The Seventh Colour

Steampunk Cannot Die

atleastintheory — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 06:42:53 +0000

A lot of the sci-fi I’ve been reading recently has been of the steampunk variety. There’s a certain something about them that is incredibly charming, and in fact completely different from the aesthetic we’ve come to expect of all things technological, these days.

First, I want to take a moment to reflect on the gorgeousness of this collection of short stories:

The stories themselves, by the way, are very good — not mind-blowingly so, but worth the price of the book.

I’m aware that there are various themes that steampunk usually strives to encompass, but I have to admit I’m woefully unaware of what those are, and how they work. I’m hoping my next trip to the library will yield some reading on this.

In the meantime, though, I’ve been thinking about why they appeal to me personally. And I think part of it has to do with the contrast I mentioned above, what I’ll call the iPod culture vs. steampunk.

It’s been pointed out before that Apple has exhausted every permutation of the word “magical” in the way it refers to its products. I’m an admirer of Apple’s obsessive attention to user-oriented design, but I find it disturbing that they’d actually associate a technological product with the arcane and impossible.

Apple doesn’t create its products by waving magic wands forged in a dragon’s lair or something — it recruits people who, despite being geniuses, have to follow the same rules of programming and physics that the rest of the world does. So to suggest that their products exist in some metaphysical realm which no one else can even dream of… that’s is a little absurd.

What’s worse is the kind of impression that gives a consumer. Real effort and compromise went into that product — it didn’t just appear out of thin air. I’d say the whole “magical” concept completely distances the user from the reality of what’s working inside it.

But then again, that’s also reflective of my philosophy in general. I disagree with the notion that breaking anything down into its scientific components reduces its potential to thrill and inspire (for a more thorough exposition on the subject, I recommend this link).

This is where steampunk comes in.

The aesthetