controversial topic, the CEO should go to every board member, one-on-one, to walk them through it before the meeting. .. There should only be good surprises in a board meeting...

348

When Larry told me during acquisition that Google would marshal the team and align their priorities with ours, he was 100 percent telling the truth. But what that looked like at Google was giving the team the skeleton of a plan and letting them fill in the rest as they went. .. But I had interpreted his words through an Apple lens. If Steve Jobs said he was going to marshal the team, that meant he was going to be there every step of the way--weekly, sometimes daily. .. Even though we were promised a full blitz, nobody was going to drop any bombs at Google. They didn't even know the meaning of the word.

The moment I realized that, I could see how we'd been misaligned from the start. We hadn't prepared for this. We hadn't planned for no managerial air cover. We hadn't planned for organ rejection.

361

I wanted everyone to keep their focus on the things we were making, the vision we were trying to achieve. Not perks, not frills, not extras. So there was no [] way that we were going to spend company money giving people free massages. We needed that money--to build the business. To reach net margins. To make sure our fundamentals were strong and sound so that we could keep employing all these people in the first place. And we needed it to help people have the live they wanted outside work. Instead of making the office so luxe that employees would never leave, we spent our money on meaningful benefits for them and their families--better health care, IVF, the stuff that really changes people's lives.

Our Lady of the Green Scapular

2025-02-11T00:00:00Z

Our Lady of the Green Scapular by Nico Fassino, 2024.

5

Two months after entering the convent, during a retreat held in the presence of an ancient and miraculous statue of the Madonna, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to Justine [Bisqueyburu], holding in her hand here Immaculate Heart, pierced by a sword, and surrounded with flames. Our Lady continued to visit Justine throughout the year, and on 8 September 1840, the Blessed Virgin Mary now appeared holding a green medallion of cloth on a loop of green cord. The medallion featured two illustrations: on the front, an image of the Virgin as she appeared to Justine, and on the back an image of her Immaculate Heart 'all burning with rays more brilliant than the sun, and as transparent as crystal; this heart, surmounted by a cross, was pierced with a sword, and around it were the words: "Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us now and at the hour of our death"'.

7

By 1846, with Fr. Aladel's blessing, the scapular began to be distributed widely, and it first received approval from Vatican officials in 1863. As the devotion spread, it came to be known primarily for obtaining numerous and dramatic conversions to the faith, but physical healings and other favors were also obtained.

9

In the second battle of the Argonne, one of the deadlies of U.S. military history [Fr. William] O'Connnor suffered a poison gas attack that left him unable to walk or speak. Refusing to be sent home, he nevertheless remained with his troops for months, even after the armistice. His recovery was slow; he continued to need crutches to walk, and his voice was still so damaged that his physicians believed he would never preach again. In early 1919 a confessor in Paris recommended that O'Connor travel to Lourdes, a site well-famed for miracles of physical healing. .. All told, about eight or nine thousand pilgrims and several bishops and archbishops were present. But the priest assigned to give the homily was injured in an automobile accident en route. The American army chaplains gathered to decide on a replacement and appointed Father O'Connor, who of course was not present and well on his way to Lourdes. When he arrived, O'Connor was notified of this unexpected preaching duty about an hour before mass. He turned to Our Lady, who on that very day sixty-one years earlier had announced herself as the 'Immaculate' to young Bernadette Soubirous, and he made a request: if Mary would intercede to strengthen and preserve his voice, he promised 'to use it as often as possible in the service of Her Divine Son.' With the clock ticking, Father O'Connor recounted how he readied himself for the sermon: 'I smoked a cigarette and then said a rosary and that was my preparation.' His voice was healed, and those present in Lourdes that day often said that O'Connor had preached the best sermon they ever heard. .. In 1946 the Diocese of Madison was erected and William O'Connor was appointed its first bishop. .. To address the rapid growth, Bishop O'Connor established the first new parish of the diocese in 1950, and he dedicated it to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

14

With the favor of the Carmelites, the Portuguese sculptor José Ferreira Thedim agreed to carve a special statue in honor of the Immaculate Heart of Mary for [Fr. Jerome] Mersberger's parish. Thedim himself had witnessed the Miracle of the Sun, and carving the statue under the very direction of Sister Lúcia, he portrayed Our Lady as she appeared to the Fatima children during the second apparition. When the statue was finished, Lúcia remarked, 'it is the nearest representation that I have ever seen of the apparition of Mary'. To be sure, the statue was already somewhat famous by the time it left the artist's workshop and Catholics in many countries wished to see it. A European tour was planned, and from Casa Thedim studios in Porto, Portugal, the statue embarked upon an 8,000-mile journey for Father Mersberger's Chicken Coop Church.

15

Soon after the statue's installation, Bishop O'Connor gave a handful of Green Scapulars to Father Mersberger and said, 'These will help you get the parish started'. He called the scapulars 'badges of the Immaculate Heart of Mary' and encouraged Mersberger to use them to build up love and devotion to the Blessed Virgin.

31

Marian devotion, along with a good many unfashionable practices, began to diminish even by the early 1960s, and it was especially common for younger priests, and priests with savoir faire, to downplay Marain devotions as outdated and irrelevant. This current was so strong that many of the laity during these years sincerely thought that the Church had changed her teaching. .. 'There is not a rosary bead or an old fashioned prayer book in the shop', was the boast of St. Benet's bookshop in downtown Chicago. .. Such was the cultural and devotional maelstrom of change which had formed during these years. It was into these waters that Father Mersberger sailed as he finished completion of the Green Scapular Shrine church and prepared to expand his Marian apostolate.

36

For by now [October 1967] there was open conflict at Immaculate Heart of Mary. Though a considerable number of parishioners remained loyal to Mersberger and devoted to the shrine, yet there were those who had become weary of the shrine's unique demands, some who wanted the laity to control the direction of the parish, and even others who reckoned the famous shrine statue and green scapulars nothing more than antiquated and embarrassing artifacts of a former age. .. To make matters worse, Father Mersberger had little to no rapport with the new bishop [Cletus O'Donnell]. .. A popular bishop of national repute and a paragon of progressive, post-conciliar ideals, O'Donnell had broad support from the priests and laity of the diocese. .. In fine, O'Donnell was the face of a new age, and Mersberger represented an older order in clear decline.

38

And now in early 1968, with the parish wracked by factionalism and mutinous claims about Mersberger's management and conduct, the situation looked rather grim. Bishop O'Donnell delivered an ultimatum: Mersberger had to relinquish command of Immaculate Heart of Mary parish, or else give up control of the Green Scapular Shrine. The new parish chosen by O'Donnell was the church of St. Mary in the tiny farm town of Palmyra... Although it meant leaving behind the largest and most populous parish in the diocese, the parish he had built up from twenty-seven families and a dilapidated chicken coop, Mersberger accepted the new arrangement. He believed in the importance of the Green Scapular above all else, was ready to do whatever it took to continue the mission, and trusted Our Lady would assist him.

41

While O'Donnell had permitted Mersberger to continue his Green Scapular activities in Palmyra, there was still an open question about the famous statue of Our Lady. ...the statue had been given as a gift and belonged to Immaculate Heart, and if the parish did not consent to its removal there would be no chance for the shrine to continue. .. At this contentious meeting...One man eventually stood up in frustration and said: 'Just let it go! It will be nothing but divisive for us if we try to keep it. We don't need it!'. .. Over the next few months Mersberger completed the transfer of the statue, shrine property, gift shop items, and correspondence to Palmyra.

52

In 1996 Father Mersberger was compelled by age and failing health to leave the shrine and enter a senior living facility. He died on 2 December 1998, at the age of 81.

53

In November of 200, the legal transfer of the [Palymyra] building to Shoenstatt was complete and...the contents of the shrine center were saved and transported to [the University of Dayton's Marian Library]. The shrine museum's valuable collection of more than 450 unique Marian statues...were carefully packed and brought to the Marian Library. The original famous statue of Our Lady, on the other hand, was almost left behind. .. Eventually...it was cut down and packed with the rest.

53

...the library was contacted by an enigmatic priest of the Diocese of St. Cloud, Minnesota, who had a familial connection to the Schonestatt order. ...would the library consider releasing the statue into his personal posession? [Director Rev. Johann] Roten, believing that the statue was taking up too much space, granted the request. After this the trail of the statue grows cold. The priest who acquired it from the Marian Library has refused to disclose its location to the [Immaculate Heart of Mary] parish and no longer responds to any attempt at communication.

73

Mersberger's strident refusal to allow the newly-mandated lay parish council to control parish finances or have actual decision-making authority also created an immense strain on the parish. Mersberger was a clear product of an former age of priestly formation and governance: the pastor ran the parish in totality, with all legal and canonical authority and with no other recourse or input.

74

...other city [of Madison] monsignors were eager to see Mersberger...replaced for a number of reasons, but especially because [he was] slow to implement the liturgical and ideological policies that were becoming so popular across the Catholic world. It ought to be noted that Mersberger was no arch-conservative or intransigent traditionalist. He...happily celebrated the new liturgy following the Second Vatican Council, and regularly concelbrated with other priests. But he certainly did not permit any of the more radical innovations or abuses which sprang up during this time, in vogue throughout the rest of the city.

84

With the parish unable to recover the original statue from Rev. David Belland, it was decided that a new statue of Our Lady of the Green Scapular should be commissioned for Immaculate Heart of Mary parish. Using scanned photographs and descriptions of the original, a new statue was created whcih paid homage to the original without being an exact replica. The new statue is considerably taller than the original, which was only three feet tall, and differs in several small elements and details of design, while generally conveying the look and impression of the original. The new statue was donated by the family of lifelong IHM parishioner Rita Noble.

Revitalizing Industry

2023-12-18T00:00:00Z

Here are some thoughts from the Reindustrialize conference:

Industry is incredible.

It transforms raw, simple things into more complex and useful things through the literal application of thought to the world. Industry requires the real world, it's anti-made-up. When so many things are soft and arbitrary, industry is all about hard constraints and real results. It's not moving a box from here to there, it's not about consumption and feelings, but creating capabilities. Working in industry is real work, the work and the result are right there in front of you.

In the past we took industry for granted, since there wasn't a real alternative. Like, are you not going to build a house and keep living in the bush? But now, in many ways we are too modest and soft-spoken. It is better to make things than to consume them, industrial employment is more important than the service sector. If your company leads your industry, every facade of your building should exclaim that. Make your employees proud to work there and involve them in the drama of competition.

But now there are alternatives to industrial work, alternatives that look like they can provide equivalent or better social standing. So we must answer why should we or I make something when they can and will do it for me and I can merely consume it? We must call attention to the benefits of industry beyond the mere goods themselves and beyond the explicitly monetary. Yes, Industry makes goods, but Industry also makes communities and people.

But how do you enter into industry? How can your unique talents and interests, your person, be brought to bear on the products you help make? After all, Ford took great pains to remove craftsmanship from his assembly lines, dividing work into shoulder-to-shoulder-sized tasks for increased productive density. This legacy continues, and it leads to real problems, not of the product, but problems in the people and processes making them. Throughout most of the 20th century, the product was all that mattered.

But now in the 21st, with tight labor and competitive international markets, these other problems are just as important to solve as those of the product. We can't reasonably expect a problematic production process to produce consistent products. Dead-end jobs and cycles of dependence are incompatible with Reindustrialization. The task of industry is not mere production, but creating integrated and sustainable production systems. If we are to Reindustrialize in any obvious way, more than widgets must flow out of the factories, but also good ideas and fulfilled people. The opportunity to work on a high-performing assembly line can, and should, have many of the same personal benefits to playing on a sports team, though requiring less natural talent and fewer years of training. Why don't we celebrate our wins?

The most visible problems are those of personnel, equipment, and product. But as Boeing had better of learned, failures in management, structure, and incentive are far more damaging and difficult to discover, diagnose, and correct. Reindustrialization is not just about making things in America, but making companies that can make things competitively, through processes that are sound and scalable and that don't take advantage of workers and are not premised on temporary market distortions.

Is your goal to make widgets, to enable applications using widgets, or to support flourishing communities by providing widgets that enable certain capabilities? Belief in and recitation of your company's reason for being is key. If this can't be defined or convincingly said, it's no wonder your teams flounder. And if your company really is superfluous, find something better to do!

It's not a level playing field. International competition is subsidized and offshoring is rewarded by our markets. At present, we simply have to accept this, and to use these realities to focus our efforts on understanding our products and finding product models that compete on different, durable bases. Our goal is not to preserve our margins and thwart commoditization at every turn, but to race to commoditization, to find what determines that commoditized price and then leverage our proximity to customers. Making the market move faster is key.

Lastly, Made-in-America does matter, but why would you limit that investment to a small flag icon when instead you can show the whole process and all of the people involved in it? People, consumers crave relationship. And while it's hard to have a relationship with a cardboard box, faces, scenery, and stories all matter in a customer's brand relationship. Internet influencers and retailers show how easy digital branding is; why can't we get excited about the things we make, people we employ, and communities we build?

AI Doesn't Matter to the Market..yet

2023-12-18T00:00:00Z

With the recent launch of Google Gemini, much is being written about whether and how LLM AIs, like ChatGPT, will disrupt Google's search advertising business, and how Google will respond to that threat. In positive pieces, the implicit assumption is that an AI agent will have the ability subtly suggest one product over another, advertising, in a way that is mildly contrary to the user's actual desire. But just as DoubleClick learned that the marketing 'emperor has no clothes', so too will Google or anyone else that tries to monetize this nudging, as it is likely to either be so predictable that it won't survive user interrogation, or so trivial as to not be worth all that much to the advertisers. That is, the nudge vector is very limited, an ad market of only two or three contextualized bidders, rather than hundreds today. That this market is smaller is the value provided to the user, but it will not be a replacement for Google's search business. To survive the spread of AI agents, I think Google will need to find something other than nudge ads.

Stratechery suggests that this will be AI-ready smartphones, though this time not open-sourced and so enjoying the moat of a closed ecosystem like Apple's. This hardware play is not durable: if advanced hardware is necessary to run an AI agent locally, that is a one-time cost, and we all know how boring smartphones are now. If the value is instead created in the cloud, that is a subscription and need not be tied to a particular hardware platform. But between these is the interesting territory, where we might imagine that strong control over hardware enables it to be designed for close coupling to some cloud-derived model, resulting in a market-beating combo. This middle path sounds to me like cloud-trained models that are delivered in compute- and space-efficient, hardware-ready formats to personal devices. Requiring bespoke hardware to run cloud-tailored models entails both initial purchase and ongoing subscription, giving a much more attractive revenue stream, while creating a vector to gather more data and incentivizing continued hardware+software improvement.

But this would depend heavily on the necessity of that hw+sw combo, a bet against historic trends of modularity and hardware agnosticism. As much as Google/Microsoft/etc are now investing in custom, AI-focused chip designs, it is far too soon to argue that these efforts will result in designs that will durably lead the market, an argument contrary to history of chip-design to-date. Lacking this, the bettor is forced to argue that only Google will be able to make this hw+sw combo happen, as a result of its unique access to the information of search, ads, YouTube, and GMail.

I don't think this argument will succeed, expecting instead the genie to escape the bottle in the form of open-source, locally-running AI agents on commoditized hardware. This would be consistent with the decreasing cost of compute and the continuing application of networks to create individual and societal value. Moreover, we absolutely should expect market forces to put an end to, as Stratechery says "Google's collection of moonshots — from Waymo to Google Fiber to Nest to Project Wing to Verily to Project Loon (and the list goes on)..." as indeed they are "...science projects that have, for the most part, served to divert profits from Google Search away from shareholders." That is, it is Google that must hope and work to try to maintain the margins it's luxuriated in, but we on the outside need not expect that, nor even desire it. For if AI reduces Google's slice of the pie, that means more pie for everyone else.

Funding open source

2023-07-17T00:00:00Z

Isn't it weird that massively scalable software relies on legalities and paper to look after itself, instead of...software?

Open source licensing is widely appreciated but its core problem is that value only flows from authors to users, there is no counter flow of value. This is solely due to the generosity of the open source authors: their decision to release their work to the public is founded on a combination of personal pride, community spirit, ideological priors, and somewhat nebulous market-shaping preferences. These motivations are, I think, generally appreciated and attained. Removing expense or use limitations does enable more people to use your work. But as Thomas Sanladerer recently presented, the problem is that compensation is not among these goals, and is often undermined by them.

The reason that other people use open source work is because it is useful to them, useful to some problem downstream of or different from that which motivated the original creation. For some reason, though, the original author does not have access to the full breadth of the problem, they cannot solve all of the problems that end-users have and therefore do not have visibility in to the full size of the problem(s) which they are helping to solve, and are thereby limited in their ability to understand and capture value off of those end solutions.

This is in contrast to an idealized, econ101 market, where, say, some collection of companies all have unique capabilities that they provide, with mutual contracts linking these isolated capabilities into competitive offerings for customers. In this 101 ideal, each of the specialists individually operate their piece of the overall solution, giving them information on the overall size of the problem and incentive to perform their piece in a manner appropriate and efficient to the problem. It also permits the specialized providers to consider their joint position and discuss whether other arrangements would be more efficient, ie through combination or redistribution of tasks. This idealized market works because each specialist can see both the originating problem and overall solution. It is rarely realized because the specialists have coordination costs that slow solution development and provision. Integrating these specialists into a vertical entity, which works from say raw supplies to deliver a product ready for end use, streamlines these capabilities at the cost of preventing these specialists from contributing to other products.

The low cost of executing software to perform specific tasks provides an alternate and inferior solution to the problem of coordination: instead of coordinating multiple entities, just ship the software to entities closer to the problems and who can provide the end-solutions themselves.

Distanced from customer need, open source developers are free from many requirements and able to pursue, in many cases, technically novel and quickly-changing capabilities. But there are many anecdotes relating that the hard part of innovation is not having the idea - and writing a performant solution - but bringing that to market, which is surrounding the core innovation with the soft interfaces that enable it to plug into the market. No matter how revolutionary the battery, it still needs a motor, transmission, trigger, and casing to be used as a drill.

So, the real question of making open source sustainable is a question of animating the market mechanisms in a way appropriate to and more harmonious with the other values, goods, and distinguishing features of open source. Doubling down on ideology is not a solution. There are real costs to developers and to the ecosystem in general when individuals miss-apply their efforts. Right now, we only see the disgruntled blog posts and videos, but there are many others.

What if open source licenses included a right of third party action or other finder's fee?

My terminology can surely be improved, but the objective would be to create new mechanisms for developers to learn about how software is being used so that they can better moderate their own investments. For instance, http://gpl-violations.org/about/ and other organizations offer rewards for reporting GPL violations. What if instead of being privately funded these rewards were baked into the license? For instance, the SEC has long included the funding of whistleblower rewards into their settlements, knowing that the best way to encourage a culture of self-policing is to create incentives for those with knowledge of problems to do their own math. The same can be envisioned for license compliance.

But to stop there would be a failure to realize the above, that while license compliance and mechanisms that encourage that are important, they are not enough. If all code were infected by viral licenses, we would just end up with a plethora of open code and no real change to what the code does or how value is distributed among the creators.

Continuing then, most attempts to determine 'equitable' assignments of value to various (sub)sub-components fail; I'd argue they cannot succeed if only for the simple reason that their contribution to the value created decreases with time. The market is the only way to solve this assignment problem, and the only way it can do that is with accurate information on use and value created. Closed source is one collection of approaches, as are the numerous variations on open core and dual-licensing. Without specifying further, it is clear that having more information is essential to enabling developers to apply their efforts correctly: instead of just creating and releasing software they can instead ask some of their likely users whether they want, and want to support, the creation of the software. There will always be a gap between the technically-possible capabilities and those utilized in a market, if only for the delay between realizing and implementing capabilities. The goal of helping developers to better apply their resources is to create, in an open way, some of the resource coordination capabilities that vertically-integrated companies enjoy, while also preserving their independence.

I see two motions in this direction. First are the success of open communities facilitated by GitHub, GitLab, etc. Second are task brokers like UpWork. These are the same thing; the first is nominally designing the work and the second incenting its creation, though today they are performed by unrelated entities.

(As an aside, UpWork is close to having a really interesting database of plain-language requirements, valuations, and — what they're lacking — delivered code.)

If you have followed through this far, the question is what mechanisms are permissable to begin this information return function. Well, as above, I see no reason for software license compliance to be restricted to text. If GPL code must be released online, it seems trivial to have compliance verification be part of the software, even included in init(). Indeed, for companies this compliance evaluation is seen as a much larger cost than actually releasing the code, that it is harder to determine what must be released and in what form than to actually do so. If, as part of instantiating the api the user needed to provide the address of the hosted code and a 3rd-party verifier's hash, that could be immediately performed, and on every instance. The host would be in on it, hosting the code and providing a fast hash verification while also producing license validation reports and use analytics.

I won't spend time addressing the various objections to this sort of information exchange beyond saying that in my view this exchange is much better than the continued under-valuation of open source.

Ok, so that's my opinion and thought. What am I doing about it? Well, here's a first attempt to solicit interest and assistance in creating an animator for Modelica result files. I'm pretty bandwidth-limited, but I have a bunch of related ideas that will hopefully make it up here or to Mechanomy at some point, in case you would like to [follow along]. I'd also welcome email, twitter, or other discussion on this and related topics.

Overall, I'm pretty convinced that the only way to improve things is to make problems more known and definite so that enough people can appreciate the solution. How we do this is a fundamental question to much of modern life.

Influencing Scarcity

2023-06-10T00:00:00Z

Post-scarcity is often talked about in utopian terms. It generally refers to the state of society when every material need can and is satisfied, that goods are not rivalrous. In a post-scarcity society everyone can have everything because manufacturing(magic) has scaled to be able to supply every want.

Or at least in themselves; housing supply may be unlimited, but houses in the mountains will always be limited by the number of picturesque perches. And while, post-scarcity, money is no longer necessary for purchasing material things, many, many things cannot be made abundant, having scarcity and limit as fundamental. In the absence of real constraint, societies will quickly invent constraints to distance sub-units from the mainstream. Think back to high-school and how culture, dress, jokes, leisure all varied widely across friend groups and cliques. Influencers aren't going away, that is, because they create the differences we crave that allow us to distinguish ourselves from each other.

One way to achieve post-scarcity is to dystopically constrain choice to those things that can be supplied equally to all. At the other extreme, where everyone has StarTrek replicators(magic), the constraint becomes creating new things, things that stimulate and excite. I think, and hope that, this is where we're heading.

Already we are shifting our appreciation from real to digital goods, and with continued improvement in AI content creation, what limits the creation of satisfying goods?

Well, in one sense the only limit on digital goods is the evaluation of whether they satisfy. For instance, there have been many attempts at creating algorithmic music, and I have yet to find one that would be equivalent to Pandora or boring DJ mixes, let alone good ones. That is, even when we have a surplus of possibly-satisfying goods, our ability to experience these is limited and that slows refinement of the technology.

Now, the ongoing fracturing of the monoculture into overlapping niche cultures naturally allows more and different goods to be tried and used to create cultural distance and increase in-group affiliation, but there is still a limit on the diversity of goods that may be tried. This explains the growth of influencers, those charismatic, photogenic people who create and give life to a persona located around certain new products. As their ranks expand, they will be able to speak to more of these niche cultures and so create demand for diverse goods and content, but there are limits to how quickly influencers can influence and how small each crowd of influencees can be.

What limits AI creation is not base creation but creating things that satisfy people. And determining what will satisfy people is much more the domain of influencers than AI, and this sounds like jobs that filter AI outputs for market success.

(And will we ever be sufficiently satisfied with material things to pursue philosophy?)

Behemoth

2023-06-09T00:00:00Z

Behemoth: A history of the factory and the making of the modern world by Joshua Freeman, 2019.

page 3

..in 1732 the British government, to promote industrial development, gave [Thomas] Lombe a large cash payment in return for making public a model of his machinery.

7

The boost in productivity were startling: the earliest [spinning] jennies increased output per worker sixfold or more, while [Richard] Arkwright's equipment, once perfected, proved several hundredfold more efficient.

13

In the early days of the factory, the economics of water power may have made large-sized plants attractive, given the relative scarcity of sites and the capital investment needed to construct dams and channels to deliver a steady flow to waterwheels.

16

...sometimes there was not enough water, leading some mill owners to experiment with using steam engines - recently perfected to drain mines - to lift water into reservoirs, which could steadily supply water to a water wheel.

23

Many local men proved reluctant to take mill jobs, unwilling to submit to the unaccustomed close supervision and iscipline that came with them. In any case, mill owners did not want adult men for most positions, preferring women and children whom they could pay less and who did not have the sense of pride and craft that came from apprenticeship training.

32

The novelty of the factory system drew attention to the exploitation of its workforce, while the long-standing exploitation of agricultural workers, domestic producers, servants, and others went largely unnoted by politicians, journalists, and writers, who generally had little interest in the lower classes.

36

The framework knitters, who made stockings, lace, and other woven goods on looms they sometimes owned but often rented from merchant-hosiers, were the first group of Luddites to go into action. To cut labor costs, merchants increased the rent and introduced wide looms, on which, instead of making a single item, large pieces of knitted material could be produced and then cut and sewed to make cheap goods, including stockings. Faced with declining income and what they saw as the debasement of their trade, the frameworkers rallied under the banner of the mythical General Ludd, targeting wide frames and merchants who were cutting wages. Over the course of a year, an estimated thousand knitting frames in Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, and Derbyshire were destroyed. It took the passage of a law making frame-breaking a capital crime to halt the attacks.

47

A wealthy Boston merchant, [Francis Cabot] Lowell, during an extended sojourn in Britain, decided that big profits could be made through the large-scale integrated production of textiles, using powered equipment for all phases of the operation within a single factory. At the time, few British firms spun and wove in the same plant and no power loom had ever been used in the United States, because of Britain's technology embargo. On returning home, Lowell hired a skilled mechanic, Paul Moody, to help him build machinery modeled after what he had seen in England. By 1814, they had a power loom successfully operating and a dressing machine to prepare the warp.

Lowell formed a joint-stock company, the Boston Manufacturing Company, with other Boston merchants to build and operate a mill. The investors realized that with the full-scale resumption of British trade after the War of 1812, their opportunities for profits in international commerce would be reduced. Manufacturing promised to be a rewarding alternative... Creating the company was a radical innovation. .. Generally they were only used for enterprises considered public utilities, like building a canal. The corporate form had great advantages; it allowed aggregation of capital on a scale few individuals could afford and shared risk among multiple parties, a pracitce well known to merchants, who often formed partnerships to finance ship journeys. Joint stock corporations also facilitated enterprise continuity when investors chose to withdraw their funds and eased the process of inheritance, important for the rich, largely passive stockholders who would be drawn to the textile industry. (Corporations gained an additional advantage when they were granted limited liability in most New England stages during the 1830s and 1840s.)

61

For the mills "To obtain their constant importation of female hands from the country," wrote the Burlington [Vermont] Free Press in 1845, "it is necessary to secure the moral protection of their characters while they are resident in Lowell". To that end, the companies established what the paper termed a system of "moral police." (emphasis original)

83

Writer Edmund Flagg declared "There are few objects more truly grand — I almost said sublime — than a powerful steamer struggling with the rapids of the western waters." For Flagg and others, the contrast between the steamboat, the creation of mankind, and the wild, natural setting of the Mississippi contributed to making the scene so memorable, bordering on the sublime, which for the nineteenth-century observer meant not just awesome or beautiful but frightening, unsettling, and overwhelming, too.

84

...public exhibitions were built around the processes, symbols, and products of mechanical manufacturing, equating them with modernity. In 1839, for example, the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association held its second exhibition at Boston's Quincy Market. Over the course of twelve days, seventy-thousand people attended. Among the exhibits were an operating miniature railroad, a small steam engine that powered other machinery, planning machines, a "cassimere shearing machine," printing presses, and knitting machines. Displayed goods included textiles from Lowell, looking glasses, cabinets, coaches, saddles, hoisery, hats, caps, furs, confectionery, soaps, perfumes, boots, cannons, rifles, swords, hardware, cutlery, locks, pumps, fire engines, and musical instruments. Defending against the believe that manufacturing was undermining repulican virtue, James Trecothick Austin, in an address at the exhibition, tried to dismiss "the supposed conflicting interests of the various classes in American society." "Our splendid manufacturies of silver are worse than useless, if it is a sin against democracy to use a silver fork."

109

Bessemer furnace workers and many others typically toiled for thirteen consecutive twelve-hour day or night shifts and then, after a day off, worked a "long turn" of twenty-four hours, which put them on the opposite shift for the next two weeks. The schedule wreaked havoc on their lives, making normal family life impossible and wearing men out at an early age.

124

At Ford, progressive placement of machinery went hand in hand with an ever-greater division of labor. Each workstation was manned by a worker who did only one or a few tasks, usually simplified by the creation of equipment designed to do just those operations, over and over again. The gains in productivity were enormous. In 1905, with three hundred workers, Ford produced twenty-five cars a day; three years later, with some five hundred workers, it rolled out one hundred.

127

Assembly-line work proved physiologically and psychologically draining in ways other types of labor were not. More than ever before, workers were extensions of machinery, at the mercy of its demands and its pace. .. Another said, "If I keep putting on Nut No. 86 for about 86 more days, I will be Nut No. 86 in the Pontiac bughouse." Ford workers complained that assembly-line work left them in a nervous condition they dubbed "Forditis."

136

Among the most important visitors to Highland Park was Giovanni Agnelli, the chairman of the Italian automaker FIAT, who came away determined to adapt Ford methods to the European auto industry, which still largely made cars through handcrafting. To accommodate the Ford system, he commissioned a new factory in the Lingotto district of Turin, which opened in 1923. The plant — one of the great landmarks of modernist architecture — was Highland Park turned on its head. Like the New Shop, it had two long, linked, parallel buildings for assembly operations, each five stories high and over a quarter mile long. In the huge courtyard between the buildings, two spiral ramps connected al lof the floors to the roof. In an opposite procedure from Highland Park, raw materials were delivered on the ground floor and production proceeded upward until finished cars were driven onto a test track on the roof, with banked curves that allowed high speeds. Then cars were driven down a ramp for delivery.

141

Ironically, while the [River] Rouge was being built out to produce everything needed to make a Model T, the car itself was becoming obsolete. By the mid-1920s, other car companies, including General Motors and Chrysler, had introduced more technically advanced and varied models than Ford, whish still only sold the Model T. By 1927, as sales diminished, it became evident that something had to be done. Abruptly, Ford stopped making the Model T, even before finalizing the design of its replacement, the Model A. For six months, Ford factories sat idle, while the company replaced 15,000 machine tools and rebuilt 25,000 more. Meanwhile, the layoff of 60,000 Detroit-area Ford workers created a social crisis, as relief agencies, free clinics, and child-placement agencies struggled to meet the huge demand for their services. The underbelly of the Ford system had been exposed.

144

With the Model A, though, the Rouge moved ahead. It peaked at 102,811 workers in 1929, a level of employment entirely unprecedented at a single factory complex. To this day, at least in terms of the size of its workforce, it remains unmatched in the United States. It was, simply, the largest and most complicated factory every built, an extraordinary testament to ingenuity, engineering, and human labor.

182

In perhaps the most powerful argument ever made in defense of the Fordist factory, at least from a point of view other than that of those who profited from it, [Leon] Trotsky answered a question he had been asked, "What about the monotony of labor, depersonalized and despiritualized by the conveyor?" "The fundamental, main, and most important task", he replied, "is to abolish poverty. It is necessary that human labor shall produce the maximum possible quantity of goods....A high productivity of labor cannot be achieved without mechanization and automation, the finished expression of which is the conveyor." Just like Edward Filene, Trotsky claimed "The monotony of labor is compensated for by its reduced duration and its increased easiness. There will always be branches of industry in society that demand personal creativity, and those who find their calling in production will make their way to them." Then came the final flourish: "A voyage in a boat propelled by oars demands great personal creativity. A voyage in a steamboat is more 'monotonous' but more comfortable and more certain. Moreover, you can't cross the ocean in a rowboat. And we have to cross an ocean of human need."

186

The tractor held an almost mythical importance in the Soviet Union... Tractors were almost never sold to individual peasants but rather used as inducements and support for collective cultivation.

196

But the bigger problem was the utter unfamiliarity of the vast bulk of workers and Russian supervisors with basic industrial processes, let alone advanced mass production. When Margaret Bourke-White visited the [Stalingrad Tractorstroi] factory during its first summer of operation, she reported, "the Russians have no more idea how to use the conveyor than a group of school children." In the plant, "the production line usually stands perfectly still. Half-way down the factory is a partly completed tractor. One Russian is screwing in a tiny bolt and twenty other Russians are standing around him watching, talking it over, smoking cigarettes, arguing."

204

Top factory managers, state officials, and party functionaries toppled into the abyss as real and perceived failures were attributed to treachery and counterrevolution, until finally even the leaders of the Magnitogorsk NKVD, who led the terror, themselves fell to it. Though no exact count is available, according to Scott, in 1937 the purge led to "thousands" of arrests in Magnitogorsk. And it was similar elsewhere; at the Gorky auto plant, during the first six months of 1938, 407 specialists were arrested, including almost all the Soviet engineers who had spent time in Detroit and some of the few Americans who still remained at the factory.

207

John Scott, who attended night school most of the time he lived in Magnitogorsk, reported that virtually everyone in the city between ages sixteen and twenty-six was studying in some sort of formal program, which took up almost all of their spare time. "Every night, from six until twelve the street cars and buses of Magnitogorsk were crowded with adult students hurrying to and from schools with books and notebooks under their arms, discussing Leibnitz, Hegel, or Lenin, doing problems on their knees, and acting like high-school children during examination week in a New York subway." For worker-students, the tremendous dedication needed to get to class, stay awake, and then do homework after a hard day's work opened a path of upward mobility. For Soviet leaders, the education push, especially in technical fields, liberated the country from dependence on foreign and old-regime expertise.

223

The creation of the metallurgy, automotive, and tractor industries, especially the plants located deep in the Soviet interior, proved critical to Soviet survival and ultimate victory during World War II.

236

In an October 1994 strike at the Goodyear factory, just four striking workers idled five thousand others.

242

Setting up an "Automation Department," the company began shifting work out of the Rouge, which had one onf the most militant UAW locals in the country and where wildcat strikes and slowdowns remained common. The labor savings proved considerable. In the mid-1950s, the company transferred production of Ford and Mercury engines from the Rouge to a newly automated plant in Cleveland. It also built a plant in Dearborn to make Lincoln engines. At the Rouge, it had take 950 workers to make piston connecting rods, but at the Cleveland and Lincoln plants it required only a combined workforce of 292. During the 1950s, Ford transferred many other operation sout of the Rouge to more automated plants, including stamping, machine casting, forging, steel production, and glassmaking. As a result, employment at the Rouge shrank from 85,000 in 1945 to 54,000 in 1954 to 30,000 in 1960, making it still one of the largest factories in the United States though only a shadow of what it had been in its heyday.

245

Between 1978 and 1982, employment in the automobile industry fell by a third, with more than three dozen factories shuttered in the Detroit area alone. During those same years, the steel indusry shed more than 150,000 jobs. .. U.S. Steel eliminated twenty thousand jobs in Gary, devastating the city, and in 1986 shut down the historic Homestead mill. The worker in the giant factory, once a heroic figure, mastering volcanic forces and massive machines, at least in the United States came to be seen as an atavism, a problem, a sad relic of a passing age.

260

Now Huta [in what was then USSR Poland] was designed without any church, forcing residents to worship in nearby villages. Requests from the Krakow diocese to build a church in the city were repeatedly turned down until the fall of 1956, when, in response to widespread protests [...the OK was given]. A year later a site was chosen and a cross erected there. Then authorities began stalling, and in 1960 reassigned the site to a school, ordering the cross removed. .. The day ended with a full-scale battle between four thousand residents and militia troops, who used water cannons, tear gas, and bullets, while the crowd threw stones, vandalized stores, and torched a building. Nearly five hundred people were arrested, some given substantial prison terms. The authorities, belatedly realizing the explosive symbolism, let the cross remain. Within a few years, Catholic leaders resumed their campaign for a church, with the backing of the new archbishop, Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II. In 1965 the government gave approval for a church near a new housing development. It took an extended campaign to raise money for the building and erect it, culminating in the consecration of what was called the Lord's Ark by the then-cardinal Wojtyla in May 1977, with seventy thousand people in attendance. The defense of the cross and building the church helped forge a culture of resistance and networks of mobilization...

263

As Goodyear, GM, Ford, GE, and other American corporations had learned decades earlier, large assemblages of workers who work together, live together, pray together, drink together, and die together can turn the largest, most important factories from models of efficiency into weapons of labor power.

276

Micro-industry [in China's Great Leap Forward] was meant to take advantage of underutilized rural labor and materials, serve agriculture, and provide inputs to large-scale industrial concerns. Most famous were the several hundred thousand very small "backyard" blast furnaces built across the country, which, along with small mines to feed them, at one point employed sixty million workers.

293

"The more sophisticated companies work on wealth creation and demand creation. And they let somebody else do everything in between." Apple initially manufactured its own products, some in factories near its Silicon Valley headquarters. But in the mid-1990s it began selling and shutting down plants, contracting out almost all of its physical production. In 2016 Apple made only one major product, a high-end desktop computer, in the United States.

294

One advantage of contracting out manufacturing was that it distanced brand companies from the work conditions under which their products were made. Seeking lower labor costs usually meant relocating manufacturing to low-wage regions, often with autocratic or corrupt governments; avoiding unions; and paying less attention to worker health, safety, and well-being. If child labor, excessive hours, use of toxic chemicals, repression of unionists, and the like took place within the facilities of a brand company, its image—its most important asset—might well be damaged. But if problems could be blamed on a contractor down the supply chain, the damage would be less costly and more easily contained.

296

In 2007, just weeks before the scheduled unveiling of the first iPhone, Jobs decided to switch from a plastic to a glass screen. When the first shipment of glass screens arrived at the Foxconn Longhua plant at midnight, eight thousand workers were awoken in the dormitories, given a biscuit and a cup of tea, and sent off to begin a twelve-hour shift fitting the screens into their frames. Working around the clock, the plant was soon pouring out ten thousand iPhones a day. On occasion, to fulfill an order, Foxconn moved large groups of workers from one factory to another in an entirely different part of the country. Meeting surges of demand requires not only a vast army of labor but also a large corps of junior officers, thousands of industrial engieers to set up assembly lines and oversee them, something that China, with its massive program of technical education, can provide. It is this ability to quickly scale up (and, when the rush is over, quickly scale down) production that Apple and other customers prize in the giant contract manufacturing plants...

301

Foxconn puts particular stress on following detailed rules and work instructions — a kind of hyper-Taylorism — enforced by a mulitlayered management hierarchy.

309

The giant factory in China and Vietnam has not received the kind of notice it did in its earlier incarnations in England, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe. Considerable attention has been paid to the plight of migrant Chinese workers, particularly in film, but much less to the factories they work in. Part of the reason is the secretiveness of factory owners, who for the most part see only a downside in allowing their facilities to be visited or documented. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, companies saw their factories as good advertising, symbols of their position at the cutting edge of industry and a way to get their products better known among customers. Soviet and Eastern European authorities viewed their giant factories as showcases for socialism, also appealing, in a different way, to a broad public. By contrast, the owners of Chinese and Vietnamese manufacturing enterprises do not want anything to do with the public. For the most part, their customers are not end users but other companies. And as far as those companies go, by and large the less known about the manufacturing process the better.

311

Basic manufacturing, for better or worse, seems like yesterday in much of the advanced world, especially the United States, an attitude [that has been] picked up in less developed countries. Modernity does not mean the assembly line for Chinese policy makers and elites. Rather, they see mass manufacturing as a stage to got through and leave behind in achieving modernity.

The Information Age

2023-05-31T00:00:00Z

Many contend that we are (or recently were) in the Information Age, by which they mean that ours is marked by the manipulation and use of Information in its various forms. This is to draw a distinction from the former Stone, Bronze, Steam, Electric, and any other of lesser Ages, centered as they were on less noble commodities. While used frequently, these labels quickly lose utility in that while the Stone age was marked by a preponderance of stones, both the Bronze and Steam ages made many more stones while mining ore or building roads and canals.

I'm sure it's been said elsewhere, but if we take the object of the ages to be the exercise of hard power (political, military) and name them after the essential element that facilitates coordination between various societal forces, then ours is more properly (and hopefully) the Economic Age, as it is economic forces that enable and mediate negotiations across our political, military, community, familial institutions. I'll venture that it was preceded by the Industrial, Monarchical, and Tribal Ages.

Of course the industrialists had and used money, but money was not able to wage or win World War II, that was done by their industry, by producing machines. Likewise monarchies were constantly limited about their treasuries, but it was the claim of succession that legitimated their taxation and to which their armies owed obedience. Labeling ours the Economic age calls attention to the use of local and national economies to concentrate and preferentially distribute power. Of course we have elected governments and they are the ones who primarily wield economic tools, but it is economic relations that determine the relative placement of political commercials, that orient industry to particular ends, that remunerates professional soldiers, and that mars family life.

For if ours were the Information age, information would be the core medium of negotiation and coordination, not money. In this usage information is not just the name of the category containing text, audio, graphical, video, and other fixed forms of knowledge, but instead links those disparate forms to some interchangeable atom. Consider in the ideal: for any concept there are particular representations of that concept suitable to various forms of information, such that by considering all of the forms it may be represented by, you can come to a fuller understanding of the concept than by any subset.

The increasing ephemerality of the internet — by which what we create is not permanently fixed but liable to error or failure (linkrot)— and the widespread feeling of information overload suggest two problems that will need to be solved before the Information age can dawn.

I'd like to view high frequency traders and internet search as leading attempts at specific solutions.

HFTs are finely tuned to particular information sources and are thereby able to transform information into money, using the next Age (Information) to profit in the present (Economic), if you will. As the technology to survey and parse information improves, the profit basis will shift from economic advantage to information advantage, so that an assessment of market risk doesn't just allow you to bet correctly but to directly combat the sources of that risk.

Search is similar, in that synthesizing disparate data points into some form that answers a query creates new knowledge, useful at present only to the user. This knowledge was already 'in the database' of search results, it just needed someone to request the particular view, to ask the computer to apply the search algorithms in a particular way. (The problem is that the search engine doesn't know why the user asked the particular question and is therefore unable to value the information potential it holds.)

I think there's a lot of work to do before the information age will actually be upon us. Of course, much of the problem of foreseeing the future is that its logic, the 'self-evident new way of doing things' only becomes apparent after it has dawned. But we can hope that it will improve upon some of today's problems, and so it is helpful to think about today's challenges to try to imagine how they may be solved in some other way.

One of the outstanding challenges of the economic age is that it is hard to value everything that we care about, to correctly express our desires and needs through economic instruments. If these valuations are erroneous, then we may underpay teachers relative to the value they create, impairing our children...or not have children at all because of credentialism or a high cost of living. Within the economic age, we are trying to fix this by valuing more things and at greater frequency, under the theory that a market is able to converge to the correct value, as long as it is allowed sufficient iterations. Hence faster fashion cycles, the explosion of digital goods and their immediate rewards, the growth of the service sector and pursuit of experiences, high frequency trading. All of these entail more market transactions, made in finer increments.

Hopefully you found this interesting, send me your thoughts on twitter. And if you made it this far I think you'll appreciate Ben Landau-Taylor's structure for classifying technological moments.

Improving Freight Trains

2023-04-19T00:00:00Z

Does US freight rail need to improve?

I've watched and read the coverage on the derailment in East Palestine, other recent mishaps, and the labor contract negotiations with interest and disappointment. For now I'll reserve my opinions on the overall challenge of rail transportation of people and freight and merely describe two improvements to freight rail that have been floating around my head for years and haven't found a better outlet.

enable multi-dimensional movement in railyards
increase car utilization

To be clear, I am not a rail professional, just an engineer and casual observer of the rail freight system. As such I'll certainly get some of the terminology wrong and present as new concepts that are known within the industry.

Backround observations on freight rail

Unlike semitrucks, where each trailer is independently moved by its own engine and driver over a 2D world, trains are inherently linear, each car connected end-to-end and confined to the current track. Adding, removing, or reordering the cars involves the entirety of the train: the half containing the car to be moved must be separated at one of its ends from the rest of the train, then both halves must be moved to isolate that car onto a side line, and then the train rejoined. Every operation on the train is then serial; all of the other cars are forced to wait for this operation to occur, and if the switchyard is limited, this operation has to occur on the main, through-going line, thereby preventing other trains from passing.

This switching constraint has not been solved; if anything, trains have grown in length as railroads have prioritized the movement of bulk commodities that are uniquely transportable on rail over other cargo that has more options. The prioritization of bulk commodities has led to cars designed for, and car-owning companies built around, long-term use cars. In fact, if you look closely at a freight train, you may be able to see that each wheel-axle set is not even connected to the car, rather the car truck is simply placed on top of the wheel-axle. (This video provides a ton of observations:

this is a field operation, even when performed in a yard
3 person crew
operations are entirely manual, requiring significant movement of and about the components
only 1 specialized machine: the hydraulic car jacks
the truck assembly is lifted multiple times
there is no intelligence or sensors on the truck, just metal
large tolerances on most parts
20+ minutes )

One takeaway is that the design incentives and standards for train cars are not very similar to those we are more familiar with, and these differences prevent freight rail from attaining the kinds of flexibilty we expect in road freight. Changing these incentives is the only way to actually improve rail freight (safety, efficiency, timeliness, maintainabilty, etc.); requiring additional safety devices or closer inspections are not going to put rail on a path to avoiding incidents like East Palestine.

Incenting rail freight innovation

Incentives can be changed in two broad ways. First: directly by the responsible parties through government regulation, commercial contracts, and financing practices. Second is by making improvements within the existing structure that promise even greater performance in some alternate, presently un-incented structure.

One encouragement of this latter form is in the operation of intermodal yards where train cars are un/loaded and trains are dis/assembled. COVID showed these yards to be significantly constrained by how quickly they could move goods between transportation modalities, eg from interstate train to truck for regional delivery. As many of these goods arrived on container ship, they are also transported by container-carrying train cars and can be unloaded by the same types of container forklifts and short-haul trucks as at the port. And both forklift and local truck are capable of moving a container about a 2D world, leaving the 1D train behind. These yards are being expanded as containerization spreads inward from the ports.

But why should the forklift be restricted to the container, why can't it operate on whole train cars and non-containerized cargo? After all, removing a container from a train car just leaves an empty car 'stored' in a moving train.

Enable multi-dimensional movement in railyards

Well, here the design of the train car with detachable axles and track-direction car couplers, not to mention the un-optimized mass of the car, make attempts to move whole train cars vastly more expensive. To my recollection the only examples of moving a train engine or car under some external power involve rotating or translating an entire section of track, for instance rotating a locomotive 180° to prepare for a return journey.

We can observe that all of the freedom of palletized and containerized loads comes from their having two independent means for supporting their load. Both pallets and containers can be placed on flat ground and they can be lifted by associated apparatus: the forks of a forklift or the gantry gripper of a container mover. Rail cars are only supported by their carriage wheels; when they are moved by crane, they typically use a frame that interfaces with the carriage wheels and then transfers the load above the car to the crane lift point. Unlike a pallet, this frame interferes with the car's normal operation, it's either rolling on track without the frame or being lifted by a crane and not touching a track.

To add a pallet-like interface to a train car, then, we must either modify some part of the wheel truck assembly or locate some alternate lifting point. Most freight cars appear to have wheel sets like those in the video embedded above, having a significant and exposed axle connecting the two wheels. While needing analysis, a lift entering under the car center might extend a cradle to engage both axles on the forward and rear carriages, so that all four axles can be simultaneously lifted, along with the car and its contents. The impact of the car's significant weight is lessened by the short lift distance, at minimum the distance to raise the wheel flanges above the rail. The broad outline is a squat vehicle having a perpendicularly forked lifting apparatus and widely set tires or treads of the style already used in large structure moving apparatus.

An alternate approach would be to temporarily install car adapters at some yard entry station or under a stopped train, the design being to again interface with the car axles while providing accessible interface points. The overriding point is that these preparatory operations need to occur quickly, as they directly impact the overall speed of operation.

Increase car utilization

With the ability to move a train car, where should it be moved to?

Well, lean manufacturing and warehousing was a large trend through the 2000s, focused on producing only what was needed and minimizing inventory sitting in warehouses. Lean is generally good because it makes businesses more responsive to their markets, linking the retail price more closely to the production cost. From this perspective it's pretty easy to see trains as slowly-moving warehouses, carrying goods with very long shelf lives and lengthy paths to market. I'm no expert on lean — though I am sure that its application to commodities has been explored — the point is that even commodities can benefit from faster market cycles, and faster market cycles respond to incentives more quickly, enabling faster improvement.

Finally

I'm dubious that technologies like positive traction control or more frequent track-side train sensors will appreciably improve rail freight simply because we should never prefer a remote, infrequent solution to a local one; that is one directly and continuously controlling the phenomena of interest. If the problem of derailments is in the operation of the cars, we need to find technologies and strategies that fix the cars and allow them to be operated without catastrophic failure.

As sketched above, this requires changing how freight cars are designed and used by increasing their utilization, which will allow cars to create more value and thereby enables them to include more technologies that allow them to be operated in safe, maintainable way. And all of this is made possible by the more flexible movement of freight cars in railyards, which may enable faster sorting and assembly of short, high-value, high-speed trains, and allow the better utilization of the rail for all cargoes.

Dual Garbage Bin Transporter

2023-04-10T00:00:00Z

Here's a quick post on a garbage bin transporter I made for my parents to help them transport their bins down their gravel driveway. I was dissatisfied with existing devices because they either required lifting the entire bin by yourself or left the bins in contact with the ground, limiting turning/backing up and de-facto requiring a smooth driveway.

So the basic goals were to:

attach to the 2" hitch receiver on a truck
lift the bins off of the uneven, angled, snowy, muddy ground
be installable and operable by my mother
be light and simple enough that it can be removed from the receiver when not in-use
be easily constructed, maintained, and fixed
be cheap
no modification to the bins

And here's what I came up with:

The receiver-mounted garbage bin transporter.

It uses a steel hitch adapter, mast, and horizontal bar to raise two full-size garbage bins approximately 8" off of the ground. On each arm a large tongue engages the dumpster's standard lift cavity, under which is a vertical panel to control the orientation of each bin. Lifting each bin is a 8:1 pulley system, which for a 60lbf bin leads to approximately 20lbf pull force on the rope. The overall assembly weighs approximately 30lbf, right at the edge of what is reasonable.

Arm Design

Garbage bins are rather big and bulky, and I considered three different arm designs in my attempt to limit mass and complexity.

The first attempted to interface with the bin handle. The implicit question was whether I could avoid an explict actuation mechanism and instead (politely) ask Mom to push the bin against the vehicle, with the arm lifiting it off the ground. While simple, this suffered from a poor hinge design, insufficient space between the arm and vehicle for the lock/actuation mechanism, and, with such a high attachment point preferred the arm to be substantially vertical which left it little angle to raise the bin off the ground.

Interfacing with the bin handle.

I considered a 'blade' concept, where the arm would engage the side flange at the top of the bin:

Interfacing with the side flange of the bin via vertical blades.

This kept the hinge near the hitch and the arm small, though at the cost of a significant twisting moment on the arm and hinge. I was not at all confident that I could make the hinge attachment and vertical 'blades' strong enough to survive the loads of the bumpy driveway. If I was able to work aluminum in the garage this might have worked out well. This quick prototype also showed that getting the blades to engage with the flange required relatively precise positioning, ~1" forward/back and 1/2" side-to-side, that made this variant appear frustrating to use.

Finally, I gave in and designed an arm to engage the same features that the garbage trucks do, the bar and pocket on the street side of the bin. As this results in a much shorter arm, I was reluctant to give up the free mechanical advantage...but I was eventually able to make it up in the pulley system. Being roto-molded, everything on the bin is angled in some way or another, making measurement annoying. While I trusted that my garbage bin was similar to my mother's in the basic interface, I wanted to be able to modify the engagement features when I was on-site, hence this has a somewhat elaborate plywood tongue and bracing that are easily disassembled.

Actuation

I wanted to avoid using a powered actuator for the complexity and mass, leading me to look at ratchet straps. Unfortunately, these act in only a single direction and I wanted the mechanical advantage for both raising and lowering. Tackles and winches are reversible but I could not find any small enough for this application. I also didn't trust my 3D printing to design a version of either of these, fearing they would have too many parts and failure paths.

Windlass

I very much wanted to use a windlass/differential chain hoist and came close to designing one to use ball chain, but since these require a continuous loop of chain, I was concerned about trusting the connection in a spliced ball.

Windlass prototype. The load is connected to the blue carabiner and raised by pulling the rope attached to the rightmost reel.

Following this I designed and printed windlass, in which a length of rope is wound around two pulleys of differing sizes such that when they rotate the rope is played out and taken up at different rates, leading to a significant advantage. This was the first prototype of this project and so I didn't have a good estimate of the bin weight or arm design, with the hard implication that I didn't know the winch mounting, loading, actuation distance, or how the line of actuation would change during operation. Though it developed the desired mechanical advantage, my prototype was rather too large and difficult to flexibly mount.

Pulley System

Next, I fell back to a compound pulley system, though instead of going for a standard, parallel pulley block I though it would be interesting to try a circular arrangement:

Circular pulley block prototype with each side enclosing an interlocking, 3D-printed pulleys.

Above the pulley axel bolts is a 10mm groove to attach the ends of a fabric tube that would enclose the rope and keep everything looking neat. Unfortunately, it experienced significant friction in the plain (journal) bearings of 3D printed pulleys which totally undermined the function, to the point that some of the inner rope runs would not move under appreciable loads. This friction also concentrated the rope loading on one side or corner of the blocks, tilting each and applying loads to the sides of the pulleys which lead to their separating. It would have been good to do a little pre-design calculation here.

With that, I reverted to a standard parallel pulley block design off of some ball-bearing pulleys I'd used before. They're actually rollers for sliding doors, with the effect that they have shallower grooves with a circular profile, but they work well enough here. And since I was heading to Menards, I bought some 3/4" aluminum flat bar for the load-bearing side plates.

Ball-bearing pulleys and 3D-printed guides with 2-axis pivoting attachments. In the lower right-hand corner you can see the disc-based rope clamp.

Between the pulley axel bolt and the attachment bolt, I added some 3D-printed rope guides to try to prevent the rope from jumping out of the pulley grooves when unloaded. With 4 pulleys on each side and the rope terminated to the truck-side of the arms, the rope makes 8 turns over the pulley system. Even with the ball-bearing pulleys, pulley friction still arises, unevenly loading the rope turns which leads to some angling of the blocks during actuation.

Each of the blocks are attached to a two-axis pivot; on the mast the J-bolts are free to rotate in their hole and the pulley block within the J, and on the arm side the rope attachment permits a similar motion. Both of these allow the pulley system to act along the ideal line of action.

Use

It was approximately 10°F and sunny the day I tested it and gave it to my mother. The arms and tongues engage the dumpsters well, easily and stably lifting the bins off of the ground.

On-site, it became clear that my disc-based rope clamp was very awkward and also that additional leverage was needed. Lacking tools and time, I vaguely recalled the two-handed winch used on some sailboats and thought of a simple two-bar crank:

A hand-over-hand crank for additional advantage. Being irregular, rope tension pulls it against the pulley block and prevents the arm from lowering while the bin is raised.

The rope winds on a 'pulley' of approximately 4" diameter, turned by crank handles that are 8" from the center of rotation, providing a 2x advantage. It requires a bit of practice to coordinate the motion of your hands when the rope is loaded, but all accounts are that it works well enough.

This will break some day, perhaps then I'll have a TIG welder and can remake it in aluminum...

The Heroic Age of American Invention

2023-01-10T00:00:00Z

The Heroic Age of American Invention, 1961, by L. Sprague de Camp.

One fact may partly explain the failure of Hellenistic science to become the self-perpetuating, ever-growing thing that science is today. This is the separation of pure science from applied science - that is from engineering and invention. Nowadays pure science could not advance unless inventors provided it with new tools and instruments, while inventors would soon bog down without new scientific discoveries to apply and exploit. In ancient times, however, pure science was a matter for upper-class philosophers, while inventions were mostly made by obscure common workmen. Archimedes, deeming himself primarily a pure scientist, apologized for his invention as beneath the dignity of a gentleman. 13

Another reason for [Robert] Fulton's success was that, having been an artist, he drew such beautiful pictures of the parts he wanted that the mechanics who made them got them right the first time. 35

By that time [1880] the Patent Office had become so cluttered with models, and the models themselves, with the advance of the mechanical arts, had become so costly that the requirement was dropped. Although the Patent Office is still entitled to ask for models, it now does so only in cases involving perpetual-motion machines and other inventions that seem to violate the laws of nature. 40

...the ground was laid for the heroic age of American invention. This is the age during which the patent laws were well enough organized, and conditions were favorable enough to inventors, so that those with meritorious inventions had a vair chance of success - provided that they also had a reasonable degree of business and legal sense and a little luck as well. This was the age that, more than any other in history, inspired and encouraged the individual inventive mind. At this time the profession of inventing had not become so large and highly organized, nor had it fallen so completely under corporate control, nor had the pace of technological change become so swift, that the individual inventor ceased to count for much and inventing became just another job. Although these changes were gradual, we may date the heroic age roughly from 1836 to 1917. It began with the reorganization of the Patent Office and ended with the entry of the United States into the First World War. 41

"The [McCormick] reaping machine from the United States is the most valuable contribution from abroad...It is worth the whole cost of the [1851 London] Exhibition." 109

The most spectacular effort to solve the typesetting problem was that of James W. Paige of Hartford, Connecticut. Paige spent twenty years, beginning in 1873, and over two million dollars in perfecting this monstrosity...which weighed three tons and had 18,000 parts. The basic patent No. 547,860 had 163 sheets of drawings with 471 figures, and 146 claims. Two Patent Office examiners went insane during the prosecution of this application and the many applications Paige filed on improvements. When completed, the Paige compositor was a marvelous piece of machinery but commercially useless. 151

[Alexander Graham] Bell knew something about diaphragms, for he had already worked with a device he called the phonautograph to help his deaf pupils. This had a diaphragm attached to a stylus, so that when a pupil sppoke into it the stylus made a wavy line. The deaf person could compare the wavy line made when he pronounced a word with that made by a normal speaker and thus correct his mistakes. 159

He [Thomas Edison] distressed his mother by dripping sulfuric acid on the furniture until his chemicals were banished to the cellar. 171

From 1863 to 1868, Edison worked as a wandering telegrapher. He was a notably fast operator who could 'copy behind' - that is, write several sentences behind the message coming in without forgetting or getting mixed up. 171

General Marshall Lefferts, the president of Western Union, retained Edison on a free-lance basis, but without any definite contract. Edison continued to improve stock tickers until Lefferts called him in and asked him how much he thought the company should pay him for the rights to his inventions. Edison had no notion of how much. He thought of asking for $5000 and letting himself be chaffered down to $3000. In desperation he said: "Well, General, suppose you make me an offer." "How would forty thousand dollars strike you?" Edison came "as near to fainting as I ever got," but managed to say yes. Three days later he signed the contract and was given the first check he had ever handled. At the bank, the teller told him to endorse it. The deaf Edison failed to understand, thought that he must have been given a wotrhless paper, and returned to General Lefferts. Lefferts explained and sent Edison back to the bank with a clerk to identify him. The teller thought it would be a good joike to give Edison his forty thousand in small bills. Edison sat up all night guarding his vast wad, until next day Lefferts showed him how to open a bank account. 173

Edison not only admitted but also bragged of the fact that he was no theoretical scientist but a trial-and-error inventor. However, he was not at all erratic or unsystematic in his inventive procedures. He was methodical as well as fertile, energetic, self-confident, single-minded, and persistent. He used a shotgun method of attacking problems: first read everything, then try everything. 176

Edison put his perfected lamp on the market at forty cents a bulb, although at first they cost $1.25 apiece to make. In five years he had reduced the cost to twenty-two cents, but the price remained the same while sales rose into millions. 181

Parliament passed laws restricting operation of steam coaches and raised their toll charges to prohibitive heights. The most drastic of these laws, in force from 1865 to 1896, required a man with a red flag to walk in front of the vehicle. 210

Goodyear conceived a passion for making rubber practical. ... Somebody described him thus: "If you meet a man who has on an India rubber cap, stock, coat, vest, and shoes, with an India rubber money purse, without a cent of money in it, that is he." 212-3

While [Reginald Aubrey] Fessenden was running tests for th eUnited States Navy between the U.S.S. Topeka and Sandy Hook, the [Lee] De Forest Wireless Company installed a shack a few feet from the naval station and (according to Fessenden) told its operator to foul up the tests. This he did by opening a powerful wireless transmitter and putting a brick on the key to keep it sending static, until Fessenden's crew bribed him with food and liquor to take off the brick. 245

Moreover, many inventors are ornery individualists by nature, the very opposite of the "organization man." To such people, fitting themselves into a corporate mold and practicing teamwork and togetherness are apt to be particularly irksome. 259

Wikipedia says this was a childern's book, but the ideal reader is an early teenager who wants a broad tale of what an inventor is. I enjoyed its broad sweep of American inventors, which allows it to capture a bit of the spirit and excitement of their ages without getting bogged down into technical or historical detail. It's written simply and engagingly, providing at least one colorful note about the person, circumstance, or inventive journey of each of the subjects, as the above quotes show.

Highlights: The Perfectionists

2023-01-08T00:00:00Z

How precision engineers created the modern world.

Over Thanksgiving I had some time to read The Perfectionists by Simon Winchester, 2018.

Each day he measured the shells, and found that they and their casings retained their design integrity perfectly, fitting the gun barrels just as well at each of the railway depots as they had when they left the production lines. Then he boarded the cargo ship. ... They were stacked in crates deep in the ship's hold. As the vessel rocked and heeled in the storm, those crates on the outher edges of the stacks, and only those, would crash into the sides of the ship. If they hit repeatedly...the bullet...would be shoved backward...into its brass cartridge case. This collision...caused the case to distort... ...once the ship had docked and the stevedoers had unloaded the crates and the ammunition...sent out to the various regiments, no one knew what order the shells would be in - would, as a result, not fit into the gun barrels out on the battlefield. 9-10

After thirty-one years of near-obsessive work, [John] Harrison managed to squeeze almost all of the improvements he had engineered into his large pendulum clocks into this single five-inch silver case, and add some others, to make certain that his timekeeper was as close to chronological infallibility as was humanly possible. 34

[John] Wilkinson filed a patent, Number 1063..."A New Method of Casting and Boring Iron Guns or Cannon." By today's standards his "new method" seems almost pedestrian and an all-too-obvious improvement in cannon making. Up until then [1774], naval cannons...were cast hollow, with the interior tube through which the powder and projectile were pushed and fired performed as the iron was cooling in its mold. 41

Winchester is a pretty drawn-out writer. Wilkinson's new method was to cast cannon whole, then bore their bores with a boring bar. This greatly improved the straightness of the bore, with walls having many fewer defects and much more uniform thickness.

...[Henry Maudslay] solved [Joseph] Bramah's supply problems in an inkling - but not by the conventional means of hiring additional workers who would make the locks one by one through the means of their own craftsmanship. ... He built a whole family of machine tools, in fact, that would each make, or help to make, the various parts of the fantastically complicated locks Joseph Bramah had designed. They would make the parts, they would make the fast and well and cheaply, and they would make them without the errors handcrafting and the use of hand tools inevitably bring in their train. 60

Where more than a hundred skilled craftsmen had once worked, and had filled, just, the Navy's insatiable appetite [for block and tackle for sailing ships], now this thundering factory could feed it with ease, without ever breaking a sweat: the Portsmouth Block MIlls would turn out the required one hundred thirty thousand blocks each year, one finished block every minute of every working day, and yet it required a crew of just ten men to operate it. ...

The Lords of Admirality declared themselves content. [Sir Marc] Brunel received a check for the money saved in one year: £17,093. [Henry] Maudslay received £12,000 and the acclaim of the public and of the engineering fraternity and became generally regarded as one of the most important figures in the early days of precision engineering and one of the prime movers of the Industrial Revolution.

To any informed engineer, however, the name Eli Whitney signifies something very different: confidence man, trickster, fraud, charlatan. And his alleged charlatanry derives almost wholly from his association with the gun trade, with precision manufacturing, and with the promise ov being able to deliver weapons assembled from interchangeable parts. "I am persuaded," he declared with a flourish of elaborate solemnity in his bid to make a cache of guns for the U.S. government, "to make the same parts of different guns, as the lock for example, as much like each other as the successive impressions of a copperplate engraving." It was uttermost piffle. When Whitney won the commission and signed the government contract in 1798, he knew nothing about muskets and even less about their components: he won the order largely because of his Yale connections and the old alumni network that, even then, flourished in the corridors of power in Washington D.C. 95

...the use by Henry Ford of an additional invention that helped make it possible for the cost of his Model T to decrease almost every year during its eighteen years of production, to go down in price from $850 in 1908 to $345 in 1916, to a stunningly affordable $260 in 1925. The car was the same, the materials the same, but the means of production had become vastly more efficient. 167 That additional invention was [Johansson] gauge blocks (Jo Blocks) which permitted parts to be measured and held to the same standard.

"Stratosphere plane?" was the note taken on September 11 of that year [1935] by the firm's senior partner, Lancelot Law Whyte... [Whyte] loved [Frank] Whittle's idea not because it might make money, but because of its sheer elegance, and because "every great advance replaces traditional complexities by a new simplicity." 185 Whyte was the first non-Royal Air Force money to invest in building the first jet engines designed by Frank Whittle.

Advancing precision, as a concept, in manufacture, and in measurement, is used to organize this book. I found the first half interesting as it provides a different lens to the advent and professionalization of engineering. Later on, essentially after the jet engine, the most precise thing quickly becomes modern: optics and telescopes, atomic clocks and GPS, extreme-UV lithography, LIGO.

This transition from individual invention to large teams becomes much less interesting and my greater familiarity with these current technologies made the drawn-out phrasing much more tedious, but non-engineers may well enjoy this narrative introduction to the concept of precision.

Controlling Privacy

2022-09-06T00:00:00Z

I've maintained that the real danger in digital privacy is when external actors know more about you than you realize you have revealed. This is particularly pernicious when they aggregate data and use statistics to conclude things you may not be aware of yourself, giving them the upper hand in any interaction.

Most people, Californians, Europeans, favor a digital privacy right. This set of laws instituting certain rights to one's digital information are an obvious, and obviously flawed exercise. With the FTC suing Kochava, a data broker, the alternative thought occurs to manipulate the market for this data.

To take one extreme future, assume everyone livestreams, and every interaction is labeled and able to be reasoned over. This rich data is itself accessible to everyone to analyze for myriad purposes. Much as we each occupy differing cultural niches today, so too will our analyses. Differing algorithmic tests for friendship, measures of political agreement, estimates of personal value, rankings of consumerism or environmentalism, indices of patriotism, the list of potential analyses goes on. Whereas today these aspects are decided by outward action, the increase in data and reasoning merely moves the decision threshold from outward action to internal disposition. The banality of this ocean of data quickly becomes apparent, as do the very limited circumstances when any of these analyses actually create value for society as a whole.

In the interpersonal aspect, having data and statistically-robust methods for regulating interpersonal relationships is inherently zero-sum and likely to further instrumentalize relationships. In the commercial view, more data just shifts purchase risk to some other domain.

"When the value estimate of my old washer went negative, I knew it was time to find another. I bought this one because I received that ad then, heard of Jerry's positive experience, read these reviews, and was finally convinced when I saw that their circular trade-in policy would make up for the last three weeks of the old washer's negative value." Even if each of these aspects can be influenced by various mechanisms, the basic decision, to replace an ailing washer, does not contain much opportunity for creating societal value, only for shifting that purchase from one supplier to another. And while the suppliers care about this, all that this abundance of data can do is make the purchasing decision more individualized. That is, instead of stickers with generic information about the average use of a washer and equally uninformed salespeople, both will be able to be more particular to your condition. This takes out much of the purchase risk, and would likely hasten the transition from private ownership to machine washing-as-a-service, purchasing a quality wash.

In this open extreme, decision making processes can be analyzed and corrected. Some people do their homework before making a purchase, limited by the information available, and the sophistication of their analysis. Outsourcing the analysis, or otherwise making them transferrable, can improve the quality of individual decisions. But as you increase the sophistication of the customer, you decrease the profitability of marketing. No longer can a supplier use flash sales or pricing gimiicks to drive purchases of less-than-ideal items. Likewise, loyalty rewards, coupons, and other forms of positive marketing will decrease in effectiveness. The point is that when you shift information within a closed system, you are merely redistributing the gains from that information among participants.

But for the impulsive consumer, excessive materialists, those occupied by vanity, hoarders, the availability of the best and worst analyses will give a finer point to their chosen lifestyle. Martha Stewart's home living may employ a suspect analysis on kitchen gadgets and housewares, but this can be tolerated and even chosen when someone is searching for a bit of feel-good distinction from their peers. Of course, if the economy tanks a different lifestyle could be chosen.

People already choose to follow Martha Stewart or fast-fashion or any of the multitude of influencers, the mere availability of data will not change their appetites. Nor, frankly, will wide data collection increase personal culpability or vulnerability. Invasions of privacy are that because they make certain private information public, the publication compromises your power of self-disclosure. But as cultural norms of privacy erode to permit the many possible uses of personal data, we will benefit if we invest in technologies that give us the same level of knowledge as the marketers. That is we can pro-actively neuter breaches in privacy by knowing ourselves better and understanding why we prefer what we do. When we know what they seek to, their data is effectively commoditized and holds little ability to manipulate.

For example, I'm in favor of video surveillance outside and inside my home. I am not in favor of Amazon or the government doing that. If I install cameras and recording equipment, if I choose to send that video data to a service for remote monitoring, I have control and knowledge over that process and can weigh the benefits of remote monitoring against the monetary or data privacy cost. If instead I install Amazon's cameras and pay them monthly for subsidized equipment and monitoring, I can achieve the same or better sense of safety, but I'll have no knowledge whether they are selling my preference in peanut butter.

The difference between DIY home monitoring and Amazon is that the former allows me to choose how I disclose my domestic information. Now if Amazon watches what I throw out to populate a grocery list, well there are times when that would be great. All Amazon has to do is to present users with an interface that allows them to run the same analyses as Amazon, to simply be open to sharing the insights gleaned from observing my life. They could give you opt-in control over the analyses, and if they proved their trustworthiness to your satisfaction you could share a wide variety of data with them. The point is that Amazon/etc. should not be seeking a lever over customers, an 'in' that allows them to manipulate people, but rather to empower users to live better lives.

Many people want personal assistants to help them manage the complexities of their lives, few want personal minders to decide for them and tell them what to do. My concern is that avoidance of the latter will prevent the former.

CommuniCam: A camera to build communities

2022-04-16T00:00:00Z

I think there's a natural opportunity to use connected cameras to improve communities, using the form factors pioneered by Ring, Nest, and Wyze but with a business model designed to guarantee local control and increase trust.

The basic model would be:

A technology company engineering, manufacturing, and operating (eg firmware updates) connected cameras and other sensors, charging predictable fees to:
Franchisees to deploy hardware and form customer and community relationships, enabling community members to buy/rent, aggregate data, analyze, and understand aspects of their communities.

Today's cameras are rudimentary, processing locally to determine when to stream video to the cloud for analysis and action. This is generally efficient, allowing the units to be battery-powered and concentrating the analysis to servers managed by a single entity. Customers paying a subscription get defined value: in the case of Ring, photo or video of any doorbell ringers alongside a more general feeling of security provided by backing up footage to the cloud. Amazon (Ring's owner/operator) provides the camera units and doorbell notification service but, having the raw footage, they develop additional, generally non-consumer products off that data. While the consumer subscription and hardware fees may cover the bottom line, the aggregation and analysis of the data is where (Amazon believes) the money is.

But that second part isn't actually necessary and does limit adoption, sparking both intimate (filming of family life) and big brother (government surveillance, product usage) privacy concerns. If the CommuniCam company were structured as a franchise nonprofit, co-op, or B-corp, it would be able to resist abuses of its network, focusing simply on developing and deploying commoditized hardware. This tame structure is its competitive advantage; any privacy compromise breaks the whole enterprise, leading it to join its competitors in brand-competition.

Franchisees would play their part in communicating and maintaining the standards of the parent. Their larger value is in helping communities to understand themselves, to coordinate local actors to better use their CommuniCams. They would do this by running defined studies, accessibly and accountably to hosts.

Imagine that a road is going to be rebuilt and the city is to conduct a traffic survey to understand road usage. The city has its standard process of counting vehicles and modeling traffic flows; this data is inherently limited. CommuniCam hosts could contribute to this by running a traffic study on cameras along the route. This would first validate the basic cars/hour of existing traffic surveys, but also estimate destination flow (by matching vehicles) and speed. Personal, commercial, and industrial users could be distinguished, along with bicycles, scooters, runners, and pedestrians. Driving behavior might be observable, depending on camera orientations and available analyses. The CommuniCam driving study would provide many of the outcomes of an in-person traffic survey, in a more scalable way over a longer time frame.

Franchisees would generally make money by subscription and study commissions, with some of the study commissions possibly paid to hosts in the form of subscription credit. They would likely (eventually) be compensated for running the traffic study and formatting the results for the municipality's consumption. But if these hardware and analysis capabilities exist, how will CommuniCam franchisees compete against municipal vendors of the same technologies? Well, the same hardware might equally be deployed to search for a missing cat. That is, the benefit and control lies with the CommunicCam hosts. If they want to improve (or check) the municipal traffic study they have that ability. But they need not be restricted to that single outcome; the traffic study could be on-going to highlight problems for the city or they could compare their traffic patterns to other parts of the city.

Some non-road studies include:

rainfall, snow, and hail estimation,
sun and light quality
vegetation monitoring (grass growing rate and color indicating sun and nutrient)
urban animal population (deer, turkey, rabbit, squirrel, racoon)

The camera systems would be designed or configured to be absolutely trusted. What that means is, whereas virtually all of today's solutions are internet-connected, leading to frequent abuse by private, government, and unauthorized actors, these connected cameras would be configured for local storage and processing. To run a study the franchisee would push a study filter to individual units which would screen their data, returning responsive elements to the franchisee for aggregate processing. This bifurcation is essential: individual units steward their data according to the hosts's retention policy and the device's limits, releasing it only when they can internally verify that their data is responsive to a study.

Surveillance capabilities are inherently negative, but the degree of negativity is worth examining. Hard negativity is the dystopian use, where people and communities are subject to ever greater powers which stand at ever greater remove from their interests and control. Soft negativity is the sense that CommuniCams are stand-ins for their hosts (which might be termed positive surveillance), that the community aims could be accomplished by having every host sitting at their mailbox, noting the same information for the same studies, but for the demands of time and attention. This is the soft sense, that individual units are less than the fullness of their hosts, that only a subset of the benefits of being present on your driveway are realizable by units.

To be frank, participation in crime or speed enforcement studies are immediate sources of notoriety and may obstruct other possible benefits, tending toward a broken-windows tallying of problems without encouraging root remedies. The recent launch of SpeedcamAnywhere, a phone app that estimates the speed of passing cars, is one of many upcoming tests of technical norms enforcement. In fact, my starting thought for CommuniCam was as a speed and traffic law observation system, allowing, say, the inhabitants of a corner house to document turning-without-stops, increasing their ability to request enforcement or the redesign of their intersection.

The question of surveillance is the challenge for hosts and franchisees, how to use technology to advance their communities rather than divide them. The larger point is that this tension is best resolved by individual people, as every other resolution involves a greater chance of division. With respect to the creeping surveillance state, CommuniCam does advance it by virtue of deploying surveillance-capable technology more widely. The hope is that this can head-off worse uses of the technology, and by having it widely deployed may educate society to its capabilities and thereby advance the norms and laws surrounding its use.

Hosts, of course may revise their study criteria or change franchisees whenever they become concerned by the franchisee's actions. They may also not use a franchisee and instead operate their own island of cameras for their own purposes, such as pet or child observation. The beauty of the local study filter design is that individual camera units can participate in multiple studies, from different organizations at the same time. That is a host may run local domestic studies, while participating in school-crossing and municipal traffic studies brokered by their franchisee, and at the same time contribute to a nationwide flora observation, while also being able to provide retrospective wind- and hail-damage documentation to their insurer.

The franchisee becomes necessary when spanning property domains, as it is organized and insured to satisfy whatever legal requirements exist. I think it likely that any data communicated beyond the host would be reduced to some form responsive to a study or at least transmitted along with the originating participation criteria, so that downstream uses may be audited. Beyond their subscription fee, franchisees would likely compete on their track record of study success, their community impact, and their audited study rating.

What's to stop a nation-wide, anonymous franchisee from dominating the system? The only technical limit is on the individual devices, that they are in the control of their hosts and subject to the host's study participation criteria, one of which may be a limit on the distance the data may be used, eg within-block, -city, or -state. The more active limit is on the decreasing utility of nationwide data, that as data from individual cameras is removed from its source, it loses value. And this is the great contribution of the franchisees: they, being locally rooted, can find new uses for CommuniCam data in a way that a remote organization cannot. This anticipates the commoditization of both the camera hardware and the analysis methods. After these, the only roles are those of host and value-finder, the one who connects the dots to find a new use for the data that is matched and responsive to a real problem. With a little time, franchisees will be able to discover and define community, profiting from their presence in an understanding of the community.

And there's nothing that prevents the franchisees from participating in national studies, again provided the study filter satisfies individual units criteria. It is just that larger studies will have comparatively smaller compensations, owing to the ever larger institutions that must be engaged to affect any change.

I think this could work, and suspect it will be better than whatever Amazon is planning. Would you like to join CommuniCam? What concerns do you have? Are there other design choice to help CommuniCam avoid the errors of Nextdoor? Please email or comment on twitter.

Engineers should write (more)

2022-02-22T00:00:00Z

Writing is a timeless skill, our least-constraining technology for fixing and communicating thought. Yet it is my impression that most engineers do not write. They may write emails all day, be stuck presenting or attending meetings, be engaged in some plm/pdm/erp/crm whack-a-mole, and/or writing documentation, but all of these are communications towards some definite and obvious task. There's a difference between writing and answering. Answering is when you are following a process, writing to fill in a textbox or respond to some particular circumstance. Writing involves something new, it requires imagining your reader's comprehension and bringing them along, to convince them of your argument. Your object is a human person, and this makes all the difference.

This being #EngineersWeek, I'd like to share some reasons that I think engineers should write for unknown readers...by analogy to control engineering. Feedback loops are everywhere: processes whose outputs have some relation to their inputs. Control engineers typically desire limited processes, ones that can be controlled to perform a system's given function. But we generally desire human processes to be unlimited: ever increasing productivity, ever decreasing costs, ever greater functionality, etc. This is not mere semantics: most physical systems are inherently limited while those that involve the future, people, society, and other broad concepts are not inherently limited, or if they are limited in some way, those limits are rarely known exactly.

What does it matter if society undervalues companies in your industry, if you struggle to recruit new engineers and workers, if your friends and family don't understand what you do? Well, you, your company, your profession, and our society will be more limited than it might be. We will solve our problems more slowly because, as the economists say, we are unable to allocate resources correctly because the information needed to allocate is unknown. Though overblown, it matters that "...being a YouTube star was a more sought-after profession than being an astronaut among kids in the US and the United Kingdom."

Writing publicly, you can share the challenges you spend each day conquering. This has several results:

you have new thoughts
you're forced to reflect on why you spend your time as you do
you can explain that to family, friends, and your wider community (deriving non-monetary compensation)
you can step outside your immediate role, creating an outlet for under-appreciated interests
you can explore what's hard and easy, what's liable to change
you can tactfully vent about or earnestly desire the improvement of some (external) situation (eg software)
you can increase your profile inside and outside your organization
you can create artifacts that endure
you will become a better writer and communicator

Here are some of my reasons. I'm not distinguishing here between blogs, newsletters, essays, and other formats, nor do I care whether your writing is self-hosted, shared on LinkedIn/etc, put on a company blog, or submitted to some industry forum, all are equivalent if they can be discovered, shared, and recommended.

Why don't engineers write more?

The common answer is that engineers can't write because of the risk of disclosing proprietary information. This is not persuasive, as proprietary information is really only interesting and useful to a small number of similarly-trained people at your competitors. Unless you're writing books that provide all the relevant context, it's quite difficult to communicate proprietary information to the degree required for a reader to act on it.

Maybe you don't have time?

Many of our predecessors found the time and ambition to write, despite having to compose by hand or typewriter. You certainly don't have free time as such, and I would not encourage you to approach writing as an enjoyable or relaxing activity. It takes work. But at the center of that work is the hope that your topics can be understood better, that you can find a way to work through your suspicions, elucidate the guesses of your gut, and eventually discern the structure and meaning of whatever it is that you wrestle with. Approaching writing as a method to grapple with things you don't know, or are insufficiently appreciated by your audience, it becomes a tool that you can use to identify and work on the big problems that will define and give satisfaction to your career. Creating and using tools is fundamental to engineering.

Do you have anything to say?

If you need inspiration, read what others are writing, engage them in conversation, and add whatever seems to be missing based on your professional or personal experience. Advice to your younger self is an excellent, recurring topic, as is explaining what excites you about your work or profession.

More likely, when starting, you'll have a few things to say about too many topics, and the task is really to think through them one at a time. When I have an idea for a post I open a text file on my phone's Dropbox and write a couple of the imagined core points down, along with the motivating context or link. This gets the idea out of my head, freeing me to return to my prior task. These starts loiter until I'm in a writing mood; on examining these, those whose idea I feel is still worth telling may get additional thoughts. Focusing on one, I start linking the points together, usually writing too much and verbosely. I try not to edit on the same day as writing, as a little delay greatly improves my editing. Eventually it's good enough and up it goes!

Why do some engineers write?

I'm not aware of any studies (!needed!) but software engineers seem to write a lot more than other engineers. They also have nice aggregators that surface good writing, thereby encouraging it. One explanation: Software moves fast, which means it is subject to fads. The only way to avoid fads is to discern where technologies and the market are moving, to skate to where the puck will be. And once you've committed to some technology that you're pretty sure is not a fad but hasn't won the day, writing about your evaluation of the alternatives and experience so-far is a great way to encourage others to adopt the same technology. Choosing which technologies to bring into your organization and build upon is, after all, one of the core competencies of software engineers. This is a positive feedback loop, one that advances you and your organization by focusing resources on key problems while avoiding those that are properly solved elsewhere.

Some civil engineers and many architects blog, most often to promote their work but also, I'd say, owing to an inability to resist explaining and justifying the huge edifice that's suddenly part of some community. They use a lot of software and, to my eye, enjoy a more diversified software ecosystem than mechanical or electrical engineers, introducing aspects of the emerging technology dynamic of software engineering.

In contrast, the work of industrial, materials, chemical, electrical, and mechanical engineers is just not visible, at least until a crane collapses, plane crashes, ship catches fire, or train derails. And that is not the time to be extolling the value, challenge, and high standards of a profession.

Additional exhortations:

I don't have a conclusion per-se but will leave you with some rationales for writing that I appreciate:

Some engineering-focused blogs/publications I read

Tweet me your comments, reasons for writing, or technical blog recommendations.

Havit mechanical keyboards

2022-02-02T00:00:00Z

I was glad to discover Havit's line of low(er)-profile mechanical keyboards, sating, for now, my desire for a flat keyboard with fast and clear tactile feedback. I bought the 87-key KB390L for myself and a 104-key KB395L for my wife. Her experience has been good and we might buy another for her office, but I've had some issues worth describing.

First, my KB390L had an intermittent 'f' key. Like, 10% of the time hitting 'f' resulted in an 'f' appearing. Havit sent a replacement promptly, but the replacement had a non-functional Enter key, and that's a show-stopper. But having worked two weeks with an intermittent 'f', I decided to 'fix' both keyboards.

I was unable to buy new switches, the Kalih Blue low-profile are too new/low-volume to be on amazon/elsewhere.

So, I made a key-cap puller from some wire and followed this disassembly guide, managing to avoid breaking anything in the 'repair'. Inspecting the Enter's switch, the leaf-spring contact appeared to be incorrectly bent, causing the contact to not close. The 'f' key's failure wasn't obvious; these switches are quite simple but thankful able to be disassembled for those nerds that want to change the plunger lubricant or spring.. 'Repair' is in scare-quotes above because I ended up swapping the affected switches for keys I don't use, namely 'f' for 'Ins' (which I NEVER intend to strike) and Enter for, I think, Scroll-lock. So far, so good.

With the keys largely fixed, I'm annoyed by two aspects of the firmware/driver. First, some keys are programmable, but you can't program volume adjustment keys into the 390L. On my 87-key keyboard there are 22 keys dedicated to changing the key light patterns, but none for the very basic task of changing the system volume/media controls.

Second, at least on Linux Mint, I had to mess with the usb device power states to get keyboard to be able to wake the computer from suspend, and once awoken I have to unplug/plug-in the keyboard to be able to log in. I definitely don't know what's going on here but I just expected it to work like every other keyboard.

So, I wouldn't recommend Havit's keyboards with the Kalih Blue low-profile switches, unless you have a soldering iron and patience. That said, I hope Havit has proved the market and that they will improve the quality control or that the bigger brands will offer lower-profile keyboards.

With all of that said, as weird as it may seem, I do enjoy typing more on a mechanical keyboard, and the muscle-memory combos in vim are even more satisfying than before.

Highlights: The Art of Doing Science and Engineering

2022-01-14T00:00:00Z

"The Art of Doing Science and Engineering" by Richard Hamming, 1996.

Teachers should prepare the student for the student's future, not for the teachers past. Most teachers rarely discuss the important topic of the future of their field, and when this is pointed out they usually reply: "No one can know the future." It seems to me the difficulty of knowing the future does not absolve the teacher from seriously trying to help the student to be ready for it when it comes. xx

Education is what, when, and why to do things. Training is how to do it. 4

The reason why back-of-the-envelope calculations are widely used by great scientists is clearly revealed—you get a good feeling for the truth or falsity of what was claimed, as well as realize which factors you were inclined not to think about, such as exactly what was meant by the lifetime of a scientist. Having done the calculation you are much more likely to retain the results in your mind. Furthermore, such calculations keep the ability to model situations fresh and ready for more important applications as they arise. 7

It is well known the drunken sailor who staggers to the left or right with n independent random steps will, on the average, end up about √n from the origin. But if there is a pretty girl in one direction, then his steps will tend to go in that direction and he will go a distance proportional to n. In a lifetime of many, many independent choices, small and large, a career with a vision will get you a distance proportional to n, while no vision will get you only the distance of √n. In a sense, the main difference between those who go far and those who do not is some people have a vision and the others do not and therefore can only react to the current events as they happen. 12

For many years I devoted about 10% of my time (Friday afternoons) to trying to understand what would happen in the future of computing, both as a scientific tool and as a shaper of the social world of work and play. In forming your plan for your future you need to distinguish three different questions: What is possible? What is likely to happen? What is desirable to happen? ... In a sense the first is science—what is possible. The second is engineering—what are the human factors which choose the one future that does happen from the the ensemble of all possible futures. The third is ethics, morals, or whatever other word you wish to apply to value judgments. 13

It has been said that in physics no creator of any significant thing ever understood what he had done. I never found Einstein on the special relativity theory as clear as some later commentators. And at least one friend of mine has said, behind my back, "Hamming doesn't seem to understand error correcting codes!" He is probably right; I do not understand what I invented as clearly as he does. The reason this happens so often is the creators have to fight through so many dark difficulties, and wade through so much misunderstanding and confusion, they cannot see the light as others can, now the door is open and the path made easy. 51

...I would think by the year 2020 it would be fairly universal practice for the expert in the field of application to do the actual program preparation rather than have experts in computers (and ignorant of the field in question) do the program preparation. 55

As we say, the volume is almost all on the surface. Even in three dimensions the unit sphere has 7/8 of its volume within 1/2 of the surface. In n dimensions there is 1-1/2^n within 1/2 of the radius from the surface. This has importance in design; it means almost surely the optimal design will be on the surface and will not be inside...generally speaking, the best design is pushing one or more of the parameters to their extreme—obviously you are on the surface of the feasible region of design! 116

We use computers to do simulations because they: 1. are cheaper, 2. are faster, 3. are often better, and 4. can do what you cannot do in the lab. 234

But let lab equipment lie idle for some time, and suddenly it will not work properly! This is called "shelf life," but it is sometimes the shelf life of the skills in using it rather than the shelf life of the equipment itself! I have seen it all too often in my direct experience. Intellectual shelf life is often more insidious than is physical shelf life. 235

Why should anyone believe the simulation is relevant? Do not begin any simulation until you have given this question a great deal of thought and found appropriate answers. Often there are all kinds of reasons given as to why you should postpone trying to answer the question, but unless it is answered satisfactorily, then all that you do will be a waste of effort, or, even worse, either misleading or even plain erroneous. The question covers both the accuracy of the modeling and the accuracy of the computations. 246

There is another important factor, known as the Hawthorne effect that is necessary to explain. At the Hawthorne plant of Western Electric, long, long ago, some psychologists were trying to improve productivity by making various changes in the environment. They painted the walls an attractive color, and productivity rose. The made the lighting softer, and productivity rose. Each change caused productivity to rise. One of the men got a bit suspicious and sneaked a change back to the original state, and productivity rose! Why? It appears that when you show you care, the person on the other end responds more favorably than if you appear not to care. The workers all thought the changes were being made for their benefit and they responded accordingly. 287

...after I had been eating for some years at the physics table at the Bell Telephone Laboratories restaurant, fame, promotion, and hiring by other companies ruined the average quality of the people, so I shifted to the chemistry table in another corner of the restaurant. I began by asking what the important problems were in chemistry, then later what important problems they were working on, and finally one day said, "If what you are working on is not important and not likely to lead to important things, then why are you working on it?" After that I was not welcome and had to shift to the eating with the engineers! That was in the spring, and in the fall one of the chemists stopped me and said, "What you said caused me to think for the whole summer about what the important problems are in my field, and while I have not changed my research it was well worth the effort." 389

Competing with Amazon: If I were eBay

2022-01-13T00:00:00Z

Efficient markets are a choice!

Over the course of 2019 Amazon came under increasing fire for the scope of its marketplace and the market power that conferred. The recent revelation that it used internal, private seller information to gauge markets and design competing, white-label goods is not going to help. At the same time, the covid cessation has significantly increased Amazon’s sales and our reliance on them, leaving many with a newfound-yet-sickly appreciation for their scale and platform. With this as a motivation, I’d like to focus on Amazon’s integration of 3rd party sellers alongside the first-party goods they directly distribute. (See Stratechery for a deeper discussion on Amazon's model.)

I don’t like the inclusion of 3rd party sellers in Amazon because it is anti-consumer. To see this, consider the story from typical retail: shelf space is limited, leading a competition between the number of products that can be sold and the amount of shelf space devoted to that. The finite resource of shelf space limits the number of products that may be sold, driving the retailer to select which brands they are willing to stock. While name-brands enjoy brand affiliation and command higher prices, retailers realize that consumers often desire a generic competitor to keep the name-brand prices in check, and so they choose certain generic brands to stock next to the name-brands. Retailers leverage their limited shelf space to encourage name-brand competition while also delivering value to customers by stocking generics.

In contrast, Amazon's shelf space is unlimited. While carrying the major brands, it is also able to carry every knockoff and imitation, reducing the signaling power of a brand name. That is, while choosing between two known brands (HP and Dell, say) invites consumers to bring their prior experiences with the brand into the purchasing decision, a multitude of brands undermines the value of experience, begging the question of why the Dell costs more than a white-label while having the same feature list.

At the end of the day, Amazon wants purchases; they structure their 3rd party marketplace to be as profitable as their own inventory, so that it doesn't matter to Amazon whether you're purchasing from them or a 3rd party sellers, despite the difference in quality. As long as the purchase happens on Amazon, you'll renew Prime. With this equivalency, Amazon has an incentive to decrease the quality of the product information shown in the search and browsing results, to focus the customer on price while minimizing the value of brand or other measurable dimensions of performance.

Most people can’t taste a difference between Kellogg’s Froot Loops and Malt-O-Meal’s Tootie Frooties, the difference is entirely in the packaging and branding. So if the retailer can remove the value applied to the brand and packaging, they can save their customer money which allows the customer to spend elsewhere. Notice that this savings is entirely dependent on whether people can taste a difference between brands, if you remove their ability to recognize the brand or packaging you can still save them money without actually competing on taste. This is just an example of how Amazon benefits from commoditization on the consumer side; they benefit from the total volume of sales and, in their control of the Amazon.com search window, have the ability to distort and hide actual product differences, harming the customer. For these reasons I've opposed and complained about the Amazon experience, and wish there were a better way. What would it take to compete with Amazon?

At this stage it’s basically impossible to compete directly, toe-for-toe with Amazon’s warehouses, supplier relations, web platform, loyal consumers and unrelated business lines. Actual, consumer-benefitting competition requires a different approach, one that severs the harmful link between Amazon as a consumer-facing retailer and distributor, and Amazon's 3rd party market.

Competing with Amazon

eBay and other auction sites have a different approach, despite malinvestment in their core experience. They already provide a mechanism for the sale of single units and can thus access smaller sellers than Amazon's 3rd party stores. While eBay has direct sales of new goods, a significant fraction of their sales is resale of rare or random (non-standardized) items. This is a key differentiator: where Amazon encourages purchase of brand-new, active production items (and their quick disposal), virtually all of eBay is resale of items that have residual value in their original function or some subset thereof.

An aside: healthy markets have resale:

It can never be cheaper to produce a new thing than to use one that already exists within some measure of local. To the extent that it is cheaper to buy a new thing than to use the existing, that is a distorted market. As I've mentioned before, I once paid 99c for a tiny package of clover seeds from India (total price cheaper than postage to send a letter to India). Amazon's 3rd party seller included a packet of Saffron seeds so that (I believe) the entire envelope could be treated as a 'gift' for customs purposes. Even if the whole 99c made it to the seller, it cannot be worth their time to bag, label, ship, and manage the whole affair. It only makes sense if the market is distorted, possibly in this case by the Universal Postal Union and Amazon-related seller volume incentives.

eBay has lots of sellers providing access to a potentially unlimited selection of items, with a default pricing mechanism that is per-sale optimal (auctions, by definition, achieve the optimal seller/buyer price because the item would have sold earlier to another buyer if that lower price was correct).

So, eBay should be able to satisfy any demand and compete in significant ways with Amazon: while eBay lacks free shipping and supply chain efficiencies, it has increased product selection and longer (more planned) sales decisions. Amazon still has an advantage for disposable or convenience goods, where the primary value is to free the customer from having to remember to make that purchase—one-click* and the decision is over and the item is on its way to you. These regular purchases have zero purchase risk: the customer is already well-acquainted with the product and has already decided to buy it, the only variable is whether it is available and at the remembered or expected price. Hence, Amazon's Dash buttons and subscribe-and-save.

But higher-value purchases are accompanied by increased purchase risk due to: the customer having not purchased this item before (uncertain on the brand, category, model, vendor, etc.) or uncertainty that it will work as they intend, as there is more marketing and (dis)information on higher-valued items. Adding to that, the purchase risk is magnified by the overall purchase price, so there is more to lose, even with the fine-printed free returns. To compete with Amazon, eBay needs to create the infrastructure for sellers to maximally communicate product attributes. (I'd like to see a study showing that, for a common product, more complete product descriptions do lead to faster/more sales because the purchase risk is less...perhaps comparing the number of pictures in a listing vs. the time until sale.)

To this, I am a strong proponent of total product specification. This is the coding of product features and specifications into standard formats that allow comparisons to be made. Getting these details right is often regarded as a wasted effort, because manufacturers lack the incentive to copy/paste from their internal specification or datasheet into the platform’s product database, they often can’t agree on standardized representations of items, and they're afraid to overburden customers with all the differences. eBay can solve these issues in multiple ways.

First, by publishing and regularly updating the sales-vs-information study I described above. Information is plentiful and this isn’t a very hard thing to do at scale. eBay has various seller analytics but doesn’t appear to get beyond the search engine and advertising perspectives (when should I list my product, what is a good seller page design, what ads should I buy), to actually informing sellers how unique their listing is relative to the others in-category, and what chain of filters the potential customer used to arrive at their listing. (This is some of the information that Amazon is alleged to have used in commissioning it's knockoff products.)

Once sellers have the ability to understand their sales, they can appreciate the value of fully-specified products. As a general principle information should not be intentionally withheld or suppressed, this can only decrease market efficiency and limit how fully the buyer can use the product. For instance, we recently bought a refurbished monitor for the home office; the seller didn’t say what was wrong with it so when it arrived we pulled it out and saw a huge crack down the middle of the screen and a chipped corner bezel. Was either of these the original flaw that motivated the first return and then ours? We likely would have accepted the damaged bezel but obviously rejected the cracked screen. We don't know what was 'refurbished' and because this information was not communicated to us, potentially leading us to waste two weeks and while the seller paid twice for shipping. We both lost something.

And this is a key point: If you're in a price war and don't want to be, you must find some other way to give the customers value. If you can't lower prices and must charge 5$ more than your competitor for similar items, you have to give your customers 5$ or more value in non-monetary terms. Local bookstores do this through cozy decor, personal connection, and recommendation. Car dealers advertise their prompt maintenance, loaner cars, and support of the local pee-wee football team.

eBay sellers can do this by decreasing purchase risk, providing more information to buyers and enabling them to use the product in the widest possible set of scenarios. Take, for instance, selling used (removed-from-equipment) AC motors on eBay. This is a commodity product with purchases driven by the total cost (unit + shipping + time) and some qualitative estimate of future utility. The motor’s base specifications are quite readable off the motor plate, so sellers can very quickly describe motors as 1Hp 3000 rpm 3/4” shaft. But, if they can tell me its former use, I can imagine its past and project its future life: use in a continuous duty application (pumping/fan) leads me to look at the bearings and how easily they might be replaced; use in process control implies lower lifetime revolutions, but lots of stop/starts potentially leading to heat-related winding damage. So, specifying something that the seller knows allows the average-to-sophisticated user to get more value out of the purchase at little cost to the seller. It’s not like the seller had some other use for this information (the only weakness is if the buyer misinterprets the information, but that is always a risk).

eBay's burden here is to 1) develop the seller interface and tools to allow them to easily and efficiently import this data (say making the eBay seller app able to take pictures, OCR the data, and direct that data into the listing fields), 2) create powerful buying interfaces that exploit the data including enabling user-created and recommended-market filters, and 3) publicize information about the health of this market.

Second, the world is complex and it can be challenging to measure some product attributes. When the market's needs are unknown, manufacturers will inevitably come to different prescriptions for the same need. This means that interchangeable products can be designed and sold under different operational and market models, challenging direct comparison. This is where fully-specified products can unlock positive, customer-serving dynamics: the best way to compete is to show how your competitor's specifications compare to your own (playing on your home-turf, as it were), showing how your preferred product measures more accurately communicate the performance.

Third, there is a fear of overburdening customers with too much information and overcomplicating a decision. This is largely a false-problem, and where it does apply it indicts the poor buying interface. The example that is often brought up here is from traditional retail, where, say, 30 varieties of peanut butter lead to less total sales than 3 varieties, that some fraction of peanut butter buyers were so flummoxed by the varieties on offer that they reject any purchase. This should not limit online marketplaces for a few reasons. The first is that eBay has control over product presentation and can, for instance, choose where the brand logo appears, where the price is located, the prominence of the unit cost, etc. Thus eBay can focus buyer attention on relevant characteristics, and not overload them in processing a gaggle of different label designs spread across shelves.

The online marketplace can add sorting and filtering options that are impossible in-store, allowing the user to structure the decision according to their preference. And since sorting and filtering are inherently attempts to apply order to a disordered system, they create value, and this value can be shared between customers so that the most popular sortings are the default, saving most customers time. (Indeed, the common default presentation of 'featured' and 'best-selling' is the demonstration of an anti-pattern, something intending to short-circuit the customer's preferred sorting.) These are all free features of online commerce and, rather than overburdening the customer, are actually ways to decrease customer purchase risk while also learning more about the market dynamics.

This is a very crucial point: the customer's frustration in composing search queries is mirrored by the seller's frustration in understanding why those customers eventually bought what they did. Markets are complex, it is eBay's job to help both seller and buyer understand each other and come to terms. To the degree that customers are unable to evaluate and understand product risk on Amazon, there is room to compete.

So, if I were eBay I would focus on users, explaining market dynamics and telling them how we've engineered our marketplace to maximize their satisfaction.

Highlights: Reinventing The Wheel

2022-01-12T00:00:00Z

Here are some highlights from a book I read recently. I found these parts interesting while reading, though they may not make the most sense in isolation. These are put here to aide my recall of the book and to give you the barest of encouragements to read it too.

"Reinventing the Wheel" by Steve Kemper, 2003.

At the end of the nineteenth century, these sixty-four textile mills comprised the world's largest industrial complex and were teh pumping heart of Manchester. By the early 1980s, they had deteriorated into an eyesore. But they were also cheap and structurally sound, a bargain for someone with vision. To Dean [Kamen] they symbolized a time when American engineering and technology had led the country to greatness and changed the world. That was the spirit he wanted for his new R&D company, which he named after himself: DEKA (DEan Kamen). 16

For Dean, frog-kissing meant looking for ways to combine the laws of physics with the latest technologies. ... In the case of the dialysis machine, his musing took him back to Boyle's Law and Gay-Lussac's Law... He explained the physics to his engineers and speculated that these principles could be combined with computer-controlled pneumatics and other modern technologies to create something altogether new for performing dialysis. It took five years to turn that insight into a product. In 1993 Baxter introduced its HomeChoice dialysis machine. ... Design News magazine named the machine the best medical device of the year. The royalties from it became the main source of Dean's personal fortune, and hence funded DEKA's freelance inventions. 19

The dialysis machine fit the pattern that Dean had been following since his days designing light boxes and infusion pumps: Combine inexpensive new technologies in unexpected ways to do unforeseen things. "I don't have to invent anything," he once said. "It's out there somewhere if I can just find it and integrate it." He added "Inventing is frustrating, it's dangerous, it's expensive, and innovators should avoid it whenever possible. Be a systems integrator." Innovation, he said, "was the art of concealing your sources." The dialysis machine also started a pattern that Fred and Ginger would repeat: a flash of inspiration by Dean, followed by years of work by his engineers to make it real. 19

Dean encouraged them to try their craziest ideas. It was fun but frustrating. Nothing but frogs [to kiss]. Even the designs that managed to climb a few stairs were unstable. "We had lots of systems, all bad" recalled Benge. 24

The surviving puppies [design ideas] would be prototyped in hard foam during the following week and voted on again. Doug reminded everyone that in a couple of years, two thousand Gingers a day would be rolling off the factory line, five hundred thousand machines a year. Ginger needed a solid base to build upon. 41

In typical fashion, Doug had taken one of Dean's casual aphorisms—"You gotta kis a lot of frogs to find a prince"—and methodized it into a monthly management tool. On Frog Day you couldn't work on anything you knew. Today, for instance, the electrical engineers were designing a kickstand and the mechanical engineers were investigating wiring. Each team had to make something that addressed one of Ginger's problems in an original way. Failure was encouraged because it implied real daring and creativity. On Frog Day, Doug wanted full-lip smackers, not safe pecks. 60

After many months of work, a DEKA team had finished an ingenious device that eliminated human error in drug dispensing...But the client had run out of money and put the project on indefinite hold, meaning no royalties for DEKA. "These things have left thirty or forty people here with no project to work on," said Dean. "But my rule is that no one will lose a job for causes that aren't their ethical or professional fault. The consequence is that DEKA—that is, me—had to absorb that expense." 79

I once asked him why he had never married. "I guess because the reason you get married is to have kids and if I had kids and did it right, I couldn't have DEKA and Teletrol and Enstrom. So if I did it right, I'd resent the kids, and if I didn't do it right, I'd feel so guilty and terrible. So I decided not to. I have a hundred and sixty kids at DEKA to take care of." He sincerely felt these things...Yet beneath these noble motives lurked another that was more self-serving and potentially damaging: the need for absolute control and an obsessive fear of losing it. 99

Dean thought that one of America's biggest problems was its adulation of empty vessels like athletes and movie stars. Why celebrate people whose chief talent was dribbling a little ball or looking attractive in two dimensions? It offended him that kids knew the names of such people but not those of real heroes, the scientists and engineers who invented and perfected products that improved the world. Too many kids wasted their time and minds dreaming about playing int he NBA or starring in a music video. They might as well buy a lottery ticket. 114

Engineers. Where I saw scenes with literary and painterly overtones, they saw physics puzzles and thermodynamics. We both loved the physical world, but absorbed and processed it differently. "I'm perfectly willing to watch a sunset," Dean once said, "but I also want to know why its orange and why it looks bigger when it touches the horizon. People think science is dry, but it's as emotionally charged as looking at a beautiful woman. The most shallow bunch of pinheads I know are arts people. I ask them, 'So you're cultured and well read? Tell me one differential equation you know, one piece of elegant physics.'" 147

He was determined to be a guy in denim and to keep DEKA a down-to-earth crucible of invention...But he also wanted to change the world and build a multi-billion-dollar international company and be pursued by heavyweights like John Doerr and Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos. This tension was manifest in his thirty-eight-acre estate... It was far more revealing than Dean seemed to understand, a monument to engineering, ego, conspicuous consumption, and the Old Economy. ... The 32,000-square-foot hilltop house offered mountain views in every direction. A heated hangar housed his two helicopters. In the garage, a Porsche 928 sat next to a black Humvee. DEKA employees sometimes used the tennis court, baseball diamond, and basketball court, but Dean never did. 160

For Scott and the engineers, the redesign offered the opportunity, or perhaps the trap, to create lots of commonalities between Pro and Metro. ... But the launch clock was ticking, and it was much easier to design two unique machines than to force commonality. Eventually—and that word skims over much anguish and many late nights—the team decided to go with two unique designs and a few common parts. 184

The first D1B took ten hours to build [assemble]. ... He insisted that everyone on the team build a Ginger, for two reasons: The process revealed assembly problems and forced the engineers to wrestle with their own designs. Chip let them install motors incorrectly, strip screws, drop screws into the chassis, and use the wrong screws (there were two similar sizes—bad poke-a-yoke). He watched them cross-thread the wheels and listened to them curse as they struggled to line up all the screw holes on the fender. He let them discover that the O-ring on the control shaft was binding under the steel washer. To get through the wiring stations, one engineer had to remove the chassis cover three times. One of the gaskets looked square but wasn't, and had to be studied before putting it on. ... Overlong guide pins forced an assembler to jiggle a transmission halfway on, partially tighten nuts, then pound the tranny with a rubber mallet until it was finally seated. 205

"When this machine comes out," said Doug, "Honda or GM can buy one and tear it down and figure out everything—except the software. That's our Coke formula. Strategically, it would be a huge risk to let it out [by subcontracting software development]." 223

No, said Dean, that's setting the bar too low. We have to be aggressive and take the position that we have the solution, and if you don't want it we'll go elsewhere. We want them to help us make their cities Ginger-friendly by getting rid of traffic. We expect merchants to pay for Ginger kiosks. "We are going to make the pedestrian king again," said Dean. "The threshold isn't will they let us do it, it's what they will do for us." 226

The next day Dean rolled up to the White House gate on an iBOT, trailed by the 60 Minutes II producer and cameraman. He charmed the guards, letting them think he was disabled and had permission for the others. The guards did make him empty the pockets of his fatigue jacket and explain why he was carrying not just a cell phone, camera, and Palm Pilot, but a tape measure, screwdriver, flashlight, electronic distance calculator, collapsible telescope, electrical tape, voltage meter, adjustable wrench, and, most puzzling of all, a steel machine nut as big as a baseball. ... He finally wheeled into the Oval Office on the iBOT, trailed by 60 Minutes II, and proselytized Clinton for fifteen minutes about FIRST. ... "If you do not want to hear about what he does," Clinton remarked at the time, "do not ask or stand within a four-mile radius." 249

On the morning of the reveal, when the curtain lifted off the machine and Diane Sawyer said "But that can't be it," she spoke for many. The show's hokey, breathless presentation turned one of Ginger's greatest virtues—it's simplicity of design—into a negative. Standing still, the machine looked ordinary, even mundane. 298

It's been three and a half years since Dean revealed the Segway on Good Morning America and told Time magazine that the machine "will be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy." ... When Amazon began selling the machine to the general public two and a half years ago, Dean and Doerr clearly expected a torrent of sales. Instead they got a trickle. 315

Highlights: Prayer as a Political Problem

2022-01-12T00:00:00Z

"Prayer as a Political Problem" by Jean Danielou, originally published 1967.

If politics does not create the conditions in which man can completely fulfill himself, it becomes an impediment to that fulfillment. 18

Why is it that prayer is fundamental to politics? As I have already said, politics exists to secure the common good. An essential element of that common good is that man should be able to fulfill himself at all levels. The religious level cannot be excluded. Indeed, the possibility of self-realization at that level is a fundamental element in the common good. The State must make provision for it, for we cannot suppose that a true polity can exist where there is no room for the religious dimension [of man]. In the Stat there must be a place for both service and adoration. 28

The church cannot disclaim any interest in temporal society for that also is subject to the law of God of which the Church is the interpreter. 36

Christianity is not merely a theory about human life, even if it were the highest of such theories. It is a divine irruption which cuts through to the very seat of our wretchedness, prizing us loose from this civilization which can do no more than lighten our load, and brings us out on to a quite different level of existence. 37

...it remains true that there is such a thing as Christian civilization. There is historical evidence. For a large part of humanity Christianity has been and remains the religion which is a constitutive element of any complete civilization... There is a danger that the obvious defects of the civilizations which have been called Christian may blind us to this fact. They must not be allowed to do so. Christianity has done much to heighten respect for the human person, to better the condition of women, to emphasize the brotherhood which exists between men of all races. 39

The greatest danger for the Christian does not come from persecution but from worldliness. The drama of Christian civilization lies in the fact that engagement in temporal affairs is at one and the same time a duty and a temptation. There must be a tension between care for the last things, judgment, hell, and heaven, and solicitude for the advance of civilization; and there is a danger that this will be allowed to slacken and the right articulation of one with the other go undiscovered. 42

Christianity is not bound up with any particular civilization, whether in time or place. It is of the essence of Christianity, on the other hand, to come to the rescue of all that has been created, and hence of the work and effort of mankind. In this sense, civilization has need of Christianity, eve in its own order, being by man's sin shut off from the fullness of its own development, even on the natural plane. It is sick and needs to be healed, like all things that pertain to man in his wounded state. Indeed, one of the characteristics of the our own civilization is a consciousness of the dangers brought to humanity by human progress itself, in so far as that progress is not freed from the forces of darkness, from the will to dominate or the passion to seize and hold, from all that betrays it and turns it away from its purpose. On the other hand, Christianity too has need of civilization. Christianity must take up and consecrate all that has to do with man. Therefore it must not ignore that side of human reality which concerns work. It is not tied to the culture of any particular place, nor to that of any particular time. Rather it is bound to all. The modern world is no exception. This, too, God has given to Christianity for it to consecrate, and it would be shuffling out of its responsibilities if it refused to face the task. It is true that industrial civilization began outside Christianity; but it is true also that it cannot come to fruition except with the aid of Christianity. It is the material on which Christianity has to work. 46

The question, then, with which we are faced today is what place to give to technology within a more complete vision of the nature of man. To have true meaning, it must be subordinated to the highest ends of mankind. The progress that has been made brings us sharply up against this, and makes us aware of situations with which technology is incapable of dealing. 54

One problem is that tech appears to be the only institution capable of and interested in fixing society's problems. Tech is is not equally suited to solve every issue, but quite simply lacks competition. The 100-fold increase in productivity has not been complimented by a similar reduction or refinement in man's desires, rather rank consumerism has coarsened these.

The artist has to be a man of his time and must therefore be today in some sort a technologist. He must do more than hold a mirror to technology; he must give it meaning. The artists of today lack ambition. They allow technology to dazzle and enslave them. What science asks of them is something more than a bored commentary on its progress. Science opens out upon the sacred, in the confrontation between the atom and world suicide, between the physician and death, between eugenics and love; but if it is to discover the sacred, science must have a means of expression. This is where art is to find its role. It must play upon the world of technology, which is like a muffled drum, and enable it to find its voice. My contention that the role is one of mediation calls for some explanation. The problem is to find a way of expressing sacred things which will correspond to the development of science and technology. The difficulty lies in bringing together the two worlds of science and technology on the one side and the world of sacred things on the other. Our tragedy today is that the bridges between them have been cut. A means of presenting one to the other is lacking; there is no imagery which can serve this role. What I am saying is that while science cannot give a picture of itself, the world of the sacred lays emphasis on imagery. Art can place itself at this frontier. While the artist as such is neither physicist nor metaphysicist, without him physics cannot lead to metaphysics. This is the problem that is posed by technological civilization. 62

Before the age of technology civilization was essentially religious. ... Man has moved from contemplation to production. He lives surrounded by the products of his inventiveness and skill, and sees in them the image of his own greatness. The heavens may bear witness to God's glory, but machines bear witness to the glory of man. There is a movement in the art of today which reflects this concentration of interest upon the making of things. Art is wedded to technical change; it elucidates its lines and prefigures its results. It ceases to be a way to knowledge and becomes a principle of production. In this way it serves to affirm man's power over his wold, and the artist becomes a share in the excitement of the technical revolution. 63

For those who are impressed with the importance of technology it becomes necessary to accept a separation between the sacred and the natural. Henceforth, nature must be thought of as completely secularized and demythologized. It is no longer a sign of the divine, but belongs entirely to man's domain. 64

This is pride; there remain many mysteries in soil, but it is more expedient to treat it as dirt.

Religious activity is a constitutive part of man. That this is so is proved by history, by psychology, and by philosophy. For the etnologist, tools and worship are signs that men are present. The psychologist also finds in the depths of the human personality something which cannot be reduced to any other sphere of experience. This is even more true for the philosopher, for whom authentic humanism is found where man displays the three sides of his nature: mastery over the universe by technology, communion with others through love, and conversion to God in adoration. 76

A world without God is an inhuman world. 76

When a man knows God truly, he has taken an immense step forward; for that knowledge is the fulfillment of his nature, the foundation of his ethics, the heart of his city. The claim of the Church has always been that it brings to men not only the light which Christ has given on the supernatural destiny and last end of man, but light also on man's natural life and the conditions in which he can find earthly happiness. 95

Therefore it is necessary for him to realize that the call to struggle comes from God himself in the midst of this earthly city which is subject to his law, and which he wants to see conformed to it. ... The Christian cannot let himself be deceived by a false laicism which sees the realities of political and economic life as belong to a completely profane world existing apart from God. 113

Why I Write

2022-01-11T00:00:00Z

In this post I want to write out some of my motivation for continuing to write a personal website, particularly given the ongoing developments in social media and the Substack newsletter trend.

First, I greatly enjoy thinking about what is possible which means that much of my day-to-day reading is in some part motivated on a view to the future, having an ongoing question of whether this or that development will be important or integral to the future. This means that, as I write, I have 126 open tabs in my general purpose browser window, while Mechanomy and my other projects each have their own queues of follow-ups. Which is to say that while reading I have many ideas, but haven't had a place to do anything about them. This website can be an intermediary place to write down and explore the cross-currents between these various developments. And this elaboration on the threads seen between the differing articles is where much of the value can be found. Writing out these ideas helps me to think them through, thereby improving and making more solid my own thinking and creating an artifact which can be shared with others.
Related to this is a desire to contribute to and build community, both locally and online in various niches. For instance I've enjoyed following the burgeoning 'progress studies' group of economists, historians, and writers on twitter. I'd like to be able to comment on their work and possibly contribute something back, but I can only contribute if I've worked through a concept; the one-off thought can be lobbed on twitter, but the explored point is of far more use.
I should elaborate more in a later post, but I have noticed significant differences between the software and hardware engineering communities in how engineers relate to their field and organization. Hardware engineers really don't write, they rarely share what technologies they're working on and what makes their work cool and essential. Their corporate blog posts are boring and unlikely to make anyone want to work for their company or become an engineer. In contrast software engineering is marked by advocates: because there are multiple languages and technologies for any given task, engineers need to rationalize and sell their colleagues on one architecture versus another. These rationales bleed into engineering blog posts which serve to communicate technical points in an appropriately-proud manner: "look at the cool engineering we're doing to provide this capability to you". This helps to circulate skills and best-practices, advancing the whole community without compromising their organization's strategic position. All of that is to say that writing is important and something I wish more engineers would take up.
I think it is good to charitably share my frustrations with the way things are and to yearn for their improvement. The website provides me a place to lay out what is wrong or may be improved with any number of things, from business models to retail stores to futurism. As an entrepreneur I know well how hard it is to find support for various hypotheses and to find those essential first users who truly get the problem you're trying to solve; sharing some of my frustrations and hopes might encourage their solution.
Lastly, writing my website should improve my writing, an essential skill that does need exercise.

Those are my main reasons for writing; I may discover more later and add them here. Do you write a blog? Why do you do so? Tweet me your reasons or any comments.

Website Rewrite

2022-01-04T00:00:00Z

I've found it increasingly frustrating to write posts with Wordpress' Gutenberg editor, annoyed by its slow and overly simple interface and the insertion of ever more layers of complexity between me and readers. In similar measure, as far as I can see, Wordpress theming has only gotten more complicated and with that the sole domain of theme designers, to the detriment of regular writers. I am really not interested in SEO gimmicks and ad space and all the other junk that makes websites today complicated and lame, its really frustrating to have to wade through all that muck to try to make a simple theme tweak.

So, time for a new website and workflow: markdown written in any text editor, processed into a static site by 11ty / eleventy, with theme tweaked only slightly from a demo blog website.

11ty comes with an rss feed, I encourage you to subscribe.

If something seems broken please send a screenshot and os/browser, thanks for reading. This post on twitter.

Searching for information: If I were Neeva

2020-06-29T00:00:00Z

Almost from its start, Google Search has been regarded as best-in-class, delivering more relevant results to both general and specific queries than competitors. Maintaining this relevance and dominance has required large and ongoing investments in the search algorithm and web indexers, investments recouped thorough the use of user data for targeted advertising. In this, Google is solving two simultaneous search problems: users searching for information they don't know, and advertisers searching for users who may purchase their products.

Many users are disconcerted by this (~anonymized) use of their search history to display ads, motivating various competitors to Google Search. DuckDuckGo, for instance, also sells advertising space in search listings, but they don't use user information in ad display. Lacking Google's profitability and scale their results are less relevant, though sufficient for many users. Startpage is similarly motivated, paying Google to display Goggle search results while showing generic, not user-specific, Google ads. In this they're like a pure Google Search, one that isn't trying to maximize profit or pay for bad ideas.

In this vein, I was interested to see the launch of Neeva as a 'subscription search' service, paying for Google Search results without ads or (Google) tracking. While some people will be attracted to this, it seems like a minor differentiator, as the primary user experience is still delivered entirely by Google, one subject to cancellation at Google's whim.

If I were to start a search company, I'd start by recognizing that many individual searches are not successful (1) because either the user doesn't know what they're actually searching for (2) or how to phrase the question in sufficiently specific way (3). I'd focus on the value of questions: searching for information is valuable because it is an attempt to take what I know and learn something else.

That is to say that while I'm sometimes scatterbrained (*multitasking), I rarely conduct multiple, unrelated searches at the same time. Successive searches, observation (1), are an indication of the failure of the prior searches to produce a sufficient answer, yet Google and every other search I've seen neglect this temporal aspect continuing to show results you've already rejected. Most of this is due to the too-simple interface of text box + contextualized hyperlinks, preventing search from attempting to group results by their textual similarity, vintage, or domain. It's nice if the answer can be in the first three results, but that is often not the case and search should help us better understand how various results compare to each other. This naturally leads to a longer interaction with the search results -- the thing Google pays to serve -- as the user is encouraged to see how the results differ and through a click or two to delve into the differences before leaving the search engine. And here's the critical point: if the search engine can show the user the point at which it cannot determine which of two groups of results is more responsive to the user's query, that is precisely the limitation of the search engine and the kind of information the search engine needs to learn to serve better results. Keeping users on the search page for that initial screening allows the collection of data to make search better. Not to sell ads, but to make search better!

Building off (1), (2) realizes that many searches have as their target a vague notion, something that may be only half remembered or a conjecture the user is looking to verify or disambiguate. Here, the search limitation of one query = one set of results is limiting, as multiple queries might be more helpful in circumlocuating to what the user is actually asking. Google attempts this with the 'other users searched for', but these suggestions are almost always entirely different questions. When the user hasn't made a sufficiently specific query, the thing to do is to ask them for more context, not suggest a different question. In recognizing when the results are insufficiently specific and facilitating this narrowing, the search engine is again able to gather more information to more directly answer the user's question, again making search better.

In the other direction, (3), some searches are nearly impossible. Searching for anything to do with Microsoft Excel, for instance, invariably returns pages of low-value clutter. Google search provides no ability to filter out SEO clickbait nor any facility to distinguish between the needs of beginning and advanced users. The problem isn't in making the query exact but specifying the kinds of resources to exclude in a way the search engine understands. Now, Google and other engines have long offered boolean keywords or the ability to negate (-) a search term, but because of the interface it can be challenging to verify that the query has been parsed correctly. Just as rephrasing a question before answering communicates understanding of the question, search engines should attempt to communicate to the user that their pages of results are not just wasting the user's time.

So if I were Neeva (or DuckDuckGo since they've written their own search engine), I'd attempt to make search a better experience, by providing better results and context than Google does. I'd classify users according to their search history/sophistication and prefer results that other users in their class have found helpful, while at the same time making clear that the results are tailored based on their search history and offering a way to remove the class restriction. Search that uses my and other users search history to become better, in a transparent way, that's what I'd subscribe to.

The future is just waiting to be built

2020-04-27T00:00:00Z

Last fall I started getting a strong vibe that 2020 would be a transformative year. It is not disappointing. So many seeds planted over the previous decades are now sprouting. Some, like coronavirus, are quick-growing weeds that must be immediately and uncompromisingly dealt with. Others have grown slowly, and are only just beginning to break the surface; it's hard to tell what fruit they'll bear but, weed or wheat, their emergence shows us what we have to work with.

Marc Andreesen summarized one of these seeds by saying: "It's Time to Build." This raises some basic questions: what have we been doing and what should we stop doing so that we can start building? What should we build? And, why is now the time?

Why is now the time? Because coronavirus has shown how vulnerable we and our neighbors are to entirely likely events, how large the gap is between our perceived risk and our actual exposure. Quoting:

Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we didn’t do in advance, and what we’re failing to do now. And that is a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to build.

We see this today with the things we urgently need but don’t have. We don’t have enough coronavirus tests, or test materials — including, amazingly, cotton swabs and common reagents. We don’t have enough ventilators, negative pressure rooms, and ICU beds. And we don’t have enough surgical masks, eye shields, and medical gowns — as I write this, New York City has put out a desperate call for rain ponchos to be used as medical gowns. Rain ponchos! In 2020! In America!

We also don’t have therapies or a vaccine — despite, again, years of advance warning about bat-borne coronaviruses. Our scientists will hopefully invent therapies and a vaccine, but then we may not have the manufacturing factories required to scale their production. And even then, we’ll see if we can deploy therapies or a vaccine fast enough to matter — it took scientists 5 years to get regulatory testing approval for the new Ebola vaccine after that scourge’s 2014 outbreak, at the cost of many lives.

In the U.S., we don’t even have the ability to get federal bailout money to the people and businesses that need it. Tens of millions of laid off workers and their families, and many millions of small businesses, are in serious trouble *right now*, and we have no direct method to transfer them money without potentially disastrous delays. A government that collects money from all its citizens and businesses each year has never built a system to distribute money to us when it’s needed most.

Why do we not have these things? Medical equipment and financial conduits involve no rocket science whatsoever. At least therapies and vaccines are hard! Making masks and transferring money are not hard. We could have these things but we chose not to — specifically we chose not to have the mechanisms, the factories, the systems to make these things. We chose not to build.

https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/

Now is the time. As we emerge from our corona cocoons, what should we start building? Are disposable masks the most important thing or are they just a stop-gap until vaccines defeat the virus? Or stepping back, do we need to build a new FDA/CDC? But what if the correct response is even more fundamental, scaling back globalism so as to build resilient domestic manufacturing of strategic items? These are all political questions and partisans are very good at resisting the future. As Ezra Klein describes in his take on Andreesen:

America’s political parties are more ideologically — and demographically — polarized than ever before. We’re also in the most competitive period American politics has ever seen. In a system like that, both sides utilize the system’s bias toward inaction to foil their opponents....The result is a system biased toward inaction. The left can’t remake American health care. The right can’t voucherize American schools. The left can’t pass a climate bill. The right can’t privatize Social Security. Neither side can rewrite our immigration laws, hence the turn towards oscillating executive orders. Neither side can pass their infrastructure packages. Neither side can reform social insurance.

https://www.vox.com/2020/4/22/21228469/marc-andreessen-build-government-coronavirus

The problem is not just the stagnation of big ticket proposals but that their stagnation prevents all other smaller matters from any hearing. If a small, well-targeted bill can't score points, it isn't worth the effort of a vote. When faced with a hard problem, the default action is to divide-and-conquer, to break up a big problem into smaller parts that might enable an incremental solution. But today, nothing is passed unless it can ride on a must-pass budget bill. If we want to build anything, we must stop trying to score big wins, to create *one* solution for the whole world, to dramatically change history. Do good. Create value. Start with the suffering and inefficiency that's right in front of you.

Lastly, what should we stop doing so as to start building? As I've said on twitter since 2009, "the future is just waiting to be built," but I've left who and what they're building undefined. This is in part pithy, but also reflects my belief that no one person or one advance can build the future, as if it is a definable entity, but rather that it emerges from the significant and uncoordinated-yet-collective efforts of many people to make tomorrow different than today.

The problem is desire. We need to want these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things. The problem is regulatory capture. We need to want new companies to build these things, even if incumbents don’t like it, even if only to force the incumbents to build these things. And the problem is will. We need to build these things.

https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/

As Ross Douthat recounts in his just-published book, "The Decadent Society," review, interview), by and large what we've been building is apparatus to ensure our physical and intellectual comforts. We haven't wanted to return to the Moon, even as space became essential to our economy. We haven't wanted to solve global poverty, even as agriculture became able. Yes, we've seen great improvements in technology, but this past month has shown how insufficient and limited those developments have been. Just as the key to success in the internet era is the ability to scale a simple innovation to massive numbers of users, many other sectors of our economy lost the ability to innovate. Instead, formerly robust economic systems were reduced to the point of being interchangeable (financialization) to enable paper gains completely dissociated from any real creation of value. Our modest attempt to prepare for a ventilator shortage has been twice undermined by insufficient margins.

We invented and at one time produced every single kind of personal protection equipment that we're now short of; we chose other priorities over the ability to maintain our standard of healthcare and living in the event of a pandemic. Coronavirus is showing, quite clearly, that we have stopped building in the most general sense, that we have stopped building homes, communities, institutions, and governments for tomorrow, but rather have turned inward on our inheritance. Tomorrow will only be better if we work today to improve ourselves and society; if we resist escapism, fantasy, and nostalgia and stay rooted in the reality and the dignity of the human person.

When hardware outlasts a business model

2020-02-15T00:00:00Z

I just shared some thoughts about the Sonos debacle and, were this an isolated incident, it's possible Sonos or another manufacturer could survive in this decision. But already in the first weeks of 2020, I'm seeing similar stories in other parts of technology. UnderArmour is ending support for its scale, wristband, and heart monitor products. Charter/Spectrum is tired of being paid to secure homes, giving affected customers one month to rip out their old hardware and switch to a new service.

It is really incredible that when Amazon, Apple, Google, and lots of venture-backed companies are developing hardware and software platforms to better know what people are doing in their homes, Charter decides to shut this business down. I'm particularly impressed that they couldn't find a buyer for any portion of the technology stack. To be clear, the home security product was originally built by Time Warner which Charter acquired two years ago. Since Time Warner didn't design this hardware itself, it's likely standard home security products with Time Warner stickers all over it. Given this, the primary costs in selling these customers is migrating them from Charter/TimeWarner's account system to the buyer's and switching the home security products connectivity from Time Warner's DSL internet to some other service. This shouldn't be that hard.

But stepping back from Charter, for as much as "hardware is hard", these companies have actively-used hardware but could not find an organizational or business structure to provide the supporting service. While I'm eagerly awaiting the case studies and books that are being and will be written about Boeing's 737 mess, the key role of financialization in Boeing's decline may also be lurking here, in the inability for well-known companies to create products that meaningfully contribute to corporate goals.

Both of these products are accessories, extensions of the core brand (UA: apparel, Charter: cable&internet) into new terrain (UA: connected health, Charter: home security). As such they need a different business model than the existing products (UA: one-time purchases to subscription, Charter: subscription internet service to subscription home monitoring). Both were likely developed and launched under a value proposition that has fallen out of priority for the company.

Financialization encourages an undue emphasis on profit margins to the detriment of the long-term interests of the organization and its customers, because profit, etc. are much easier to measure than the long term health of the company. The systematic hollowing of Boeing's engineering divisions made the short term numbers better while seeding the present disaster. Trust is very hard to earn. In the case of Under Armour, casting off the connected health products angers customers who bought into their ecosystem, disrupting their routine and forcing them to evaluate competing products, thereby making them less likely to buy another UA product. At least UA's customers have other options for apparel and fitness tracking; though Charter is not a dominant home security provider, it is a telecom monopoly which prevents the full measure of brand damage from being realized.

To be continued, I'm sure.

Standardizing the Future

2020-02-01T00:00:00Z

Apple's resistance to standardized cellphone charging is disappointing and discouraging: Apple doesn't want to be prevented from engineering its own, ever smaller connectors for ever rounder rectangles. Ignoring the great progress in wireless charging, the better question is: why is Apple lobbying when it could be improving its devices?

One of the oddly unsolved problems in cellphones is their daily ability to overcharge their batteries. While other high-demand battery devices - cordless power tools - have solved this by making the chargers more intelligent and thus able to stop charging when the battery is 'full.'

Apple could take this standardization conversation in a useful direction by proposing chargers that advertise their ability to supply power on connection. As any Kill-a-Watt will tell, most chargers and other power supplies waste energy when not powering a device. If the chargers were made more intelligent, they would be able control how much power they supply to a connected device. A cellphone could then request the charger's full capability during a fast-charge, switch to a trickle for standby functions, and stop supplying power entirely when the device is disconnected.

This improved charger requires two things: power control and some method of communication to attached devices. Power control entails a switch on a transformer's high-side to gate power, or in a switched mode supply, the switching duty cycle needs to be variable (across the entire range, or more likely 100%, 5%, 0%). Ultra low power microcontrollers can be powered off the wall plug, parasitically. And since we're unlikely to move back to barrel or other non-USB charging interfaces, communication is quite easy.

So, why Apple? Apple is one of the few companies that takes pains to control the entirety of their product. They enjoy broad customer support, have healthy profit margins, and frequently claim a beneficent attitude towards their customer and the environment. As such, they have the engineering, market, and cultural position to make this smart-charging technology cool, to paint it as an obviously good thing for all involved. That they can't see this opportunity is unfortunate.

Planned Senescence

2020-01-25T00:00:00Z

I've followed the Sonos planned obsolescence drama with interest. I'll admit some sympathy for the company: they have a spreadsheet somewhere that lays out the ongoing maintenance costs and, as they regularly receive telemetry from all of their devices, know very well how many devices are affected by the policy. They undoubtedly feel a bit betrayed by their customers: their policy is significantly more generous than other connected device manufacturers, many of whom don't deliver a single update.

But at the heart of this problem is a design decision: what is the correct interface for a speaker or other piece of audio hardware? The outraged customers have a point: making sound doesn't get old and if the hardware shows no signs of degradation, why should it stop working?

I thought this would be harder to show, but Sonos has a great document, 'Sonos System Overview' [pdf], that describes their hardware architecture. In the name of user experience, Sonos has implemented a two-tiered approach: each device can communicate with your other devices through your homes wifi, or the Sonos devices will establish their own mesh wifi network to fill your home with music:

...each Sonos product is both a network client and access point. Instead of merely accessing the network, each component also expands it. Sonos components communicate with every other Sonos component in wireless range, ensuring multiple, redundant paths for data to travel. While each component must be within range of at least one other component, they don’t need to be within range of the central point.

Section 3.2 - SonosNet Stup

Why do customers need this particular network design? Why can't they just run speaker cable all over their dwellings like all of us regular folks? Wireless music delivery is an important component of Sonos' value and their customer conception is very similar to Apple's: premium devices that provide a great end-to-end experience. The difference between Apple and Sonos is that cellphones are (were) constantly improving whereas sound quality is not. Sound quality is the most noticeable and enduring component of Sonos' value proposition; the unboxing experience and whole-home music delivery are very quickly forgotten or taken for granted. I'd trace much of the customer ire to this change in a Sonos speaker's value, that today the assumed or forgotten features are threatening the primary, enduring feature.

So, the customers ask, can these things be separated? Can the sound quality be somehow separated from the wireless delivery and the other platform capabilities? Indeed, Sonos appears to be developing this option:

...beginning in May, it will introduce a way for customers who want to keep using their legacy hardware to separate those old products from their main Sonos system. You’ll want to do this splitting off step because once a device stops receiving updates, so does your entire Sonos system.

But where the company foresees trouble is with streaming services. If a partner like Spotify makes an SDK change that calls for more powerful hardware, these older products might get left behind.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/21/21075043/sonos-software-updates-ending-play-5-connect-zone-players

And this is where Sonos' network architecture bites. I'll try to be brief, but I read the second part of the above to implicate the intentional technical limitations of streaming services. Stepping back, streaming music services work by sending your requested content through the internet to your device, which decrypts the digital music data, and converts it into analog signals that are played on the speaker. There are many, many ways this could be done, but only a few are trusted by the content distributors. Sonos appears to have chosen to push the decryption all the way to the smart speaker itself, with the result that the ability to decrypt Spotify, etc. is entirely dependent on the end device itself, requiring frequent upgrades of every device so as to remain compatible with the streaming sources. So it is not that the speakers are unable to play music, per se, but that they're unable to maintain the end-to-end chain of trust required of the digital streaming ecosystem.

Were the computer and radio bits separable from the audio frontend and speaker, Sonos' would be able to just sell an upgraded 'Sonos brain' to the affected customers. This modularity constrains design; Sonos pays a pretty penny to make their devices look great.

Without replaceable modules and given the hardware they have, I'd recommend making the speakers simpler: instead of having each speaker be independently able to decode music from the original source, rely on newer devices to do the heavy lift interfacing with outside music sources, and send the music to the speakers over a simplified always-compatible protocol. This would likely mean sacrificing the mesh networking, but better that brittle feature than to throw the entire unit away.

In fact, the home theater industry has developed a wireless protocol, WiSA, that sounds very similar to what Sonos should adopt. Of course, Sonos could develop its own, proprietary protocol and keep its customers restricted to its ecosystem, but doing so will only keep their company from creating new devices that add value to previous and prospective customers.

How should hardware manufacturers avoid this kind of customer ire? There are two ways: plan to go out of business within the life of your product, or plan for retirement! Just as in real life, planning for retirement means a few things: understanding and communicating signs of decreased ability (capacitors fail, plastic breaks, etc...this is normal for physical hardware devices), adaptation to changing conditions (reductions in feature set so as to disable insecure protocols, etc.), and the arrangement of end-of-life plans (repair symbols within the device). Sonos failed to plan for the graceful retirement of its devices; instead of communicating their senescence it attempted to mandate their obsolescence.

Update 01/25: I see the CEO just responded and committed to do nothing. This won't restore customer love, to do that he needs to describe the original problem, why they thought obsolescence would work, what they've learned, and, since the original problem still exists, how they're going to solve it in a better way.

myPipes

2019-09-04T00:00:00Z

Given the end-to-end encryption of https, 3rd party transport middle men can't determine what a user is doing without deep packet inspection. DNS operators have some of this information, as they must translate your request (www.youtube.com = 216.58.192.238) to connect you to your destination. So, is it good to change your DNS servers from your ISP (moral paragons that they are) to Namecheap / Dyn / Google?

What do these services do with their requests? They know your IP and what you sought; do they sell this to ad networks (or are one..Google)?

Alternately, the pro-user direction is to tell you who you're contacting; is Alexa/ the CPAP machine/etc. reporting on you? They can tell you how frequently a new session is made and what other domains are contacted at that same time/with the same user string.

More locally, this connection monitoring is an opportunity for router makers and OS providers; they have been able to block access to arbitrary domains or IP ranges for years, but that's a rather technical endeavor. Better would be to help the user/bill-payer understand who they're working with. An egocentric google analytics.

If I Were: Smuckers

2019-02-17T00:00:00Z

Seriously. Sell jelly in squeeze tubes. Just be done with it already. OK, get fancy and sell PB&J in a dual-tube. Tube packaging efficiency is so much better, and, if you do the nozzle right, you don't need to refrigerate because no air will enter (see Franzia/bagged wine). TetraPak and others have this figured out; why are we still discussing this?

If I Were: Arm&Hammer

2019-02-17T00:00:00Z

'Fresh box for baking!'....100tsp/box

If I were Arm&Hammer...I'd sell baking soda in 1 teaspoon packages.

They already realize the need ('Fresh box for baking!') but choose to sell 100tsp per container for $0.94. Other parts of the box tell me to change boxes every month, so, according to Arm&Hammer, 95% (5tsp = 5 batches of cookies / mo) of the product they sell to customers is intended to be wasted. I'll gladly pay $1/5tsp/mo to have a less self-contradicting package!

Howard Hughes Medical Institute @ Stanford

2018-10-17T00:00:00Z

After my PhD I left UW-Madison for Prof. Mark Schnitzer's group at Stanford and HHMI, where I worked with laser physicists and biologists to design automated neuroscience systems to increase experimental throughput. These robotic systems are more than a convenience, as they can eliminate the need for sedatives, permit re-sampling of the same neurons over long durations, enable simultaneous observation of multiple, disparate brain regions, increase experimental controls, and reduce experimenter workloads. I found this work interesting because these systems naturally inhabit unexplored design regimes and required varied and creative systems, mechanical, electrical, and software engineering. Here's a longer overview of their research.

My primary project was reconstructing, improving, and rearchitecting the fly picking robot, seen here in it's original form.

This robot is the first step of an automated fly experiment system, where we need to gain custody of a freely behaving fruit fly and prepare it for subsequent experiments. This paper has more details on the overall vision.

I also designed and built a 5D remote center-of-rotation kinematic mechanism to enable observation of challenging areas of the mouse brain. I'll include a longer discussion in a later post.

I chose to live in Palo Alto and bike commute 6-8mi every day. This was great for my health (collarbone excepted) and avoiding the commute helped make Palo Alto more tolerable. My second apartment was near Page Mill and most weekends I biked west and up one of the great Portola climbs. Running the Stanford Dish, or in the Santa Cruz Mountains was also quite fun, though I missed the forest and verdant trail running I had in Wisconsin. And it was great being 3 hours from Tahoe skiing, though I was never convinced that it was winter when it was 3 hours away.

There is much to criticize on the quality of life in the Bay Area: I found the prevalent socioeconomic class distinctions jarring and I became increasingly doubtful that they would act to fix their broken cities. Alas. I have some thoughts on the way out of this more generally, we'll save them for the longer post.

Thanks to Mark, Tony, Cheng, SeungJe, Radek, and the rest of lab for the hard work and friendship.

If I Were: Macy's/JCPenny

2018-02-02T00:00:00Z

The first way to view the ongoing struggles of department stores like Macy's, JC Penny, Yonkers, and others is by likening them to their internet adversaries. From this vantage we see their hip, sprawling, prime-retail stores as grossly inefficient warehouses, bleeding margin on

customer acquisition: advertising to get people in the door
labor: presentation, refolding, cashiers, and cleaning
storefront: cost/sqft to be in the (strip)mall

These costs recur, so that for any item we can imagine (and if we had the data could calculate) the daily cost to sell that item, or similarly view how every additional day on the shelf further decreases the potential profit on that item. Now, the whole idea of department stores is that you can use profits in one seasonal department to offset losses in others, so this is simplistic, but it communicates the basic challenge of retail.

One way to move more product and offset the cost of physical retail is to also sell online, using your brand loyalty to compete directly with the online-only retailers. In some cases this loyalty can sustain higher prices, but in many cases it seems that department stores must price-match online-only retailers product-for-product. And since the department stores' cost of inventory is higher than online-onlys', they must accept reduced profits. (Many were able to make up this loss by their close relationships with leading brands, potentially giving them access to wider product variety, better product targeting to regional stores, and likely better terms.)

But people still shop for clothes in-person, suggesting that the stores provide some value that they're not capturing today. So the second view on department store struggles is their historic value proposition of convenience, selection, and reasonable cost/frequent sales. With retail items costing slightly higher than online, we're left with an immediacy that next day shipping can't quite match and a product selection that, while decreased in breadth from online, can be classified and filtered to a much greater extent by personal criteria.

Given this, I wonder how a showcasing model would change these underlying businesses. Instead of selling customers in-store items, the retailer should prefer, say, two-day shipping from the regional distribution over the depletion of the in-store inventory. I think the retailer has a choice as between selling an in-store unit with 50% of the original margin remaining versus inventory from a more cost-efficient warehouse where, say, 95% of the original margin remains. If ship-to-home is the default, advertised-sale price, the retailer could still sell in-store items at slight $5/5% markup, as a soft preference for selling items from the retailer's most efficient units. Moreover, by shifting the retailer's distribution strategy from inventory-on-shelves to more efficient warehouses, they might better compete with online retailers by aping their efficiencies--in no world does it make sense to expose 5 identical products of every single item to customers, this is just an artifact of the era when the store was the warehouse.

So, if I were Macy's/JCPenny, I'd seal the deal in person and deliver in two days.

debator//debater

2017-11-11T00:00:00Z

A machine to help us communicate...

The last time I had free nights and weekends, 2011, our country was growing predictably chipper over the coming election, so I spent some of that free time considering debaterdebator.

The idea was simple: build a machine to help us communicate. I wondered whether personal relationships could be leveraged to draw friends into better discussions on political things, whether that discussion might benefit from ready access to conversation aides, and if the participants could be encouraged beyond the cable news/talk radio and red/blue strawmen. Fundamentally, I thought (and think), that people desire increased good for their selves, family, friends, and broader culture, that they would find it disconcerting to disagree with people they already trust and interact with, and that these relationships would have the best chance of drawing people together, into some greater understanding of and respect for our mutual interests and individual concerns.

Now, this idea struck some friends as obviously bad; that once you start down the partisan debate path, forever will it taint the relationship. I think that's both wrong and unfortunate. It's unfortunate because it is the willful maintenance of a veneer, a retreat from true, honest conversation and, actually, a diminution of the friendship. That's Facebook, that's the echo chamber we have today. Instead, the (benevolent!) platform could strategically choose topics for conversation and then support the users in the formulation and conduct of a discussion.

So, in the case that uncle Jimbo had posted/tweeted articles and messages critical of the latest IPCC report on climate change, and nephew Jimmy the converse, our platform would begin with their relationship and detect that the article content and audience graph between these two relatives only minimally overlapped. From there it would have prompted each person to review the other's endorsements and encourage them to pose questions to each other. Since neither participant is an expert in climate change, the platform would use the same article graph to find and suggest bridge articles that appeared to span the difference in perspective and might serve as a basis for shared knowledge and increased accord. By encouraging each person to question the other (filtering, at least crudely, against attacks) within the context of a shared set of information, I hoped that they would come to a better understanding of each other's perspective, their own, their culture, and their world. And this would be valuable to them, to our society, and to the many interested parties.

I believed this interaction was enabled by reasoning over social platforms and the simple encouraging of people to seek explanations for their positions and, in citing them, attempt to defend their sources and arguments against those mustered charitably by their friend. So, the platform should be a quest to discover truth, at first between two friends and likely reaching a trivial depth, but it had the potential to stoke something other than partisan, tribal cynicism, which we have far too much of.

I believed a this system was technologically possible 5 years ago (2011); it is even more the case today, and this is slowly being realized in a predictably breathless manner:

Those all referred to Facebook, and indeed their seat high atop Mt. Data enables them to rain benefits and harms on those below according to, essentially, their Ferengi whim.

While there are rational fears about the power of big-data (with the right analysis Facebook can create knowledge, and hence powers, that no other entity save the NSA can approach), it need not be exercised so insidiously. I very much believe technological advances are tools that we can choose to apply for our benefit; so the contrast between what Facebook is doing and what I wanted to do is the user's choice. Facebook wants to drive greater engagement to expose their users to more ads, to encourage consumerism. The problem is that Facebook is not helping people; it seeks to capitalize on their preferences, fears, and weaknesses, rather than aid their discovery, growth, and participation in the world. It and many other platforms today provide a useful service, but they could do so much more.

Enable your customers

2017-10-16T00:00:00Z

Here's one of many articles describing the challenge of maintaining personal privacy amidst the spread of data brokers http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/national-security/article166488597.html

The core and often unacknowledged challenge here is the asymmetry, that people will generally modify their behavior (self-censor in some contexts) according to their surroundings and present purposes. This ability falters when we do not know what our friends and adversaries know about us, preventing us from leveraging our friendship or guarding against their power. So far we've avoided the utopic and dystopic extremes, but the classic example of Target illustrates the potential benefits and dangers:

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”

The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

These situations and extremes can be avoided. While the first responsibility is on companies to ethically and honestly interact with their customers, that is essential, I can see the temptation to wring customer data for pennies, and that once some return has been achieved to expand these datastores. As Target stated in the preceding, “We’ve developed a number of research tools that allow us to gain insights into trends and preferences within different demographic segments of our guest population.” and “Our mission is to make Target the preferred shopping destination for our guests by delivering outstanding value, continuous innovation and exceptional guest experience...”

Years ago, I complained on twitter that companies like Roundy's, in the notoriously low-margin grocery sector, have customer loyalty programs but retain all of the data and conclusions for their internal use. Hiding the purpose and mechanism of these programs is one way to avoid customer ire, but this tactic is one misstep or abuse from cataclysmic failure. I think it better to share the results with customers. Given the limited shelf life of many products and limited shelf space for all the rest, customer predictability is directly related to efficient stocking and pricing, but they could do much better than coupons in creating and maintaining product demand. Specifically, grocery stores should email or have an app that forecasts my likely grocery needs and serves as a starting point for the weekly grocery list. It is quite easy to curate a list of things that a given customer uses on a weekly and monthly basis and is probably close to running out of. This is a service to the customer, an aide to their busy life, but most importantly it shifts the customer's mindset from one of generally needing to get groceries to a plan to go to a particular grocery store for these specific items...and some others. Coupons could be issued in the email/app for ancillary purchases (Cool Whip® to go with the planned ice cream), but they're made more valuable because they can be applied to the customer's shopping list, reinforcing the commitment and articulating the expected savings. At this point it does not matter if other stores have the same prices and coupons, they can't match the convenience. This system would naturally encourage online/pre-bagged grocery pickup and it could give a very meaningful perspective on the customer's consumption trends. Again, they have the data and are currently using it to improve their processes while denying the same benefits and insights to their customers; if they open the access both grocer and consumer can understand their consumption, but they can also collaborate and discover a more efficient relationship.

So, I do not see a reason for companies to hide their insights from their customers and believe that the negative effects, both in bad PR and missed opportunities, exceed whatever benefit there is in deceiving customers. As we both know, it's been too long since I had a Twinkie..

Solar Trains < Solar Railways

2017-07-25T00:00:00Z

When I first saw the headline "India's first solar-powered train makes its debut," I envisioned something that actually grappled with their substantial energy requirements and somehow leveraged their uniquely distributed infrastructure. But, instead, the described pilot project puts solar panels on passenger cabin roofs for climate control. So, small potatoes.

But recalling 2014's Solar (freakin') Roadways (mostly a bad idea), the better idea is to create solar railways, like:

Simply take the solar panels from the moving train and install them between the tracks.

I don't want to write a long post, so some bullets in favor of this idea...

generated power isn't moving, so it's easier to efficiently feed into the railway/municipal grid (the power density of liquid fuels is largely unrivaled by any sort of storage, so I'd bet it is better, on the whole, to optimize trains for the efficient use of energy than to dictate what source it comes from, let the electricity go to wherever it can be best consumed)
trains aren't made heavier from the panels, or substantially modified (though, given that most freight trains are diesel generator feeding electric traction, it would be cool if tracks had an electrified rail for mountain climbs and descents)
rights-of-way and site-prep are minimal, need only design the panels to flex with or be isolated from train deformations
panels are typically exposed to the sun along rural stretches
panels would be cleared of debris by the regular passing of trains and kept free of encroaching weeds/branches by the same
train-ground drag would be reduced by their smoother surface
a distributed source of power for many rural uses

and some limitations

panels are not angled to the sun (a Fresnel lens built into the glass protector could reduce losses with latitude)
total collection area is limited to very long, thin sections directly beneath or adjacent to the rail
these long, thin collection areas would require longer power transmissions than the same collection area would otherwise require (unless the rails themselves can be used as em waveguides--antennae--and efficiently)
the installation is not secured, theft/tampering more of a challenge than with other rail infrastructure

I'm sure I've missed some attributes, comment if interested. I think the transmission issue is the most limiting, though while briefly searching about rails-as-waveguides, I saw this article about railway electrification...as it says, this is so obvious I'm a bit amazed it hasn't already occurred. So, maybe we can electrify rail corridors and install some generation in that developed but otherwise unused land; sure seems better than a few panels powering the AC.

#NetNeutrality

2017-07-13T00:00:00Z

As today's Day of Action on net neutrality draws to a close, I want to post a couple of thoughts from my FCC comment here.

First, it's important to say that net neutrality is not the ideal solution, competition is. We do not enjoy the fruits of competition because of substantially captured agencies like the FCC and due to the heavy lobbying at state and city levels. Major ISPs claim to innovate as they write and support ever more burdensome regulations that greatly limit the ability of new entrants to compete, while the federal level has approved of so many mergers that the incumbents are almost entirely free of peer competition. Every notice how the flashy Charter and Comcast commercials pitch the same bundles year after year? Net neutrality is not the solution, but its presence is far preferable to its repeal.

Fundamentally, I want my ISP to be a dumb pipe. Many bristle at this, but, really, all that I want is for them to convey my page requests and uploads to the address I specified and to communicate the responses to me. No more, no less. Do this better than any (hypothetical) competitor and you have my business. I do not want my data being inspected for ad targeting, page modification, third party sale, etc., and I certainly do not want the pleasure of paying you multiple times to do your job. I don't care for cable tv or phone service or your crappy jingle. Stop wasting money on advertising and improve your quality of service, this stuff is only as complicated as you make it. Your customers cannot escape your monopoly, as your industry's worst overall consumer sentiment ranking shows every year.

I agree that encouraging or requiring every ISP to build out and maintain entirely parallel paths to each potential customer is a foolish and wasteful proposal, a telco strawman. Rather, we need local loop unbundling, whereby the infrastructure is separated from the customer service and features, just as Republic Wireless is permitted to operate on AT&T and Verizon networks. It is not out of nobility that AT&T and Verizon allow Republic's use, but rather Congress' recognition that spectrum is limited and should be leveraged to the greatest possible degree.

As Mike says, "So, the fight at the FCC matters, but the end game is Congress." Big changes to make US ISPs competitive and efficient businesses cannot come without Congressional action or antitrust action, but we can try to prevent things from getting worse by supporting net neutrality. I cut the cord years ago because I could not justify the expense of cable tv nor bear the incessant inanity and banality of almost every channel, and I fear that giving the same cable and media companies the same control over the internet will result in the same destruction.

My FCC comment:

As a recently-graduated engineer, the internet is central to my work, hobbies, entertainment, and intellectual pursuits. Never before has such wealth been made so widely available, and never before has it reached so deeply into each user's life. Expanding the equitable access to this body of knowledge and culture is a noble goal for the FCC to pursue, and while net neutrality is not the ideal mechanism to achieve this, its continuation is far preferable to its repeal.

Fundamentally, I want my ISP to be a dumb pipe. Many bristle at this, but, really, all that I want is for them to convey my page requests and uploads to the address I specified and to communicate the responses to me. No more, no less. Do this better than any (hypothetical) competitor and they'll have my business. I do not want my data being inspected for ad targeting, page modification, third party sale, etc., and I certainly do not want to pay multiple times to ensure my data is safely and securely transmitted. My communications are extensions of myself, and when there is only a single provider to communicate them to the wider internet, that provider is in a position of power over me. I trust my ISP to accurately, impartially, and indeed ignorantly convey random inquiries, moments of frustration, deep conversations, cultural interactions, searches for truth, and experiences out of my past.

Only in the days of dial-up, pre-cable internet, did I enjoy service provider competition. Since then, living in Wisconsin and now California, there has only been a single broadband provider, Charter or Comcast. Any other internet service providers have been far too limited for regular use due to fundamental deficiencies in their technology. To keep the rate reasonable, as a college student I played the common game of threatening to cancel service so as to remain at introductory rates. It always amazes me that prices go up while the service stays constant. It also amazes me that the FCC, with subpoena authority, has no interest in the internal shifting of profits from ISP services to loss-leading tv and phone units, and takes consumer prices as remotely indicative of a healthy market. While Charter and Comcast continue to produce expensive, flashy commercials for the same crappy bundles, year after year, that tells me that their advertising is not performed for competitive reasons, and it certainly hasn't improved their customer satisfaction rantings. Instead, they desire to maintain their image as being in and with the times, to dull the pain as they abuse us. Our country is neatly divided between the major ISPs, and until Congress gets its act together to force local loop unbundling, net neutrality and regulations like it are the only check on my local monopoly's power.

Ben Conrad

PhD Defense: Redundant Design and Adaptive Control of an Interleaved Continuum Rigid Manipulator

2016-11-22T00:00:00Z

This past Monday I completed my PhD in Mechanical Engineering, bringing to a close my years as a student and my time at UW-Madison. While I expect to break out parts of my research and dissertation in greater detail in the coming weeks, for now I want to post my dissertation and a recording of my presentation. Many people have contributed to my experience at Wisconsin, so I thank my parents, my advisor Mike Zinn, my committee, and many friends for making these years enjoyable and fruitful.

My dissertation (.pdf, 105MB) and abstract:

Continuum manipulator compliance enables operation in delicate environments at the cost of challenging actuation and control. In the case of catheter ablation of atrial fibrillation, the compliance of the continuum backbone lends an inherent safety to the device. This inherent safety frustrates attempts at precise, accurate, and fast control, limiting these devices to simple, static positioning tasks. This dissertation develops Interleaved Continuum-Rigid Manipulation, by which the hysteretic nonlinearities encountered in tendon-actuated continuum manipulators are compensated by discrete rigid joints located between continuum sections. The rigid joints introduce actuation redundancy, which an interleaved controller may use to avoid continuum nonlinearities and dynamic excitations, or to prefer particular configurations that may improve task accuracy, permit greater end-effector forces, or avoid environment obstacles. Two experimental systems explore the potential of these joints to 1) correct for actuation nonlinearities and enhance manipulator performance and 2) increase the manipulator’s dexterous workspace. These experiments expose important design and control observations that were not apparent in the general robotic and continuum literature.

My presentation: slides (.pdf, 8.4MB)

A Longer View On Academic Publishing Platforms And Innovation

2016-03-23T00:00:00Z

TLDR: Patentese values superficial bets on the future of technology and society, to the detriment of technology and society.

I've been watching the relationship between researchers, publishing platforms, and IP evolve with some interest. To choose some examples:

Elesiver buying Mendeley
Patent Trolls (for instance)
IBM Watson's attempts at culinary creation
Paul Allen launching AI2 and its Semantic Scholar

What technology will the next Amazon/Google/Facebook/Uber deploy? Today's unicorns consistently apply a novel assortment of known technologies to some large market beset by some inefficiency. In the absence of oracles, the next unicorns are guessable. If you can observe the pace of innovation in any particular field -- say the number of publications per year -- you quickly learn what technology sectors are interesting to academics and also receiving funding. If you see this rate of innovation increase, that signals that something new has occurred. And because researchers and funding agencies like to be fashionable, a quick semantic similarity analysis across the literature in that increase will give some sense of what the excitement is about.

Most researchers want to make 'life' better, and most people are happy to pay for a better life. Since researchers are generally only excited by progress towards their discipline's goals, and since those researchers inhabit the same reality as their eventual consumers, what excites researchers will probably, eventually, ideally, be valuable to society. So, if you notice increased innovation in some sector and realize that, by the nature of that sector, growth will impact many, well that's worth paying attention to.

Having some intuition, it's time to place bets. The form of the bet would differ by institution: funding agencies can target for some desired effect (say, Rep. Smith) and trolls could weight their acquisitions by maturity and potential scope (today's trolls as amateurs). So, such a learned-intuition technology is agnostic to the ends (as ever), but, the actors differ greatly in their ability to amass the underlying database, and in the rewards for applying it.

Who is positioned to leverage the learned-intuitions? Funding agencies are doubly disadvantaged: grant reporting is sporadic and does not approach the rigor of (generally privately-held) peer-reviewed journals, while the ends will always be subject to the shifting winds of bureaucratic debate. (Moves toward open access, data, and analyses would remedy both of these, though they may be stymied lobbying.) With the government's manifest inability develop and apply new technologies, pessimism is warranted. Certain, other entities are advantaged as this relatively cheap method can extract more value out of already-held repositories. I picture this as a(n) hourglass, where fields of research may be analyzed (both semantically and in the author/referenced/viewer graph) to identify emerging trends. This is the broad, upper funnel. The observed trends may be entered into patents, where the patentese (the stilted language encountered in patents) can hide the absence of a reduced-to-practice, coherently-understood innovation. This is the hourglass' neck, with one ideal being a single patent that draws inspiration from many observations and thereby is able to make broad claims across products (the hourglass' expanding lower chamber). A form of this speculative patenting occurs in many university tech-transfer offices today, who grasp at any IP in a projected-to-be-sexy market, but is greatly improved by the intuition wrung from a large database.

The problem, the social harm, is that the standard of proof differs between the literature, patents, and the market, and so do the rewards. Researchers, 'the literature,' broadly value interesting, well-posed, and thoroughly-explained experiments. New works are valued by their novelty, by the degree to, and manner in which they solve the associated problem...and not by their sweeping claims. Good work is not immediately and individually rewarded, but appreciated in aggregate through greater grant success and honorariums. The market has a related interest in things that work, that solve the consumer's problem...and little patience for those that do not. It does not reward ideas but their execution, and there is a federal agency to restrict claims to reality (the FTC in its consumer protection role). Between the researcher and market lie patents; on one side patents draw inspiration from disparate developments and on the other they seek to claim parentage of broad swaths of future products. The reward is (US, typically) a 20 year monopoly over all possible renditions of the claimed idea, far beyond that which was realized during the original application. Whereas both the literature and the market incent specificity, the patent system incents vagueness.

Combining the aggregation of the academic literature into large databases in machine-readable forms with big-data analyses can* yield patentable claims. While there are probably big-data ways of evaluating market potential for determining the risk of particular claims, I suspect researcher interest to be a good proxy. (At least in some domains, as great interest and excitement in the newest particle or complexity does not a market indicate.) I imagine the typical result to be patents like Myriad's BRCA-1 test or the CRISPRs; things that are close to the literature dressed up in patent language. The patent application is not going to be reviewed for actual utility (as FDA does) nor is the patent examiner going to verify that the claims are possible, only that they are plausible given the state of knowledge. As the burdens and perverse incentives (see the paper) of the examiners are widely known, entities might craft patent applications whose background summary and prior art are not representative of the literature but tilted to their benefit. Again, it does not matter (to the applicant) whether the claimed innovation actually functions, but only that it appears plausible. The risk of discovering this (potential) impracticality is reduced by the patent thicket, where the number of granted patents is more important than their quality (courts are similarly burdened in testing the leveraged claims).

Without reforming the incentives, rewards, and norms of the (US) patent system, I fear that they will become an even larger vehicle for rent-seeking. Who's the master of these databases, and really, the knowledge they contain? For, as I mentioned, the semantic analysis of the literature may be put to other, more socially-useful purposes. It is important to remember that the purpose of patents is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" the very advance of technology has rendered sub-optimal the current form of the patent system. I am not against patents, but I do ask that they be useful.

*an assertion I think true, whether this is possible today or tomorrow is debatable

Getting started in Simbody

2016-03-03T00:00:00Z

I'm testing Simbody for mechanical system modeling, here are some quick notes.

VisualStudio 2016 setup

I followed the x64 VisualStudio instructions, placing the final installation in C:\Simbody. After creating a new C/C++ Win32 Console Application and a blank source file (to access the C/C++ options), I entered these project properties: Configuration Properties | VC++ Directories | Executable Directories = C:\Simbody\bin Configuration Properties | C/C++ | All Options | Additional Include Directories = C:\Simbody\include Configuration Properties | Linker | All Options | Additional Library Directories = C:\Simbody\lib Configuration Properties | Linker | All Options | Additional Dependencies = libblas.lib;liblapack.lib; pthreadVC2_x64.lib;SimTKcommon.lib;SimTKmath.lib; SimTKsimbody.lib (all in the lib directory)

I'm no expert on VS; the above work for me.

A basic check of the dynamics

Let's model the elementary mass/spring/damper system and calculate the natural frequency and damping from the response:

See github and the many comments in verifyDynamics.cpp. Included there is a basic PositionReporter that writes positions into a given text file.

The values given in the figure allow calculation of the system's response, with some relevant parameters being:

$\omega_n = \sqrt{\frac{K_{spring}}{M}} = 2.2361$ [rad/s]

$\zeta = \frac{C_{damp}}{2 \sqrt{K_{spring}M}} = 0.0112 $ (underdamped)

$\omega_d = \omega_n \sqrt{1-\zeta^2} = 2.2359$ [rad/s]

Now, let's measure these same parameters from the simulated response. Running verifyDyanmics.cpp produces a csv file with the x position written out every 0.1sec. Plotting this in Matlab gives:

The response is the black line, with blue x's indicating the identified peaks and valleys.

The dashpot causes the initial 10m/s velocity to decay exponentially, with the response envelope given by $A e^{-\zeta \omega_n t}$. If we measure the time between peaks or valleys, we find the damped time constant $t_d$, which is related to the damped natural frequency by:

$\omega_d = \frac{2\pi}{t_d} = 2.3639 $ versus $2.2359$ calculated above.

The above response also draws the envelope function, with the cyan giving the calculated envelope and the red dashed Matlab's 1D exponential estimate.

So, this was a very simple check on Simbody's physics and a good excuse to figure out how to easily move data out of Simbody.

PhD Preliminary Examination

2016-02-07T00:00:00Z

I gave my prelim presentation this past January, recapping my work with Prof. Zinn on Interleaved Continuum-Rigid Manipulation. The presentation went well and I enjoyed the audience's and committee's questions, most of which centered on things that would be very fun to look at given infinite time. As I hope to graduate soon, I'll only be able to look into a few of the most fundamental questions, saving others for later students. With that, here are links to my document and narrated slides, followed by the prelim's abstract:

Preliminary Thesis [45MB PDF]

Slides [6.1MB PDF]

Redundantly arranged rigid joints and flexible continua for increased continuum manipulator performance and continued safety on Vimeo and also on YouTube

Abstract

Continuum manipulator compliance enables operation in delicate environments at the cost of challenging actuation and control. In the case of catheter ablation of atrial fibrillation, the compliance of the continuum backbone lends an inherent safety to the device. This inherent safety frustrates attempts at precise, accurate, and fast control, limiting their use to simple, static positioning tasks. This preliminary work develops Interleaved Continuum-Rigid Manipulation, by which the hysteretic nonlinearities encountered in tendon-actuated continuum manipulators are compensated by discrete rigid joints located between continuum sections. The rigid joints introduce actuation redundancy, which an interleaved controller may use to avoid continuum nonlinearities and dynamic excitations, or to prefer particular configurations that may improve task accuracy, permit greater end-effector forces, or avoid environment obstacles. Two experimental systems explore the potential of these joints to 1) correct for actuation nonlinearities and enhance manipulator performance and 2) increase the manipulator's dexterous workspace. These experiments also expose important design and control observations that were not apparent in the general robotic and continuum literature.

LED Christmas Lights

2016-01-02T00:00:00Z

For any given product, it is always interesting to see which aspects are improved and which languish. Engadget's recommendation of the best LED and incandescent Christmas lights highlighted this; the difference between the LED and incandescent strands is almost entirely restricted to the bulb (and associated electronic driver).

LED Christmas light (top) versus incandescent (bottom)

Looking carefully at the above picture, the incandescent bulb can be removed from the socket while the continuous mold line (lying exactly between the socket's two flat sides) suggests that the LED bulb cannot be removed. Assuming this, I'd wager that the LED bulb is first connected to the wires and then the socket molded around this connection. The socket length and design, then, serve no functional purpose beyond fulfilling the consumer's expectation.

LED Christmas lights were just coming to the market during my senior year in high school. My senior project focused on the attachment of the bulb to the wire, where I realized that the increase in bulb quality (incandescent to LED) and associated decrease in bulb failure lessened the need for consumer-replaceable bulbs. So, I designed a light strand where the LEDs were directly inserted into the wire and also a machine to construct these strands.

LEDs can be inserted directly into the wire, then encapsulated in plastic/rubber for electrical isolation.

Removing the socket results in a more compact light strand which should be cheaper to produce (less material and elimination of a dedicated electrical assembly) and less visually-intrusive because the 'socket' has been substantially reduced (Christmas light strands are green to blend in with the tree). Electrical contact is maintained without soldering by the compliance of the wire, much as a nail driven into wood is retained by forces from the compressed fibers.

A simple machine to make LED Christmas lights. From left; a spool of multistrand, multiconductor wire passes between two vertical-alignment rollers, through a wire-puller (drive), and into the LED inserter. LEDs fall from the vertical hopper into a bit and are driven by the pneumatic cylinder into the wire, such that their leads pierce the wire, making electrical contact. Exiting the wire, the leads are bent against the wire in the same manner as a stapler curls the staple on the back of the paper. This prototype does not encase the LEDs; after the press the light strand is wound around a spool for packaging.

I've learned much in the eleven years since this project, but this idea remains relevant and would be fun to revisit. I built this project in the context of the Szmanda science scholarship, so my paper and presentation highlight the energy efficiency of LED lights against traditional incandescents. (The presentation's pictures tell a great story.)

IEEE IROS 2014: Interleaved Continuum-Rigid Manipulation Development and Evaluation

2015-06-22T00:00:00Z

See my post at the Robotics and Intelligent Systems Lab for a recap of my presentation at IEEE IROS 2014...reproduced below.

A new manipulation approach, referred to as interleaved continuum-rigid manipulation, which combines inherently safe, flexible actuated segments with more precise embedded rigid-link joints is described. The redundantly actuated manipulator possesses the safety characteristics inherent in flexible segment devices while gaining some of the performance gains possible with rigid-link joint systems. A demonstration prototype was developed, the purpose of which was to explore the design space as well as demonstrate the feasibility of the approach in a clinically-relevant form. The overall design is described along with performance data evaluating its functionality.

Conrad B., Zinn M., Interleaved continuum-rigid manipulation approach: Development and functional evaluation of a clinical scale manipulator, 2014 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems; 2014 14-18 Sept. 2014

Highlight talk

IEEE ICRA 2015: Closed Loop Task-Space Control of an Interleaved Manipulator

2015-06-22T00:00:00Z

I recapped my presentation at the 2015 IEEE ICRA conference over at the Robotics and Intelligent Systems website...reproduced below.

A new manipulation approach, referred to as interleaved continuum-rigid manipulation, which combines inherently safe, flexible actuated segments with more precise embedded rigid-link joints has recently been introduced. The redundantly actuated manipulator possesses the safety characteristics inherent in flexible segment devices while gaining some of the performance attributes of rigid-link joint systems. In this paper, we describe a general controller developed for an interleaved manipulator. The controller is implemented on a clinically-relevant prototype, the results of which demonstrate the advantages of an interleaved manipulator. We also consider kinematic drivers of the interleaved manipulator workspace, showing that careful kinematic considerations can substantially improve manipulator workspace and task accuracy.

Conrad B, Zinn M, Closed loop task space control of an interleaved continuum-rigid manipulator. 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA); 2015 26-30 May 2015, Seattle, WA

Highlight talk

Bike Helmet Head Light

2015-06-22T00:00:00Z

I enjoy biking into Engineering every day and though not much of a problem today, the summer solstice, I like to see and be seen throughout the darker times. I quite like my Planet Bike Blaze, a compact 2W bike light and its warble flash mode, but it's somewhat difficult to interface to my helmet. So, this past weekend I finally replaced the fishing line version with a 3D printed pan/tilt mount.

Helmet pan/tilt light mount

Printed vs rendered

This design is simple and compact, consisting of three parts screwed together. The gray disc is zip-tied to the helmet, with a concave surface and some VHB tape to help it conform to the helmet. The two blue clips ride along a channel, providing the pan movement, with the screw hole creating the tilt axis. The gray trapezoid receives the screws, with the light attaching to an imitation of the original handle bar mount.

If I hadn't printed in black, you would see in the above that I need to spend more time tuning my printer. Though only a PrintrBot, I've seen many better results; hopefully I'll have printed some more things before this breaks and I need to redesign/reprint.

Also, this design would be a lot better if I had a 3D model of the helmet; lacking a 3D scanner I tried AutoCAD's 123D Catch cellphone scanner...but this is now offline

Crazy cool to have this in my pocket, but insufficient resolution to be useful for this project. So, a good quick project, but it's largely a stop-gap until I can build some lights into the helmet voids...

IEEE ICRA 2013: Interleaved Continuum-Rigid Manipulation

2015-06-22T00:00:00Z

Reproduced from our lab post

In recent years, minimally-invasive surgical systems based on flexible robotic manipulators have met with success. One major advantage of the flexible manipulator approach is its superior safety characteristics as compared to rigid manipulators. However, their soft compliant structure, in combination with internal friction, results in poor position and force regulation and has limited their use to simpler surgical procedures. In this paper, we discuss a new approach to continuum robotic manipulation that combines flexible, actively actuated continuum segments with small, limited stroke rigid-link actuators. The small rigid-link joints are interleaved between successive continuum segments and provide a redundant motion and error correction capability. The authors refer to this approach as interleaved continuum-rigid manipulation. In this paper, we describe the overall approach and investigate its performance using a one degree-of-freedom testbed and two degree-of-freedom planar simulation.

Overview of the Interleaved Continuum-Rigid Manipulation concept.

Conrad B., Jinwoo J., Penning R., Zinn M., Interleaved continuum-rigid manipulation: An augmented approach for robotic minimally-invasive flexible catheter-based procedures, Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2013 IEEE International Conference on; 2013 6-10 May 2013

PDF Tools I Use

2015-04-24T00:00:00Z

PDFs are a staple of academia and industry, but they're neigh-intolerable without the following:

Foxit Reader - I've used Foxit for years; it's plain better than Adobe, allowing all sorts of commenting, highlighting, and manipulation tools that Adobe restricted.
PDF XChange - I was first encouraged to it by Docear and find it as capable as Foxit. Recently I needed to OCR a scanned book; Foxit doesn't have this in their free version but PDF XChange does, so it's nice to have multiple tools.
Both of the preceding allow you to replace the document colors; pure inversion of white & black is an improvement, but I typically reduce the contrast by choosing a ~50% gray background and black text. Without this change you end up staring at a 200W light bulb all day...
PDF reDirect - This is a pdf printer with a gui. The gui makes it easy to batch combine and/or re-order pages in pdfs. So as long as we have to communicate in PDF, this is a useful utility.

...and some things have to be done by ghostschript (Unix). Four lines of python, a call to gs, and a secured PDF no longer prevents highlighting and commenting.

And because 1000s of PDFs in a hierarchy of folders is a huge pain, I use both Mendeley Desktop and Docear to manage organize the library.

I'm not content with either: Mendeley is owned by Elsevier, so it should be avoided; Docear is open source, having lots of feature requests and understaffed (volunteer) developers. I'll keep Mendeley around until Docear has a good cross-library pdf text search. I love how visual Docear can be, I just wish it was able to auto-categorize. Some of the most useful views are the most tedious to create by hand: consider a web showing who cited whom - the info is in the .bib and in the DOI/Google Scholar link but isn't currently brought in and presented. Since Docear's open source and written in Java, I should be able to see how this might be done...perhaps this summer.

Electron Beam FreeForm Fabrication -- IN SPACE

2015-02-02T00:00:00Z

In the last post I described the basics Electron Beam FreeForm Fabrication (EBF3), here's why I'm excited about it:

Let's walk through this process:

Metallic Refuse

Life and research aboard the ISS requires a lot of supplies and results in good amounts of waste. This is the most expensive garbage in the world, and, due to the restricted lab and living space, includes completed experiments and spent supply ships along with the more obvious packaging, clothing, food, and other waste. Given the nature of space exploration, this waste components of this waste are known absolutely and excellent candidates for in-orbit recycling. Used Progress and other supply ships, having arrived at station, could likely be stripped of components and structures that are not required for their reentry garbage truck function and again recycled into new components and structures. Though accompanied by greater risk, ISS (or some other manned or unmanned station) could also serve as a destination for end-of-life satellites as the only place where there residual in-orbit material value may be captured.

Garbage, Meet Recycler

If you introduce a metal into an electric field sufficient to overcome the intermetallic bonds, those bonds will break, freeing electrically-charged ions from the donor. This plasmification is the basis for vacuum deposition, but what if the donor is not a pure metal but rather some alloy? What if the donor is something like the aluminized mylar found in space (-age) blankets?

The second part of this step is an external electromagnetic field, as commonly found in mass spectrometers. If the plasma is accelerated by an electric field and then encounters a magnetic field, the ions will arc according to the strength of the field and their mass. With the electric and magnetic fields coarsely tuned according to the known properties of the garbage, its component atoms can be sorted into atomically-pure stacks.

Sorted Feedstock

These atomically-pure stacks are highly valuable, due to their purity and location in earth orbit, as long as there is a process by which they can be made into something new.

Feedstock, Meet Printer

The same combination of electric and magnetic fields used to recycle garbage can be 3D printed into new components and structures. By selectively introducing atomically-pure feedstock into the same electron beam used for plasmification and guiding the plasma via the same magnetic field, a part could be build layer-upon-layer. This is essentially EBF3, though instead of a translating build platform the platform could be stationary and the beam scanned across the part by varying the magnetic fields. (Though for alloying a translating stage or translating emitter might be required...)

3D Printed, Variable Alloy Components...In Space

3D printing metallic components in space would be a game changer; it would allow recycling of substantial fractions of today's orbital garbage into new components that equal or rival their terrestrially-produced counterparts. Further, the cycle described could also be applied to asteroidal and other in-space resources. I don't know what technology Deep Space Industries envisions...

...but I can't see why EBF3 would not meet their needs.

Finally,

I've spent 500 words describing this concept, but it seems to be worth much more study. While the individual elements of the described cycle exist terrestrially (and mass spectrometry has been used on many robotic space missions) they have not been integrated into a single apparatus.

Many questions accompany this concept; I hope to explore some of these going forward (as posts, and perhaps more formally), and, more than that, answer why MadeInSpace is on the ISS rather this...

Electron Beam FreeForm Fabrication (EBF3)

2015-02-01T00:00:00Z

There are many cool things happening in 3D printing these days, but the technique I'm most excited about, electron beam freeform fabrication (EBF3), has received very little coverage. So in this and following posts, I want to describe the basics of this technique and some of the cases where I think it is the ideal manufacturing technology.

Printing in plastic is easy. Heat some PLA or ABS to 300-400F and squirt it out of a small nozzel while tracing the outlines of your part. Alternately, selectively shine a UV light source on some UV-cure epoxy and you have a stereolithography machine. These two techniques, finally free from patent protection, are responsible for virtually all of the media buzz in 3D printing.

While these technologies accomplish the basic aim of converting a CAD design into a dimensional prototype, few of these additively-produced prototypes can withstand loadings similar to those a traditionally-machined part (even when machined from the same plastic, let alone metal versus printed plastic). Not every application needs this durability, but it is the greatest limitation of every 3D printer you've probably heard of.

Printing in metal is expensive; in contrast to the great variety of Kickstarted $300-3,000 consumer/prosumer printers, MatterFab made news this past summer with the announcement of a metal-printer targeted at $100,000. This printer, and it's million-dollar-plus competitors, uses a kilowatt-class laser to melt particles in a metal powder together, forming a solid part. Depending on the scan speed, laser intensity, and material addition rate, this method (referred to as laser-engineered net shaping – LENS – and metal laser sintering) can produce fully-dense parts with material properties similar to those of cast or annealed parts. Since melting the metallic powder depends on the relationship between the laser wavelength and intensity and the powder's melting point and absorbtivity, machine cost and material selection are closely related. Common configurations have difficulty producing aluminum, titanium-aluminide, tungsten, magnetic alloys, and others. These difficulties are easily explained by considering the reflectivity of some common metals versus common laser wavelengths:

Reflectivity of common metals and common laser wavelengths. HPLD stands for high-powered laser diode. Chart courtesy Kennedy, Byrne, and Collins, 2004.

Similar to LENS, Electron Beam Freeform Fabrication (EBF3) directly melts metallic materials to form a fully dense part, though using an electron beam rather than a laser. EBF3 commonly uses a stationary electron beam and a multi-degree-of-freedom positioning system to build parts layer-by-layer. As shown below, the electron beam is focused at a particular point, melting any co-located materials. Introducing new material into this region – by a wire feeder – increases the volume of this pool. Indexing the positioning system causes the pool to move, leaving behind newly deposited material. Adding a second wire feeder enables in-pool alloying and the production of functional gradients (varying the alloy along the part). Most EBF3 systems operate inside a vacuum chamber to both prevent the surrounding environment from attenuating the electron beam, which also eliminate the prospect of part contamination.

Left: Schematic representation of electron beam freeform fabrication (EBF3), courtesy Taminger & Hafley, 2008. Right: An EBF3 machine at NASA Langley, courtesy of Bird & Hibberd, 2009.

Along with the prospect of metal-agnostic (or more so than LENS), studies from an EBF3 research group at NASA Langley indicate that resulting parts are stronger than wrought and tempered alloys:

Comparison of EBF3-produced Al 2219 to Al sheet and plate from Taminger & Hafley, 2008. ‘Typical’ refers to conventionally-produced wrought and tempered sheet and plate properties. Of note, the ‘As-deposited’ specimen has greater strength than the wrought and a T62-tempered EBF3 deposit outperforms a conventional T62 alloy.

In addition to producing parts with commendable material strength, EBF3 is a fast process. Able to trade resolution for speed, EBF3 has been demonstrated at deposition rates of 178 to 594 cm3/hr (11-36 in3/hr) in Al 2219 and 434 cm3/hr (26.5 in3/hr) in Ti-6-4 [Taminger & Hafley, 2008]. As a point of comparison, a representative laser-based system deposits at 8 to 33 cm3/hr (0.5 – 2 in3/hr) [Taminger & Hafley, 2010]. The electron beam is also more efficient at delivering energy to melt pool, at approximately 95%, than a laser process, which might see 10% efficiency due to losses in the laser, beam transmission losses, and the naturally high reflectivity of most metals [Taminger & Hafley, 2010].

According to Lori Garver (NASA Deputy Administrator through 2013), EBF3 is used in fabricating the titanium spars for use in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter; some more mundane results are below:

Parts produced in Taminger & Hafley, 2008: a) a TI-6-4 wind tunnel model, b) a square box of Al 2219, c) an Al 2219 airfoil, d) an Al 2219 mixer nozzle, e) an Al 2219 converging/diverging nozzle, f) a Ti-6-4 guy wire fitting, g) a Ti-6-4 inlet duct, and h) a Ti-6-4 truss node.

The significant disadvantage of EBF3 is poorer control of the part surface quality than plastic and LENS printers. EBF3 part resolution is essentially limited by the feed wire diameter, but this diameter dependence has not been demonstrated in the literature. Given the commercial availability of LENS techniques, the majority of the community has focused on understanding EBF3 and its unique alloying ability. EBF3's selling point of printing with high strength alloys places the focus on accurate alloy production; applications demanding these alloys are sufficiently advanced (and costly) to delay interest in higher resolution.

EBF3 also requires an evacuated build environment, on the order of 1x10-4 Torr, adding an appreciable degree of complexity to any EBF3 (terrestrial) system [Taminger & Hafley, 2008]. Davé’s original 1995 description mentions that use of a high-energy electron beam (>500keV) can eliminate the need for vacuum, though such a device will be accompanied by its own complexities in generating large potentials. The literature has apparently not yet considered this variation.

Producing spars for the F35 is nice, but to me the killer application for EBF3 is not terrestrial, but in-space. In the next post I'll lay out why I think EBF3 is the ideal in-space manufacturing technology.

Update

2014-05-07T00:00:00Z

I've been less than frequent in posts, though my drafts folder is full. So I'm lowering the bar and hope to push out posts that could probably use more polish but which I'm tired of having linger in the drafts...and so, AmISheltered occurred to me today and is now public. Cheers.

Pandora Bounties

2014-05-07T00:00:00Z

I've used Pandora for many years and its selection is persistently limited in some genres of music I'd like to hear more of. So given this, why can't it offer bounties for creation of new music?

In my experience, liking or disliking more than every fourth track quickly leads their algorithm to overfit and play the same collection of, say, 50 songs without any variety. This leads to user fatigue and consumption elsewhere. As each station is essentially trying to learn what subgenre you enjoy, many users may end up with essentially the same overfit station and Pandora can tell how long they persist under the repetition before leaving for another source. These statistics give Pandora a reasonable way to set the music-creation bounties, as they can be viewed as a projection of future earnings once the music has been created.

More importantly, this idea creates what should be a central element of Pandora's business plan, that is to better inform artists what music is in demand. Nostalgic artists are free to cling to the idea that they only produce what moves the heart, but for practically-minded and emerging artists, this program would give them some basic criteria to shoot for.

Works submitted for each particular bounty could then be introduced into the stations of previously-frustrated users, with the bounty winner determined by likes or plays over a set trial period. (An element of this would be notifying users that Pandora has found new music for their station, encouraging them to give it another try.)

These works needn't be new, as the bounty could incentivize retired musicians to enroll their music in Pandora's catalog, where rightsholder discovery may have prevented their prior inclusion. Newly-created works would benefit both the artist and Pandora, as made-for-Pandora works could be recorded with significantly less or no label involvement, allowing Pandora to give artists all of the streaming fees (they could also be treated as works-for-hire, though this might reduce participation).

AmISheltered

2014-05-07T00:00:00Z

Consider a Facebook/Netflix/etc. app that analyzes a user's profile to determine how sheltered they may be relative to their peers. This data would be presented to the user, accompanied by a breakout plan to get them up to their peer norm. Offers from media providers (Netflix/Amazon/etc.) would encourage the user to 'rectify' the situation through term-limited catch-up deals/packages ($10 to 'get' Game of Thrones or $20 and the Fifty Shades of Gray will be on your doorstep tomorrow).

The obvious revenue elements are:

kickbacks from providers (essentially referral fees),
demographic intuition for advertisers (what groups are not responding to our advertising campaigns),
appreciation from data providers (for promoting complete taste profiles),
social literacy trivia games (à la Jeopardy), and
offers in an ongoing to-do list to maintain social literacy (number and frequency of entries informed by prior rectification speed/thoroughness).

The offerings should also be tailored by age/maturation as the desire to be socially-literate varies/decreases with age.

I can't say I would use such a 'service', but because the data and revenue model exist...it should/will as well.

Control Diagrams in LaTeX

2013-01-04T00:00:00Z

Note: This post broke years ago, but I still like the idea of creating declarative graphics..

Over Christmas break I've become dangerous with $\LaTeX$ document typesetting (wikipedia). There's something incredibly attractive about having the entire source of a document embedded in a single, text file. Indeed the learning curve has been a bit steep (it may yet get stepper...), but I'm now able to reasonably produce dynamics and controls documents with integrated figures. Here's the state block diagram for the quintessential spring-mass-damper problem, composted in $\LaTeX$:


\\begin{tikzpicture}\[node distance=5mm and 15mm, >=stealth, skip loopDL/.style={to path={-- ++(0,-.5) |- (\\tikztotarget)}},skip loopLU/.style={to path={ -| (\\tikztotarget)}}\] \[+preamble\] \\usepackage{tikz} \\usepackage{graphicx} \\usetikzlibrary{ arrows,  shapes.misc,  shapes.arrows,  chains,  matrix,  positioning,  scopes,  decorations.pathmorphing,  shadows, calc} \\tikzset{ nonterminal/.style={rectangle, minimum size=6mm, very thick, draw=red!50!black!20, top color=white, bottom color=red!50!black!50, font=\\itshape }, terminal/.style={rounded rectangle,  minimum size=6mm, very thick,draw=black!50, top color=white, bottom color=black!20, font=\\ttfamily}, junction/.style={circle, draw }} \\pgfsetlinewidth{.4mm} \[/preamble\]
\node (xddot) {}; \node (plus1) [junction,right=of xddot] {[N]}; \node(invM) [nonterminal,right=of plus1] {$\frac{1}{M_p}$}; \node(intT1) [nonterminal,right=of invM] {$\int$dt}; \node(intT2) [nonterminal,right=of intT1] {$\int$dt}; \node(x)    [right=of intT2] {}; \node(Cp) [nonterminal,below=of invM] {$C_p$}; \node(Kp) [nonterminal,below=of Cp] {$K_p$};
\path[->,every node] (xddot)                 edge node[pos=-.1]    {$\ddot{x}$}                 (plus1) (plus1)                edge node[above]        {\emph{ $M_p\frac{d\nu}{dt}$ }}     (invM) (invM)                    edge node[above]         {\emph{ $\frac{d\nu}{dt}$ }}         (intT1) (intT1)                edge node[above]        {\emph{ $\nu=\frac{d\nu}{dt}$ }}    (intT2) (intT2)                edge node[pos=1.1]    {\emph{x}}                    (x) ($ (intT1.east)+(2mm,0)$)    edge[skip loopDL]                                (Cp.east) (Cp.west)                 edge[skip loopLU]                                (plus1.south) ($ (intT2.east)+(2mm,0)$)     edge[skip loopDL]                                (Kp.east) (Kp.west)                 edge[skip loopLU]                                 (plus1.south west); %add minus signs to plus1 -- can't this be added to the skip loops above? \node at ($(plus1.west)+(-.2,.2)$) {+}; \node at ($(plus1.south west)+(-.2,-.2)$) {$-$}; \node at ($(plus1.south)+(.2,-.2)$) {$-$};
\end{tikzpicture}

Some parts are still a little rough, but the capability is there. In case you're wondering, I'm using QuickLatex, which renders TikZ graphics. I'm planning to write some more advanced posts in Dynamics and Controls using these tools, but for now here's the code for the above diagram:


!\\begin{tikzpicture}\[node distance=5mm and 15mm, >=stealth, skip loopDL/.style={to path={-- ++(0,-.5) |- (\\tikztotarget)}},skip loopLU/.style={to path={ -| (\\tikztotarget)}}\]
\[+preamble\]
\\usepackage{tikz}
\\usepackage{graphicx}
\\usetikzlibrary{ arrows,  shapes.misc,  shapes.arrows,  chains,  matrix,  positioning,  scopes,  decorations.pathmorphing,  shadows, calc}
\\tikzset{
nonterminal/.style={rectangle, minimum size=6mm, very thick, draw=red!50!black!20, top color=white, bottom color=red!50!black!50, font=\\itshape },
terminal/.style={rounded rectangle,  minimum size=6mm, very thick,draw=black!50, top color=white, bottom color=black!20, font=\\ttfamily},
junction/.style={circle, draw }}
\\pgfsetlinewidth{.4mm}
\[/preamble\]
\node (xddot) {};
\node (plus1) [junction,right=of xddot] {[N]};
\node(invM) [nonterminal,right=of plus1] {$\frac{1}{M_p}$};
\node(intT1) [nonterminal,right=of invM] {$\int$dt};
\node(intT2) [nonterminal,right=of intT1] {$\int$dt};
\node(x)    [right=of intT2] {};
\node(Cp) [nonterminal,below=of invM] {$C_p$};
\node(Kp) [nonterminal,below=of Cp] {$K_p$};
\path[->,every node]
(xddot) edge node[pos=-.1] {$\ddot{x}$}                        (plus1)
(plus1) edge node[above]   {\emph{ $M_p\frac{d\nu}{dt}$ }}     (invM)
(invM)  edge node[above]   {\emph{ $\frac{d\nu}{dt}$ }}        (intT1)
(intT1) edge node[above]   {\emph{ $\nu=\frac{d\nu}{dt}$ }}    (intT2)
(intT2) edge node[pos=1.1] {\emph{x}}                          (x)
($ (intT1.east)+(2mm,0)$) edge[skip loopDL]                    (Cp.east)
(Cp.west) edge[skip loopLU]                                    (plus1.south)
($ (intT2.east)+(2mm,0)$) edge[skip loopDL]                    (Kp.east)
(Kp.west) edge[skip loopLU]                                    (plus1.south west);
%add minus signs to plus1 -- can't this be added to the skip loops above?
\node at ($(plus1.south west)+(-.2,-.2)$) {$-$};
\node at ($(plus1.south)+(.2,-.2)$) {$-$};
\end{tikzpicture}

#PennyForNASA

2012-12-17T00:00:00Z

In response to #PennyForNASA's campaign to double NASA's funding, I emailed my representatives:

Dear Sen. Ron Johnson [R, WI], Sen. Herbert Kohl [D, WI], Rep. Tammy Baldwin [D, WI-2]:

I'm an engineer and I support Doubling Funding for NASA and U.S. Involvement in Space because solving difficult problems drives innovation while inspiring the nation. Manned space exploration is one of the most interdisciplinary applications of high-technology. Though founded on winning the Cold War, I believe the largest benefit of the Apollo program of Moon landings was the installation of a 'can-do' attitude across the nation's work force. When walking on the Moon - a recognizable feature of an idyllicized future - was recent memory, there could be no doubt that our country was capable of building that idyllic future. Thus we started the computer revolution which has now made possible the most democratizing and freedom-spreading communications medium, the Internet. This was not an aim of the Apollo program; we beat the USSR, but in so doing created a number of audacious and innovative generations. These generations created the information economy, whose profits have defended our preeminence among nations. Stimulate our country; fund our future.

I would enjoy further discussion on innovation, competitiveness, exploration, and/or our country's future at your leisure.

-Ben Conrad

TRACLabs

2012-04-21T00:00:00Z

After graduating in December 2010 I had 6 months to spend before starting grad school, so I went on an extended internship with TRACLabs in Houston, TX. TRACLabs is a small company that does automation and robotics research and development work for NASA and the Defense Department.

My work centered on developing and using TRACBot, a powered wheelchair - based development robot. During the spring and summer Patrick, Mars, Bryn, and I significantly upgraded TRACBot from

TRACBot outside

TRACBot inside

I worked on a number of projects over the spring and summer, here are some highlight videos:

Beat-Based Gestures with Brown University

Leader Following

(Notional) Wounded Soldier Extraction

And some pictures:

Ben, Nico, and Jon

Letter in Support of NASA & Commercial Crew

2012-04-17T00:00:00Z

A Letter to Senators Kohl and Johnson in support of robust funding of NASA's Commercial Crew program.

As your committee marks-up NASA's 2013 budget I hope you will consider my thoughts on the future of NASA and government-funded research and development in general. I'm from Wausau, earned my undergraduate degree from UW-Madison in Engineering Mechanics-Astronautics, and am now a graduate student in Mechanical Engineering at UW.

Both of you are in a position to recall, hopefully favorably, the national excitement surrounding the Apollo program while witnessing a defining moment of our history. The program was a proxy for national defense, and once it was clear that the USSR was nowhere close to our capabilities the program was drastically pared back with little succession planning. Apollo was a weapon of the Cold War and, after accomplishing its purpose, funding priorities shifted away from space. NASA has continued at essentially the same level of congressional support since then, leading to an inefficient space program whose lead over other nations is dwindling.

However the effect of the Apollo program was not limited to our winning of the Cold War, and it is now being argued that its effect on the Cold War was not its greatest benefit to our country. Rather, Apollo was a visibly daring endeavour and its accomplishment inspired multiple generations to pursue technically-demanding careers while instilling in them a can-do attitude that they have carried throughout their careers. The Apollo program bears some responsibility for the revolutions in computing and communication that have recently defined our country and our economy. I don't know the exact degree of influence Apollo has had on our country, but since you are entrusted with shaping our future of our country you should be interested in the answer.

What I can say, as an engineer, a past President of the UW section of the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics, and a member of the National Space Society is that we cannot know what we will learn from tackling the challenging problems implicit in doing anything new. The hard questions often have profound answers; we cannot lead the world from our armchairs.

If you allow that the Apollo program increased our national prestige and enshrined us symbolically, and literally, as the technologic and economic leaders of the past 60 years, a good question is how can we recapture some of that (we still lead, but our plaque has lost some of its luster). A better question is how can we create an environment that fosters future advances and continued leadership. Both of these questions are easy to pose but are difficult to answer in a concrete, actionable way. Instead, I like to ask: what kind of people are responsible for Apollo's achievements, what motivated them, and do they exist today. If the latter is true, where are they and why do many claim that America is on the way out? If we can lead, if we can do better, why don't we?

The median age of the Apollo launch controllers was 26; I'll be 25 in May. I've worked at NASA Kennedy Space Center and have friends working a Johnson Space Center and Ames Research Center. I enjoyed my work and my friends derive great satisfaction from working directly for the space program, making whatever contribution they can. What NASA does not have are droves of young engineers, scientists, technicians, and managers.[1] NASA is cool, but true excitement is elicited only by companies that are developing systems which have the potential to launch these droves of young workers into space and return them safely.[2] SpaceX is preeminent among them, but I follow, with bated breath, developments from Orbital Sciences, Blue Origin, and Boeing.

It is essential to fund NASA's Commercial Crew program. The simple reason is that the engineers at companies that are developing new spaceflight systems are in pursuit of something greater than shareholder profits, theirs is the dream of expanding the frontier. This dream is grounded in reality: my peers and I have at least twenty years where we will be physically capable of enduring spaceflight, performing complex tasks, and dealing with intense situations, and in these commercial companies we have the opportunity to create the systems that will sustainably transport us into the future.

After watching the significant amount of work put into the Constellation Program, I have little faith that Congress' current fashion, the Space Launch System, will meet its development and fiscal targets.[1] It may fare better than Constellation, but NASA cannot afford another system where NASA is the sole designer, producer, operator, and customer with anything resembling its current budget. The Shuttle program has many accomplishments, but it significantly limited the agency's programmatic flexibility and shares the blame, with past Congresses, for our current payments to Russia and expected seven year human spaceflight gap. In comparison, Commercial Crew is a steal.

Becoming an astronaut, that is one who works at the frontier of human experience and at the height of our technical capability while directly shaping our future beyond Earth, is my ultimate aspiration. Though my education and experiences have grounded my expectations of becoming an astronaut, it is still possible and is something I continue to seek. Irregardless of my present likelihood in that regard, that desire has made me into a competent engineer. My graduate research is in medical robotics and it is quite possible that my career will continue along this path. If so, then my future achievements are due in part to NASA's existence and its advancing of the space frontier.

It is therefore also essential to fund NASA and our other agencies that support American R&D. In the national context, seeing NASA, commercial space companies, and other entities pursue challenging problems motivates future generations of our technical workforce. Once motivated, there is no personal or societal loss if there are too few opportunities, as their training and inclination towards solving challenging problems will ensure that they remain active contributors to our nation, but we must be visibly attempting the future.

In summary, in funding the NASA you fund the dreams of tomorrow, and by fully funding the Commercial Crew program you encourage the realistic expectation that those dreams can become reality.

Thank you for your time, I would enjoy answering any questions you may have about me personally or how the aerospace industry affects Wisconsin students.

Ben Conrad

1 - This inability to create a vibrant, do-anything culture is due to NASA's inability to add significant numbers of new employees, its obligations to the civil servants, and its earned perception as an often lethargic, bureaucratic entity (in comparison to a new, sexy, lithe, commercial company). I watched as the successor to the shuttle, Ares I-X, was developed, assembled, and launched on its first test flight. Constellation was developed to the point that we had test hardware, but shifts in administration and Congresses scuttled it. Now we won't have another, government-designed and government-built rocket until 2017 at the earliest. I advocate in support of Commercial Crew, and the Administrations request in this regard because Commercial Crew is the fastest, most sustainable investment the Congress can make. For unlike Constellation (and Shuttle) once awarded future Congresses and administrations can only build on top of what the companies have already constructed. In so doing, the customer is separated from the builder; the builder only gets paid if the customer likes the product, but the customer carries no veto over the builder. Moreover, if our country wishes to stop wasting money, we would do well to give NASA some funding stability beyond the three-year horizon.

2 - NASA is capable of great things and could reattain the culture of accomplishment it had during the Apollo program. But without a significant restructuring to its funding and accompanied modifications to the civil servant workforce to make it more competitive with commercial companies, NASA will be increasingly consumed by paper studies and budget projections of systems that never get built, tested, or flown.

SF Pictures

2012-04-15T00:00:00Z

Some pictures from my January trip to visit Lisa and Brian in San Francisco.

Pictures from Big Bend National Park

2011-06-14T00:00:00Z

While interning at TracLabs in Houston, I took a mini-vacation over Memorial Day weekend to hike around Big Bend National Park, located in southwest Texas on the Rio Grande. It was hot, super-dry, and a 10 hour drive from Houston, but I enjoyed exploring the mountains and getting out of Houston.

The high fire danger prohibited backcountry camping in the higher elevations, so I hiked about 15 miles on Saturday and did a bunch of shorter hikes on Sunday.

Here's a High Chisos map and some pictures:

Graduation

2010-12-24T00:00:00Z

My four years at the University of Wisconsin - Madison were a great experience and I had many opportunities to develop my engineering skill set. Highlighted here are my academic studies, research for Prof. Sanders, and experience with the Zero Gravity team.

I graduated in December of 2010 with a B.S. in Engineering Mechanics and Astronautics and a Computer Science minor. EMA is similar to Aerospace and Mechanical engineering but emphasizes the underlying physical principles over applied results. (So a mechanical engineer may be taught the applications and limitations of an internal combustion engine while an engineering mechanics receives less-specialized knowledge. An EM may be less familiar with current industry practices but can more easily design an analyze new systems for which industry has not yet embraced.) The Astronautics specification provides additional coursework in dynamics and orbital- and fluid-mechanics.

I greatly enjoy engineering and it is the myriad challenges in designing space-based systems that hold my interest. My experiences with Prof. Sanders and the ZeroG team motivated my pursuit of graduate engineering studies and formed my desire for a career in engineering research. I am cautiously optimistic on the future of NASA and commercial space endeavours, and I do believe that we can chart an economically sustainable path beyond Earth orbit. Our future is in space; I hope to enable a small part of our continued exploration.

LEVITATE

2010-06-15T00:00:00Z

The acronym says it all: The Lunar Exploration Vehicle for Intraplanetary Transport and Terrestrial Expansion. An enormous project, but a good time.

The EMA senior design spans two semesters; the first develops an idea into a consumer product, while the second tasks us to design an airplane, submarine, or spaceship. Last semester I developed BoomAlert, a device to warn sailboat crews of a dangerous boom movements. This semester Tim, Adam, Kevin, Tyler, and I are developing LEVITATE, the Lunar Exploration Vehicle for Intraplanetary Transport And Terrestrial Expansion. Props to Kevin for the NASA-worthy acronym.

We documented (somewhat) LEVITATE's development over the semester, see Team LEVITATE. We're also on Twitter, give us a follow.

From left: Tim, Kevin, Adam Tyler, and Ben

Project Summary

LEVITATE is a lunar exploration vehicle capable of providing intra-lunar transportation of two astronauts to any scientifically interesting or resource-rich location by means of orbital and sub-orbital transfers. It has the capability to sustain two astronauts for up to fourteen Earth days at the remote site. LEVITATE is motivated by a dichotomy in the way our nation has previously planned to explore the Moon, as presented in the Review of U.S. Human Spaceflight Plans Committee's analyses of possible lunar missions. LEVITATE enables global lunar access in addition to lunar base development.

Project Documents

RASC-AL Report [.pdf, 4.7MB]

RASC-AL Presentation [.pdf, 4.5MB]

RASC-AL Poster [.pdf, 1.6MB]

Ben's Recap

Let's keep it short: over the course of 66 days, 5 undergraduate Engineering Mechanics students designed a spaceship. The semester began with some pie-in-the-sky ideas on aerospace vehicles capable of carrying two people or 500 lbs...

...proceeded to some rocket science...

...included some enthusiasm...

...and ended with a 7" stack of engineering drawings.

Assuming a standard daily consumption of 2 20oz bottles of Mt. Dew, each member drank approximately 20gal (78L) of the lime-green stimulant. Of course, this increase in consumption is inversely-mirrored by the daily decrease in sleep, as the May deadline approached. Thankfully, the feared correlation between frustration with Solidworks and optical mouse failure was not observed. All-told, team LEVITATE put a ton of work into the project, learned countless lessons about engineering design and documentation, team coordination, and individual motivation along the way, and left with an invaluable encapsulization of their undergraduate education.

RASC-AL Competition Summary

As briefly mentioned on the blog, we entered LEVITATE into the 2010 Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts Academic Linkage forum, held in Cocoa Beach, FL. This program solicits undergraduate and graduate teams to solve general problems faced by NASA's exploration efforts. Solutions to these problems are grounded in academic research, leverage existing technologies and systems, and optimize some essential parameter, usually mass or fuel consumed.

The key advantage of an intra-lunar vehicle like LEVITATE is that it allow mass (money) to be spent building a permanently-inhabited base at a single lunar location while providing access to the entire lunar surface. Thus, it combines the 'Lunar Outpost' concept — future missions reuse equipment and facilities launched on previous missions — with the 'Lunar Global' concept, where short missions are conducted at various locations, returning samples to Earth for analysis and never returning to the same location. Once on the lunar surface LEVITATE requires no Earth-launched resources. Assuming lunar resource gathering and processing is a significant activity, LEVITATE's fuel can be collected with no additional effort during this processing. And since more than four lunar equipment landings are required to enable continual human habitation, there will be a surplus of spare landers on the lunar surface from which to salvage replacement parts for the majority of LEVITATE's systems.

As you may appreciate above, LEVITATE was designed to every nut and bolt and, I would argue, that we gave the best presentation/paper/poster session of our vehicle in the undergraduate competition. The only outstanding elements of our design were those systems that we knew depended heavily on the other systems in the lunar architecture (outpost module, spacesuits, robotic assets, etc.) and/or those that were already of a sufficient technology readiness level (>TRL 6) to give us confidence in their availability. (This is why we fully designed the life support, vehicle structure, suitport airlocks, and habitat wall structure.) Unfortunately, from the perspective of the RASC-AL competition, this reliance on the lunar exploration architecture and the time pressure of our academic schedule prevented us from adequately documenting our vehicle design decisions. While I can attest to the background research performed on each system choice and our valuation of each option, these decisions were not conducted nor documented in the most rigorous way (namely trade studies). Our compressed development and decision-making process, combined with RASC-AL's virtual requirement of trade studies, prevented us from placing in the competition. Despite that, I greatly enjoyed developing LEVITATE and my time in Florida.

A Sample Size D Drawing

This assembly drawing is one of the panels that form LEVITATE's pressure vessel. The annotations refer to additional drawings that describe components of the wall panel. This drawing describes how those parts should be arranged and fixed together.

STS-130 Launch

2010-02-13T00:00:00Z

STS-130 Endeavour from the KSC Visitor Center

We left Madison on Friday, drove straight to Florida for the planned Sunday launch, saw it go up Monday morning, and were back in Madison 11:30 Tuesday. Lots of driving, but a great launch to see.

NASA's HD footage

STS-130 Pictures from Chris

Spaceflight Now press site, remote cameras

BoomAlert

2010-01-15T00:00:00Z

A device to warn sailboat crews of dangerous boom movements, with the mast mocked as the vertical cardboard tube and the boom by the horizontal. Developed in EMA 469 with David Aguilar, Lisa McGill, Scott Sardina, and Jordan Wachs.

The EMA senior design spans two semesters; the first develops an idea into a consumer product, while the second tasks us to design an airplane, submarine, or spaceship. Over the first semester David Aguilar, Lisa McGill, Scott Sardina, Jordan Wachs, and I developed BoomAlert, a device to warn sailboat crews of dangerous boom movements. See also my spring design, LEVITATE.

If you want to watch our final presentation instead of reading, seek to 1:50 here.

BoomAlert alerts sailboat crew to dangerous motions of the sailboat boom known as autojibes. These occur when sailing with the wind and are due to poor captainship or random, unanticipable, changes in the wind. Immediately before the autojibe the sail is typically full-out, nearly perpendicular with the centerline of the boat. As the wind changes direction the boom quickly accelerates and swings across the cockpit to the other side of the boat, reaching rotational velocities of >2 rad/sec. These angular velocities are not very dangerous near the pivot point (gooseneck), but can reach 5-10 mph where the crew sits. If a crewmember is unaware, they can be struck by the boom, as seen here: (I would embed, but the video owner doesn't want anyone to see his video. Begrudgingly, a link.)

To overcome this problem, BoomAlert senses boom accelerations and alerts the crew by aural and visual means. Here are the major parts:

Accelerometer Housing

We began our design with a sail on Lake Mendota to characterize sailboat boom movements. With a waterproof camera attached to the mast, looking upward at the underside of the boom, Dave simulated autojibes while I recorded videos of the boom sweeping from side to side. Returning to land, we analyzed these videos and determined angular positions, velocities, and accelerations. Based on these results, we decided to measure boom acceleration and trigger the alerts when acceleration crosses a user-set threshold. This threshold is determined by boom length and crew position along the boom, so that BoomAlert can be used on any size of boat.

The accelerometer box holds a 3-axis accelerometer which communicates with a microcontroller by the I2C two-wire serial communication protocol.

Control Box

The control box contains the system electronics, power supplies, and alert devices. An Atmel ATMega 368 microcontroller compares the accelerometer readings against the acceleration threshold, and depending on the boom's position, alerts the sailors to the motion.

Documents

View our slides [2.2MB]

NASA Kennedy Space Center

2009-08-15T00:00:00Z

I'm in Florida at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. I'll hope to share a couple of the cool things I'm doing here: Here's a map of the area.

The Drive

Nothing real special here, I arrived in Madison at 17:30 from Germany on Wednesday the 10th and packed till 0:30 Thursday morning, making for a 25.5 hour day. Leaving Madison at 9 I reached Dalton, GA (~30 mins. NW of Atlanta) by 23:00. The Tennessee-Georgia border is quite hilly/mountainous which took me a bit by surprise, since it was already dark when I started going up. I was on the road by 8:00 Friday morning and arrived in Cocoa Beach at 17:15.

I'm staying on the small strip of land between the Atlantic Ocean and the Banana River, due east of Orlando. The Cocoa Beach / Cape Canaveral area is probably 50% tourists and is, as near as I can tell, thoroughly focused on the beach and NASA. I had a brief conversation with my hosts, Frank and Sylvia, before unpacking a bit. Hungry, I headed to Mio's for some Ian's style pizza (a Madison favorite) and walked around the beach while eating. After this I called it a night, quite tired from the three days of travel and to give myself a decent chance of getting up at 3:30 to see Endeavour launch.

Endeavour did not launch (thankfully Frank checked before driving out to the Cape) and I spent Saturday and Sunday unpacking and exploring the area.

First Week — 6/15-21

Kennedy's quite a large center and there's a lot of activity in the area. My daily drive takes me through the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS) and south of all of the launchers and processing facilities. It's pretty cool seeing Endeavour on my way in.

The drive takes about 30 minutes, half of which is traversing the CCAFS before coming to KSC. I'm working in the O&C building (Operations and Control, I believe) in the industrial area, south of the pads. The building's about 200m long and is where the Apollo Command and Lunar modules were assembled during Apollo.

The Vehicle/Vertical Assembly Building (VAB) before the LRO/LCROSS launch

As I've mentioned before, I'm working with the Modeling and Simulation group within the Information Technology and Communications Directorate with two other interns. Our task is to identify and potentially prototype an Augmented Reality (AR) interface for the new space suits. We're basically asking what data can we show an astronaut to make extravehicular activities (EVAs) more productive and safe while reducing error. Some examples of AR: the yellow first-down line added to NFL games, the moving driver/car tags in NASCAR races, and the heads-up-displays in fighter jets. Thinking about an astronaut, we would like to display vital indicators, mission tasks, camera feeds, and other data inside the space suit's helmet. As many of you know, this is not my normal line of work, but I have enjoyed thinking about the obstacles an astronaut faces while doing their mission and creating new approaches to solve these issues.

This week was evenly divided between orientation and some basic research on AR. It was a bit slow starting, but by week's end I was able to log into my computer and knew how to retrieve voicemails. Endeavour suffered the same Hydrogen leak during Wednesday's attempt, so the highlight of the week was the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LRO/LCROSS) launch Thursday evening. This was the first time I saw anything larger than an Estes rocket take off and greatly enjoyed first seeing, then hearing and feeling the launch. We had had some thunderstorms earlier in the afternoon and almost called off the launch, but we made the last opportunity and the Atlas V sent LRO/LCROSS to the Moon. Unfortunately, it was still overcast for the launch, so I saw the Atlas lift off the pad and ascend into some low-flying clouds.

6/22-7/2

The student football ticket floodgates opened Monday morning and two hours later all 14,000 tickets had been sold. At one point I had four tabs open, reloading every five seconds but could not secure entrance to the ticket sale webpage. Thankfully my friend Lisa was admitted and, after buying her tickets, still had an active session and was able to purchase for friends (this may have been on purpose to keep groups together, but it was not advertised...), so I'll be at the games.

Work-wise, the first couple days were spent recalling various projects & technologies I'd seen elsewhere (HackADay, movies, etc.) and doing some heavy brainstorming on new ideas. With some capabilities in mind, I began researching the current state of AR (augmented reality) and how it might be applied to spacesuits. This quickly spiraled into a full review of augmented reality, spacesuit construction, helmet-mounted displays, human-computer interfaces, and related topics, including Apollo Moonwalk accounts and video. (Watching that footage again was enjoyable, especially when trying to reach a dropped hammer...) After two and a half weeks of research, (today's 7/6) I've saved and annotated close to fifty articles and have probably read & rejected four times as many along the way. I'll spend tomorrow (7/7) and part of Wednesday reviewing and summarizing my research to guide our AR development (if I produce a nice graph or conclusion I'll throw it up here).

During this research period we (my mentor Priscilla and fellow interns Keith and Pan) took a trip to the University of Central Florida in nearby Orlando. There's a corridor of modeling and simulation researchers and companies in central Florida of which UCF plays a large part. With my engineering research background I enjoyed seeing labs where some of the newest ideas are being developed and gained a better picture of the overall M&S field. The take-home lesson of the day was that our goal should not be to make the astronaut more efficient or productive, rather we should be enhancing their ability to perceive and understand their environment. This enables them to make mission-critical choices based on data that cannot be quickly or easily transmitted to the ground for review. Of course, systems that do make the astronaut work more efficiently are useful and sorely needed, but they do not require much conceptual groundwork; once the technology and funding are ready they can be rolled into the relevant suit module and used in-orbit and eventually on the Moon.

GOES-O Launch — 6/27

Looking west in Melbourne, 1:15 before GOES-nowhere.

I was down in Melbourne Saturday afternoon and had thought that the drive north to see Oth launching of the Geostationary Observational Environmental Satellites (GOES-O) would take around a half hour. The hour-long launch window began at 18:41 and I planned on grabbing a Hot-'n-Ready pizza (craving since Germany...) on my way to the Cape. After a little searching I found Little Caesars and was headed north by 17:30, by way of the coastal mainland highway (Hwy 1). As those who are familiar with the area, this was a poor choice and I was about even with my apartment (Cocoa Beach) when the launch window opened. Pizza finished, I was still a half hour from the Cape and eagerly peering out the windows, looking for rocket exhaust. I reached the NASA gate and headed out to NASA Causeway (northernmost road spanning the Banana River) and was relieved to see the Delta IV still on the pad and weather to the northeast, moving offshore. My Causeway parking spot was about two miles from the launchpad and a couple minutes later the weather had cleared to start the countdown. For Shuttle launches the 3-4 mile Causeway is full of people and the mission countdown is played over loudspeakers; I was joined by about 6 other cars on the west side of the bridge and the speakers were not carrying the launch. I noticed some of my fellow watchers exit their vehicles and, eyes on the rocket, saw the engines ignite (18:51) and the vehicle slowly lift off. Being two miles away, the low, rumbling explosion was delayed a couple seconds but quite enjoyable once it reached me. The rocket exhaust was quite bright in the evening sun and as the vehicle accelerated I could not see the rocket body, only the plume. About 20s after ignition I could no longer distinguish the flame from the few clouds and I took out the camera for some plume pictures (on Flickr). Quite thrilled that I made the launch and its success, I headed home.

The Fourth — 7/3-5

Saturday was a beautiful day and made for a great, 10 mile bike ride over the Cocoa Beach Causeway which connects Cocoa Beach/Cape Canaveral with Merritt Island and Florida. After the ride I hung around the apartment till dusk and headed north for the Cocoa Beach/Cape Canaveral fireworks. I parked a couple of blocks from the beach and had a chocolate malt as I walked over. The beach was full of people and the weather made for great firework-watching—clear and comfortable. Two barges held the fireworks ~500' from the shore while a multitude of boats were further out. The fireworks were good, see Flickr.

Family Visit — 7/15-21

My parents flew down on Thursday into Orlando and we had supper at a nearby Fridays. I'd last seen them in mid-May and enjoyed retelling my week in Germany and first month in Florida.

While I worked Friday they walked north and I picked them up on the way home. We headed south to Melbourne for supper at a good Italian/seafood place whose name I can't remember...I'll check the next time I'm down there. We stopped at the store for some necessities and finished out the night watching the Tour.

Saturday morning my dad and I went for a brief beach run while mom gathered some shells. After a brief respite, we headed back to Orlando to pick up my brother, then headed south to check out Bok tower. Built on the highest point in the peninsula, Bok is a carillon (bell tower) inspired by those in the Netherlands. The carillon itself is closed to the public and surrounded by a small moat, containing large, orange fish. Around the hill top is a well-cultivated garden which transitions into orchards. We headed back to Cocoa Beach around five and planned out our Sunday activities.

Sunday morning we headed to church then spent the rest of the day as tourists. Quizno's for lunch, we walked through the Ron Jon mecca then changed for the beach. The waves were cresting at 3-5' and made for a good couple hours in the sun. Around three we cleaned up and went through the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Center. I was unable to get us all on-base and we arrived too late to see the Saturn V center (featuring a Saturn V, Apollo replicas, spacesuits, etc.). After heading through the gift shop we saw the new Star Trek on the KSC's IMAX. The movie ended around 9:30, about five minutes ahead of a good storm.

I left Dan and parents to another day in Cocoa Beach as I worked. That evening we went to a real good pizza place, A N.Y. Pizza House, and is the closest I've come to Sam's in Wausau. We took a drive south and a brief beach walk near Melbourne Beach before heading home. Some chocolate malts finished out the day.

I rode into work with Frank (my host) while my parents took Dan back to the airport, then continued westward for a day in St. Petersburg. They returned to Cocoa Beach Wednesday afternoon and we had supper at Carrabba's, a good Italian chain (apparently there's one in Milwaukee).

We got up early Thursday morning to drive to Orlando for my parents' 8am flight, then I headed into work. All told a good couple days with the family and, I'm told, enough sun and relaxation.

STS-127 Endeavour

I had rushed down Florida to see Endeavour's 6/13 attempt canceled 7 hrs after my arrival in Cocoa Beach. Weather and a gaseous hydrogen leak repeatedly delayed launch to 7/15, six attempts and a full month after the planned launch. The astronauts suit up in my building (Operations and Checkout, O&C) and I caught the walkout (the astronauts' last, up-close appearance to the media) three times, leaving the photographers many shots to choose from. In the intervening period my co-worker Bec tried taking us out to the pad, but some schedule confusion stopped us just outside the access gates.

The launch was quite enjoyable. I'd previously seen a Delta IV (GOES-O) and Atlas V (LRO/LCROSS) launch, but neither approached the raw power of Endeavour's launch. I was about two miles from pad 39A, just behind the press site and to the south of the VAB and large countdown clock you'll recall from Apollo 13. Here's a brief montage:

I was standing right behind a fence onto which my camera was mounted and continuously taking pictures, so I have ∼50 more of the plume after Endeavour had moved out of the picture; needless to say I was enjoying the experience.

I followed STS-127/ISS Assembly Flight 2J/A on NASA TV during its 17 day mission and was fortunate to get out to the Shuttle Landing Facility for landing (thanks, Frank). I was at the midpoint of the runway and surrounded by reporters and other, credentialed employees. The first physical sign that Endeavour was on approach were the double sonic booms, and I didn't see Endeavour until it was midway through the final banking turn (since the shuttles are brick-covered gliders hauling tons of trash on return). The scrub brush surrounding the SLF prevented me from seeing the main gear touchdown, but I caught both the nose gear and parachute deployment. The orbiter was still going at a good clip and quickly disappeared behind more scrub, eventually stoping at the southeast end of runway 15. We had followed the orbiter servicing caravan in and watched as the trucks drove out to stabilize Endeavour's systems and prepare for crew exit.

Two hours after returning from the runway the Crew Transport Vehicle 'docked' (probably the best word, click through) with the O&C building to transfer the 127 crew. This struck me as a bit excessive, but considering Koichi Wakata's return from 4.5 months on the ISS, think it was done to avoid taxing his immune system. Anyway, I greatly enjoyed seeing STS-127 to completion and have a much greater appreciation for all the work that goes into every shuttle launch. I'm thrilled that I was able to see a launch and landing and count myself very fortunate, considering the impending transition from shuttle and the questions on its replacement.

STS-128 Discovery

I got to see Discovery twice during its preparation for STS-128, which launched (video) this past Friday (9/29). First up was a visit to the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) where the external tank (ET) and solid rocket boosters (SRBs) waited for the orbiter. Each shuttle launch is the culmination of multiple production lines, scheduled years in advance, and the VAB is a flurry of activity as the United Space Alliance launch crews prepare elements two, three missions in advance.

We began at platform C, the highest of the removable platforms, which services the ET oxygen vent. We moved downward, stopping for pictures, joining the SRBs and past the upper and lower Shuttle attach points. The shuttles are readied in one of three Orbiter Processing Facilities then rolled over to th VAB for mating to the ET & SRBs. Once in the VAB, the shuttle is lifted vertically, inserted into shuttle-shaped cutouts in the access platforms, and attached to the ET & SRBs. The completed stack rests on the Mobile Launcher Platform until launch.

While in the VAB, we stopped to see the assembly of the first test flight of the new Ares rocket, Ares I-X. This process is now complete and Ares I-X is the tallest vehicle to inhabit the VAB since the Saturn V. As some of you may know, the future of this program is in flux (along with the future of American spaceflight), but I enjoyed seeing what the future may be. I hope that President Obama continues Constellation and proceeds with the Halloween Ares I-X test flight.

NASA Summary

Describing my work at Kennedy Space Center was a bit involved this past summer, though now that I've returned to Madison I hope to give you a decent idea of my task. The Moon is an extremely attractive destination for future manned space missions, primarily because of its proximity to Earth and potential to answer many questions on Earth's geologic history, the formation of the solar system, meteor and asteroid bombardment phases, human adaptability to low gravity, among others. While there is uncertainty in our near- to mid-term plans for human exploration, I fundamentally believe that we will extend beyond the planet by way of lessons learned on the Moon.

This past summer I worked with the Modeling and Simulation group at KSC, mentored by Dr. Priscilla Elfrey, with two other interns. Our task was, broadly, to create an interface for use by lunar astronauts, whereby pertinent information (vital signs, current task, path to habitat, seismometer status, etc.) is displayed in the astronaut’s helmet. The highest conception would allow the astronaut to simply look around his/her environment, and as their gaze progress their line of sight is tracked and any information on objects of interest is displayed on request. The astronaut will be able to display, manipulate, and annotate any object, location, or procedure; the overriding goal is to enable the astronaut to understand their environment and then communicate that understanding to the habitat/Earth. This will require many technologies to be integrated but this approach may be broadly called augmented reality (AR) – the real time addition of information to the world, as perceived by the user. As I began this project last June, the multidisciplinarity (word?) of AR struck me as I began remembering projects covered on Hack a Day, among other places. Recalling these provided an informal indicator for the current status of the required fields while highlighting capabilities shared or unique to lunar extravehicular activities (EVAs). I spent most of July in academic research, searching, reading, annotating, drawing conclusions from the literature, leading to seventy articles-of-merit. I made a significant effort to form conclusions between articles and disciplines to identify the most significant improvements to lunar EVAs, given probable mission profiles and expected technology advances.

The overriding conclusion from this research is that the function, role, and purpose of the astronaut will change from one of manual labor to a perceiver of systems, once continuous human presence is established and as equipment continues to arrive. To enable this function, the astronaut must be able to naturally and comfortably interact with physical and electronic systems, manipulating information with the same (or better) ease as physical tools.

The final product is a thirty-plus page report that evaluates seventeen applications of AR to lunar EVAs in the context of the literature, first-hand interviews with astronauts, and expected lunar missions. This report is still in draft, but I produced a summary poster featuring six of the more interesting ideas. I'm working to finish the full report and will post here asap.

Study Results:

A concept of how information can be added to an astronaut's view of the lunar surface.

Towards Perceiving the Lunar Environment [.pdf, 1.5MB] Accompanying Poster [.pdf, 1.0MB]

Keys to improving Extravehicular Information Interaction [.pdf, .7MB]

Great Smokey Mountains — 8/22-3/09

Friday, 8/21, was my last day at KSC. After a good lunch and wrap-up talk with Priscilla, I headed to the Astronaut Hall of Fame while my badge was still valid. Filled with relics from the each era of the the space program, the hall of fame presents the stories of the astronauts as they prepared, conducted, and returned from their missions. See a couple additional pictures on Flickr.

I hiked into 65 on Saturday, then Noland Creek / Springhouse Branch / Forney Ridge / Clingman's Dome / Forney Creek on Sunday, stopping at 70. I exited Monday via the Whiteoak Branch trail and was at Pizza Hut by 11:30 for lunch.

All spring and summer I'd wanted to go camping but didn't find the time. So, I left Cocoa Beach around 6 Saturday morning to reach the Great Smokey Mountains National Park in Bryson City, NC, by 5pm. My plan was to hike to site 64 for Saturday evening, then climb up Clingman's Dome and down to spend Sunday evening at site 69, before returning to the van Monday afternoon. Heading north on Saturday, I had an hour delay traveling through South Carolina and some difficulty finding the ranger station to register my plan; it was dusk by the time I parked the van at the Noland Creek trailhead. With flashlight in hand, I began hiking along Noland Creek towards site 64 with the hope of reaching it by 10 (~4mi on an improved surface in 1.5 hrs...). My pace was pretty quick as I was a bit on edge from not being able to hear (the roaring creek) or see (confined to the flashlight beam) in any detail. Given my delays and absolute darkness, around 9:15 I revised my plan to put in at site 65 which I expected to be just around the next corner. Near 9:30 I happened upon a sign which indicated site 65 was .1 miles further down up Noland Creek. Approaching 10, it was pretty clear that I'd missed site 65, but having gone this far I decided to continue my original plan to 64, which, according to my dark-afflicted distance estimation, I expected to reach in 15 minutes. You'll notice that the map is quite basic and I had difficulty determining where the trail crossed the creek. Continuing on, I came upon a straighter section and, scanning my flashlight into the distance, saw a pair of eyes about 1.5' off the ground 100' ahead of me. Stopping immediately with flashlight trained on the animal, it moved like a prowling cat, leading me to conclude that it was a Bobcat. So, with the Bobcat in front of me and no guarantee as to when I'd find site 64, I retreated down the trail a bit and had my tent pitched by 10:45.

I was up with the Sun Sunday morning, but since I was in a mountain valley this was around 7. After packing up the tent, I began northward and found site 64 forty minutes further up the trail. At site 64 I took the Springhouse Branch trail to get out of the Noland Creek valley and onto Forney Ridge. Climbing up Forney Ridge was a bit of work and, since I was on the west slope of the ridge, my right leg was doing 20% more work than my left... The tree foliage was pretty thick and I was never able to see my destination in the distance, though the decrease in stream size was a good measure of my progress. Two miles from the top I came through Andrew's Bald, a region of small trees and mountain grass which afforded me my first views of the valleys and ridges leading up to Clingman's. As I entered the bald I heard and saw some rustling in a berried tree and, as a family approached from the Clingman's parking area, saw two little black bears and presumably their mother jump out of the tree and head for the woods. I was 50 m away so they paid me no notice, but mentioned them to the family as I continued towards the top. Trail improvements and passersby increased as I neared the summit parking lot, and I was relieved to find a water fountain at the trailhead. After walking the last half mile from the parking lot to the summit observation area, I sat and had peanut butter and crackers, jerky, and a Dew for lunch. I'd made good time on the way up, finishing lunch at 1:30, and giving me time to look around and rest.

Just finished lunch on Clingman's dome. They're called the Great Smokey Mountains for a reason.

The Great Smokey Mountains are so named because of their all-encompassing fog, which prevented any long-distance (>200m) views. It was cool to watch the fog rolling over the peak and into the valleys; it apparently gets clearer during winter and many years ago one could see hundreds of miles. Near two o'clock I began to descend towards site 69, along the Forney Creek trail. Over the summer I was not able to run or bike nearly as much as I'd wanted and I felt it on the way down, the legs got real tired of negotiating wet rocks and switchbacks. The map mileage did not include these switchbacks and, despite being downhill, my 6 mile guesstimate to site 69 seemed closer to 8. Despite this, I enjoyed watching Forney Creek form, beginning as a trickle near the summit and growing to a raging mountain creek 3m across. I reached the campsite around 5:30 and spent some time pitching the tent and making a small fire. I greatly miss having regular campfires (as we do at home), but windfall surrounding my campsite was uniformly damp from the ever-present fog. I'm ashamed to say that it took a couple tries to get going, but it did last long enough for me to have supper by the fire and to burn my garbage. Around 7:30 I called it a night (as it was pretty close to dark in the valley) and turned in after hanging my pack. Situated just above the juncture of two streams, the roaring of water dominated all other forest noise and I was quickly asleep.

I slept well and was up around 8 Monday morning, though pretty sore from Sunday's climbing. With eight miles to the car (from 69 to the White Oak Branch Trail to the car at Noland Creek and Lakeview Dr.), I expected to leave the woods around one then drive to a hotel in Knoxville. The hike got interesting real quick, as I was faced with four unimproved (no bridge) creek crossings. This part of the Forney Creek Trail clearly used to be an access road and each crossing had a stone ramp leading to where a bridge would have been. The bridges had long been removed and I had to search for the best combination of rocks and fallen trees to make my way across; I hadn't done this sort of stream crossing since Philmont and enjoyed the challenge and occasional wet foot. Unfortunately my pictures of these crossings are fairly blurry; the terrain and width of Wausau's kayak course is good for comparison, though the volumetric flow rate was less.

Done, now let's get some lunch.

As I made my way down and across ridges, I was struck by the forest's variety: one valley would be deciduous, then hardwoods, then lots of underbrush and a variety of trees. Though my legs were pretty tired, I greatly enjoyed walking through the forest and absolutely perfect hiking weather (mid 60s & sun, filtered by the canopy). Site 71 was quite expansive and would have been a nice place for day trips; one tent was up but I didn't see anyone the entire way out. My hike ended with a walk through the quarter-mile long, two-lane Lakeview Drive tunnel. This tunnel has no destination; the road comes up from Bryson City, N.C. and ends at the Lakeview trailhead without any turn-offs.

I reached the car at 10:45 and, after getting a wrap-up shot with the trailhead, took the hiking boots off and drove into Bryson City for some lunch. It felt real good to sit in the car and at Pizza Hut; I was quite sore from all the hiking and the poor pack fit (my tnf backpack had waist and chest straps but was not long enough for a proper backpacking fit), but quite pleased with how well the trip went.

After a leisurely lunch I began the two hour drive to Knoxville, heading west along edge of the Great Smokey Mountains then north to Knoxville. This area is quite rugged and beautiful, I passed by Fontana Lake and stopped at Fontana Dam (part of the Tennessee Valley Authority's chain of hydroelectric dams) for a little bit. Continuing, I began to notice lots of motorcyclers on the two lane highway (SR-28) traversing the mountains. Despite it being a state highway, the road had an incredible number of turns and a posted speed limit between 20 and 40 mph. The motorcyclists were having a great time, shooting around me at twice to three times my speed, despite completely blind corners. Photographers were camped out in a couple of the turns, capturing the cyclist's form as they came around (they also took some pictures of me, but I can't see how exciting a champagne van going 20 on a mountain road is...they were likely practicing focusing on moving targets). It was not until I saw a Knoxville area guidebook that I learned that the 318 curves I drove through "...is America's number one motorcycle and sports car road."

I reached Knoxville around three, and after cleaning up went found supper on the University of Tennessee campus. Tuesday brought me back to Madison to begin my senior year. I had a great summer, thanks to everyone who helped make it possible.

Hyperspectral Spectroscopy

2009-08-14T00:00:00Z

I worked with Professor Scott Sanders and his group in the ERC throughout my undergrad. Our research looked to create sensors that quickly measure combustion systems. These tools allow engine designers to verify engine performance and critique their design metrics. These methods can also be applied to other dynamic systems; eg. rocket engines. Here's an overview:

Creation of a Fiber Optic Thermometer for Widespread Commercial Use in Internal Combustion Engines

Our research engines have windows in the cylinder walls to allow direct observation of combustion but many other engines do not have this convenience. LaVision, GmbH. has developed an optical spark plug to provide optical access to an engine while retaining normal spark plug function. With LaVision, we've developed a hyperspectral sensor to measure engine combustion in any spark-ignited engine (truck, car, jeep, lawnmower, etc.).

Hyperspectral Absorption Spectroscopy

High Speed Grating Spectrometer

Combustion can be a dirty process and as the engine runs soot can accumulate in the optical path. There are a few ways to overcome this, this design simply threw power at it (up to 0.5 W broadband). The sensor generated broadband light (1333-1373nm) centered on the 'R' H2O absorption branch and sent it through a sample. The concentration, temperature, and pressure of water in the sample caused some wavelengths to be absorbed, altering the broadband signal. This alteration is recorded by a 14kHz infrared linescan camera attached to a grating spectrometer. Comparing the altered signal to simulated water absorption measurments allows the concentration, temperature, and pressure of the water in the sample to be determined.

High Speed Grating Spectrometer

Visualizing Fiber Mode Movement in Multi-mode Fiber

Light traveling through multi-mode fiber interferes with itself, causing variations in intensity along and at the exit from the fiber. The specific pattern is a function of the wavelength and position of the fiber.

A common problem in our applications is 'catching' all of the light sent through a sample. Beamsteering (the bending of light due to inhomogeneous engine conditions) limits the amount of light that we can capture in the output fiber. Enlarging the diameter of the fiber is the simple solution but mode noise is encountered in diameters beyond 10μm. Mode noise results from the light interfering with itself and dominates other noise sources in the system, as shown in the animation (right) and picture. A single-mode fiber would lack the black and white variations in intensity, appearing to be uniformly illuminated. This investigation with former M.S. student Renatta Bartula tried to qualify the mode movement but was unable to remove the mode noise through post-processing.

Laser Building in Germany

2009-07-15T00:00:00Z

Intro

As I've said elsewhere, I'm heading to Germany to complete a sensor system I've been working on for the past year with Prof. Scott Sanders, supported by LaVision, GmbH. I've covered the project-specific details and have a couple documents here. I fly out of Chicago this Saturday (5/30) and will arrive in Frankfurt on Sunday morning. Monday (6/1) is a national holiday, Whit Monday, so I'll spend Sunday and part of Monday exploring Frankfurt before taking a train to Göttingen.

Once in Göttingen, I'll build the sensor and explain the analysis code. LaVision will then take the prototype and reduce it to a smaller form factor and optimize its function. I'll return to Frankfurt next Tuesday, 6/9, and will arrive back in Madison Wednesday afternoon.

I took a bunch of pictures and posted them to ~~Flickr~~; a few are included in the description below.

Trip to Germany

Saturday morning I took a Van Galder bus to Chicago and checked into my flight to Newark, NJ. There was no one else in my row on the Boeing 757 and I enjoyed flying around New York and flying over the Statue of Liberty and Central Park. I arrived around 4:00 and expected to have a two hour layover before heading to Germany via Air India. Since I was switching airlines I needed to check into Air India, whereupon my layover disappeared.

My flight from Newark to Frankfurt was only the first leg of an Air India flight to India. Since New York is a moderately large metropolis and India is a bit far away, flights are not commonly offered. As such, the check-in line was quite crowded with families traveling or returning to India. I spent ~45 mins in the check-in, after ensuring that I did not need to transfer my luggage from my Chicago flight.

Now, Newark is a bit of a weird airport in that each terminal has its own security check in; there is no secured passage between the terminals. As such, I rejoined my fellow passengers in the security line for another twenty minutes. Throughout check-in and security, I got the impression that Air India paid less for its berthing and terminal space than all of the other airlines. Things just didn't flow as smoothly as one would expect in a major airport. Perhaps that's how they offer a $360 roundtrip flight from Chicago to Frankfurt...

I had hoped to eat supper but only had time to grab chips, a muffin, a croissant, and a soda before boarding. Since I was departing in Frankfurt, while the plane refueled, my seat assignment was changed to an exit row, giving me more room for my right leg but less for my left (the door opening mechanism protrudes from the cabin wall). The flight itself was pretty uneventful and authentically Indian. I chose trout for my supper and had a croissant for breakfast.

We arrived at the Frankfurt am Main (on the Main river) Flughafen at 8 am Sunday (6/1), right on schedule. It was a simple matter to find my luggage and a train to the Hauptbanhof (train station). I got a little confused by their train station naming and nearly got off at the stadium in SW Frankfurt, but maps stored on my phone prevailed -- not enough buildings, tracks, or people.

Reaching the station, I was impressed. I knew that trains were widely used in Europe - and planned to use them for all transportation within Germany - but it was not until I saw the Hauptbanhof that I began to realize their national importance. I think that an institution's physical presence is a good indicator of its regional and national importance. If it is impressive then the people feel it is a good use of public funds; if it also functional, then it shows that the institution understands its purpose and the needs of its users. Trains are continuously arriving and departing, shops are open for any travel need, announcements are multi-lingual, and people are hustling about. Taken together, the importance of the rail system to Germany's infrastructure is clear.

McDonalds, Burger King, Pizza Hut, and Subway are everywhere, often within blocks of each other. Soda is pretty scarce, Coke is commonly available and Sprite and Pepsi are rare, but I found no others. Instead, Germans seem to prefer water and apple juice with gas (carbonated / seltzer).

Once the cool factor passed, I looked for some food. Thankfully (?), Germany is overrun with McDonalds, Burger Kings, Pizza Huts, and Subways. I was hungry for a burger (my supper plan for Newark) and went to Burger King at ~9:30. Since I don't know an ounce of German, I had one English/German travel guide & dictionary in my pocket and a different version in my backpack. I had saved a map of the route between the train station and hotel on my phone and tried to check in.

Frankfurt - 6/1

map

I reached my hotel at 10:30 but my room wasn't ready, since check-in started at 15:00. I checked my suitcase with the front desk and picked up some more complete city maps. With maps and dictionary in hand, I went for a walk around the city.

When I was setting up the trip I had noticed a park relatively near my hotel and headed that direction. Consulting my maps, I saw that the park actually extended around the entire city center in a three mile semi-circle, beginning and ending at the river. Camera in hand I began. It felt real good to stretch the legs and the new scenery kept me awake, since I had only slept for three hours during the flight and needed to absorb the seven hour differential.

The park was cool and fairly busy for a Sunday morning. Biking is quite common (similar to Madison, but the roads are built more with bikers in mind and for smaller cars) and most people were getting some exercise. There was quite a lot a vegetation and these big trees which I don't recall seeing in America. Anyway, see the Flickr tour for more. I kept walking in the park till I reached the river and walked over some downtown bridges and along the waterfront. I tried to see St. Bartholomeus' Cathedral but they were holding service when I stopped by. It was about 13:00 and I headed back to the hotel, having circumnavigated Frankfurt. My room was ready and once I sat down the rest of the afternoon and evening were lost.

Frankfurt -> Göttingen - 6/2

I slept well and was ready to go by ~9. I would be heading to Göttingen in the afternoon and wanted to explore Frankfurt a bit more. I walked through the heart of Frankfurt but most of the shops were closed I went through the Zeil, a cool downtown mall with an innovative roof (you may have heard of it...) and continued towards the river. Frankfrut was holding a festival, Turnfest, along the river and in a historic downtown square. While there I didn't know what was being celebrated/remembered, but apparently Turnfest is the world’s largest leisure sports and competition festival. Most of the activity took place in the city fairgrounds so what I saw was a small part of the festival, but cool nonetheless. I toured the Paulschirche (St. Paul's Church and German seat of government in the 1800s) and a historic building with lots of flags. There was a stage set up in a public square near the Paulschirche and a band was playing. It sounded cool and as I continued to walk through I saw what appeared to be church service leaflets. By this point it was about 10 and was turning into a beautiful, mid-70s day. It was all in German so I started back towards the hotel, needing to check out of the hotel by 11.

Picking up my suitcase I went to the station and purchased an InterCity Express (ICE) ticket to Göttingen. I had a simple salami, cheese, and hard-boiled egg sandwich and Coke while waiting for my train. Göttingen is about two hours north of Frankfurt by train, in the middle of the country. The train was pretty nice (leagues above Amtrak & moving twice as fast) but I must've missed something when purchasing the ticket, as I twice had to give up my seat to someone who reserved it. I'm still not sure how or why they reserved the seat but was a little annoyed to be bumped by someone getting on two stops after Frankfurt, especially since there were open seats...

Heading up to Göttingen, nice country

Anyway, the German country side is nice with lots of rolling hills, occasional villages, and a good mix of forest and farmland, quite similar to Wisconsin. From a distance the only difference is architectural, with Germans preferring closely-spaced, clay-tiled houses to American suburban and rural sprawl.

Probably a third of the size of Frankfurt, Göttingen also has a quaint, bustling city center contained within the old city wall. I searched the station for a good map but finding none, started toward my hotel relying on my cellphone map. I stayed the week in the Hotel Kasseler Hof, chosen by my hosts for its close proximity to the city center. The room was simple; the double bed was indeed two, single mattresses placed side by side with separate sheets and covers for each...the Ramada was the same way. The breakfast was much more wholesome (bread, sandwich meats, fruit, baked green bean bundles wrapped in bacon...) than most continental breakfasts in America. While I'm on food, Coke (and Pepsi) taste sweeter in Germany, possibly due to the predominance of carbonated water (with gas). I didn't get used to this and you can imagine my surprise when my apple juice was also carbonated.

When in Frankfurt I had some difficulties with my laptop's AC power adapter which I attributed to my international adapter. Reaching Göttingen, I verified my international adapter and realized that the power adapter had indeed been broken in flight. Hoping for a bad solder weld or a broken wire, I took the adapter apart (keychain leatherman...) but to no avail. Without my laptop/internet, I picked up a map from the front desk and took a walk about the city. Since it was still Whit Monday, few shops were open but the weather was nice and ice cream made a good supper.

LaVision - 6/3-5

I met the project manager, Thomas, at 9 on Tuesday morning and went to LaVision to begin work. In general, LaVision takes optical sensing systems and integrates them into simple and stable laboratory instruments. In the context of my project, LaVision desires to reduce the source/sensor complexity and integrate the components into simple-to-connect containers so that a non-spectroscopist can use the sensor. They have a nice balance between lab and office space, allowing the various groups to develop and work closely with new sensor systems.

Tuesday through Thursday I spent assembling the laser of parts we had preordered. Thankfully nothing was broken outright and of the two issues that appeared, one is largely solved and we have some ideas for the second. The main purpose for the trip was to bring the project team up to speed on the various component choices in the light source and for me to share some of the operation characteristics of the system. Friday we went over the data acquisition and temeprature-finding routines; this currently consists of four independent steps which will hopefully be rolled into one, real-time temperature finding routine. This was the most difficult part as I have comparatively little experience in molecular absorption and had not recently thought through the various operations in the temperature finding and simulation codes. Things came together and I believe I answered their immediate questions (they all speak English well). I'm sure that there will be more questions as development continues but I believe that the broad objectives are well understood.

LaVision also had an HP AC adapter so I had power and internet whilst at their facility, but the hotel internet proved intermittent. Skype was especially encumbered, it seemed as if the hotel had a bandwidth limit and any transatlantic video chat quickly hit that limit. This system failure was less than graceful as it prevented me from logging on during the next two days, eliminating any personal internet usage (it'd be a bit much to be posting to Flikr/facebook while at LaVision).

Internet issues aside, Thomas took me out for supper and a beer almost every night (and never to McDonalds/BK/Subway) and I got to learn a bit more about Göttingen and life in Germany.

Berlin - 6/7

Arriving in Berlin

I took Saturday easy but planned a trip to Berlin for Sunday. The Deutsche Bahn has a nice weekend program, an unlimited number of train rides for €37. Leaving Göttingen at 6:30, I took three regional trains up to Berlin. There's a lot of history in Germany and I enjoyed traveling through the former East Germany on my way to Berlin. Perhaps it was the route choice, but most of the small towns we went through seemed to have stopped growing. In many ways it is the same as what's happening in northern Wisconsin / the UP; where younger generations are leaving their elders for larger cities and modern convenience. Prosperity returned as we approached Berlin, arriving at the Hauptbanhof at 13:45.

map

After taking pictures of the terminal, I stopped at Pizza Hut for lunch. Finishing, I headed southeast, across the Spree River and past the Marie-Elisabeth-Lueders-Haus (part of the parliament complex). Pausing for a few pictures at the Reichstag, the traditional seat of parliament, I reached the Brandenburg gate and spent a little while reading the gate's history. There were music stages on both sides of the gate and lots of people around. Vendors lined the first half mile of the Straße des 17. Juni (commemorating "the uprising of the East Berliners on 17 June, 1953" - wikipedia) and I slowly made my way through the stands, heading west.

Nearing the Siegessäule...it wasn't exceptionally bright, so I'm not sure why this looks painful...

I walked through parts of the Tiergarten and happened upon a concert at the Carillon. At 60m, the Siegessäule (Berlin Victory Column) dominates the Tiergarten skyline, so I continued that direction. Since it was still mid afternoon, I bought a ticket and climbed up the column through an interior stairwell. About 5m up, an intericate mosaic covers the central column and encircled by large, red granite columns; see the photostream for close ups. Continuing upward, the circular stairway becomes more like a ladder, especially when passing other visitors. I reached the top and took in the surroundings, appreciating the extent of the Tiergarten and all the traffic/activity. It was about 16:00, so I finished looking around and descended the column.

I was now southwest of the train station, so I walked along the Spree and past the Bellevue Palace. I couldn't tour the building or see any interior pictures since it is the President's residence, but both the exterior and extent of the building make it worthy of 'palace.' Continuing along the Spree, I passed the House of World Cultures and the Chancellery. As is evident from the pictures, both the Chancellery and Parliament are impressive buildings; they face each other across a broad square to the north of the Tiergarten.

My train departed at 17:10 so I grabbed a danish pastry and a soda for supper. I had forgotten my book at the hotel and bought a German newspaper that recapped May news stories in English. This was written from the German perspective and included a number of opinion pieces, I enjoyed reading the authors' take on events in Germany and America, as well as the special on Indian/Pakistani relations.

My return trip stopped in Madeburg, Braunschweig and Kreiensen, a west-then-south route. I had an hour in Barunschweig and stopped at a Subway for some cookies (~20:00) and went on a short walk near the station. The city also had a large downtown park and, had it been earlier in the day, I would have walked through. Returning to the station I found that my train to Kreiensen was delayed 15 minutes, adding a little anxiety to the trip since I originally had a 20 minute layover. After hurrying to the Kreiensen-Göttingen gate, I found that that train was also delayed an indeterminate amount of time. About 30 minutes later the train came and I arrived in Göttingen at 00:30 Monday morning. All in all, it was a pretty condensed walk around Berlin, but an enjoyable use of my Sunday.

LaVision - 6/8-9

After too little sleep and some surprise at my weekend trip (on the part of my hosts at LaVision), we prepared a simple flame test for the sensor. We were unable to independently verify the flame's temperature, but I was able to show how the acquisition and analysis pieces came together and get some preliminary temperatures by the end of Monday. I spent Tuesday morning summarizing the sensor operation, step-by-step and concluded the workday with a final demonstration.

To complete my German experience, Thomas took me to the Paulaner for some Bavarian food Monday night. My main dish was three meats: Leberkäse (liver-cheese that contained neither...sort of like ground ham), Weißwurst (a white sausage), and some other kind of sausage. In with these were some very good potatoes, lots of Sauerkraut, and Weißbier (light, almost sweet) to wash it down. It was a very good, filling, and greasy meal.

An aside: I gave you this amount of detail since many of you know that I have simpler tastes than most. Suffice it to say, I did not starve while in Germany and ate very similar meals to what I do in the states (calling it American would be improper, since the only truly American dish is a burger). If anything, the places that I visited had less food diversity, lacking Mexican and Chinese restaurants.

I caught a 17:20 ICE train and was in Frankfurt by 19:40, whereupon I checked back into the Ramada. It was still a bit early so I headed out towards downtown for some supper and a store or two. I eventually settled on ice cream (again, I'm not sure why it tasted so good for supper...) but found that every store closed at 20:00. Exactly. It was still light out and a good amount of people were walking around, but by 20:05 most lights were out and employees headed home.

Return Flight - 6/10

My flight departed Frankfurt at 8:05, so I was up at 5:00 to catch a 6:00 train to the airport. Reaching the Hauptbanhof, I prevailed against the ticket machine and searched for my train. My first choice train was departing gate 103 so I searched the station but only found gates 1-25. After 103 supposedly departed, I checked the route tables and realized that #22 would take me to the airport, departing in 5 minutes. I boarded the train and was a bit discomforted by my fellow passengers' lack of suitcases; as the train left the station the train began turning northwest and I watched the southwest track I though I was on recede from view... Getting off at the first stop in northwest Frankfurt, I searched for another train back to the Hauptbanhof. Upon returning, our train went below ground and I emerged from gate 103, one of the subterranean gates that I saw no indication of in the main terminal. Studying the route information for the third time, I realized that my #22 train to the airport only ran on Sundays and, enlightened, found a train that would take me to the airport. This train departed at 6:38 for arrival at the airport by 6:52. So, where I had intended to have two hours for check in I now had an hour.

Thankfully, most passengers were already on the Air India flight from Frankfurt to Newark (having originated in India) and the check-in and security lines were relatively short. I reached the plane ten minutes before takeoff but was unable to get any snacks or fill my water bottle (empty for security). It was cloudy beneath us for the entire trip back, making it very bright outside the plane which helped to keep me awake. We arrived in Newark right on time but my two hour layover was consumed retrieving my suitcase and checking into my American Airlines flight to Chicago. As before, I had 20 minutes before boarding, during which I found a cream cheese danish and finally filled my water bottle. I intended to take the VanGalder bus back to Madison but was a little worried about the timing; the flight was scheduled to arrive at 13:50 and the bus was departing at 14:30. If the baggage claim was quick it'd work out, if it was slow or we were otherwise delayed in the air I'd have to wait for the 15:30 bus and not arrive in Madison till 19:00. Thankfully (and I was) things worked out and I made the early bus to Madison.

Back in Madison, I met my mom for supper at the Nitty before returning to my apartment to pack for Florida. So ends my trip to Germany. To summarize, I read three books, two magazines, and a newspaper, used five German words, built a laser, took my AC adapter apart, ate and drank, took lots of pictures, walked over a mile in four German cities, rode trains for 15 hours, did some LabVIEW coding, saw historical places, and had a great time. I got quite a lot out of this trip and now better understand and appreciate commercial research and development. Moreover, I found that I could go to a new country and get around reasonably well. Knowing German would have made the trip much more enjoyable and I'd have been able to avert a few travel hiccups, but I thoroughly enjoyed this experience.

Thanks to my host LaVision, especially Thomas Berg and Olaf Thiele.

SplitKey

2009-04-14T00:00:00Z

An ergonomic laptop keyboard that does not constrain portable computer form or design.

Laptop computers combine power with mobility and have recently usurped global desktop shipments. Users are computing for longer periods in a variety of locations yet laptop manufacturers often fail to consider the user's comfort and health in the computer's design. Specifically, one cannot enjoy an ergonomic computing experience on their laptop without sacrificing the computer's portability.

Ergonomic keyboards are commonly available (if seldom used) but are often twice or three times the size of the laptop computer. Having taken apart laptops and keyboards, I realized that a simple improvement could be made to a laptop's keyboard to significantly enhance user comfort without decreasing computer performance or mobility. I developed a removable laptop keyboard that can be further separated between those keys normally operated by the right and left hands. The laptop remains fully functional when the keyboard is attached and communication is accomplished by either wired or wireless means. Such an improvement allows for an increase in user comfort and potential aversion of the onset of musculoskeletal diseases.

I developed Split Key over fall 2007 and entered in the 2009 Innovation Days, winning the Sorenson design notebook competition and taking 3rd in the Tong prototype prize. I enjoyed considering, if briefly, the full scope of the idea — ergonomic research, laptop and keyboard patents, market considerations, and design optimizations. Please see my presentation or disclosure for more information:

Split Key presentation

Slides Disclosure [.pdf] — Idea description, ergonomic research, and market potential.

I would appreciate any comments and hope to detail the prototype creation on Instructables...as time permits.

Building the proof-of-concept

The wireless concept

Pre-modification, chosen for the absence of anything to the sides of the keyboard

Removing the keyboard

Can start to see whether the keyboard is constructed as-expected

The keyboard cavity

Removing the plastic backing/damper

Separating the back tray

Tray, membrane switches, and keys

Overlaid

Removing the top bezel

Planning out the wire routing

The separation line

Simple tools, used carefully

Does the halves still go together?

Yup

Now for the traces

Top and bottom traces from the left and right halves, using conductive epoxy to reconnect the cut traces

Now need to connect the wires to a flat flex cable to plug into the original keyboard connector

Forming two thin aluminum back plates to help manage the wires

Unorthodox bonding of keyboard half and back plate

Test fit

Connect all the wires

Done

ZeroG Team

2007-05-24T00:00:00Z

The University of Wisconsin ZeroGravity Team develops, conducts, and analyzes microgravity experiments as participants in NASA's Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program. I flew with the experiment my freshman and sophomore years and co-lead the Linear Spray Cooling experiment with Lisa McGill. My involvement has been very rewarding and I have enjoyed considering and hopefully minimizing the effect of gravity on our experiments.

Participating in NASA's Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program, I joined students from across the nation in designing experiments to be performed in a microgravity environment. Over three years, we submitted three research proposals, and NASA selected two of these experiments for investigation aboard the DC-9B Weightless Wonder. This plane achieves microgravity (zero-g) by flying a parabolic path, during which the plane, occupants, and experiments experience zero gravity for 30 seconds. My flights capped 11 consecutive years of UW experiments in this program; see below for descriptions.

Experiment Summaries:

2006-7: Measuring Capillary Forces in Microgravity

Our team designed an experiment to research capillary action in microgravity. Capillary action is the phenomena that allows plants to transport liquid from their roots up to the highest branches. In contrast to terrestrial applications, microgravity fluid systems cannot rely on gravity to collect fluids; instead the absence of gravity often 'allows' fluids to get trapped in the corners of tanks far from the tank exit. In these cases, the fluid cannot be drawn out of the tank, and though unspent, is useless. To better understand this situation, this experiment measured the flow velocities of two liquids as they flowed up five differently-angled surfaces (see video, below). These velocities are a function of the fluid properties and the surface geometry; interpreting our results will guide fluid system design to avoid trapped-fluid scenarios. This research can also be applied to transporting fluids in space without pumping.

Presentation

2007 - Capillary Action - John & Ben

2007-8: Spray Cooling in Microgravity

As computer processors, power amplifiers, laser diodes, and similar devices increase in performance they are also becoming smaller. Since these devices are not 100% efficient some of the input energy is lost as heat which is increasingly concentrated due to shrinking size. Removing this thermal energy is essential to the continued operation of these devices but current methods are fundamentally limited in their heat transfer capability. Specifically, forced air convection cooling quickly requires absurd velocities to cool high heat flux devices and liquid cooling breaks down when vaporized liquid prevents cool liquid from contacting the hot surface. Linear spray cooling is a two-phase technique that shoots coolant droplets at the heated surface and uses their inertia to prevent the formation of a vapor bubble. Working with Professor Tim Shedd we showed that coolant flow rate is the primary determinant of a linear spray cooling system's performance and that the influence of gravity is minor (2.6% at the largest). While further work is needed, there does not appear to be any fundamental reason that would prevent linear spray cooling from being used in satellites, on the International Space Station, and in variable-gravity environments (fly-by-wire aircraft for instance).

This research was presented at the 2009 Space, Propulsion, and Energy Sciences International Forum in Huntsville, AL.

Spray Cooling overview

SPESIF Presentation

SPESIF Proceedings Paper

2008-9: Continued Investigation of Linear Spray Cooling

Our previous spray cooling experiment answered some questions but motivate a number of others. In my Junior year we proposed a new array design and a more thorough characterization of spray cooling in microgravity. The new array design was precisely machined from a single piece of aluminum, as opposed to the array of tubes used in previous linear spray arrays. Unfortunately, NASA's support was reduced by 2/3rds and we were not selected to fly this experiment.

The new array concept:

The egg-carton like array is formed by drilling an offset array of blind holes, with the spray jets formed by drilling a small hole through the hole sidewalls.

And result:

The new machined array with 200 250μm spray nozzles angled at 45 degrees.

Previous Years:

As mentioned, UW has been active in this program for a number of years; here are some of the materials I've collected which document our research.

Ben's Website

After Globalism

PreReview

Gitting Long In The Tooth

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A Time to Build Anew

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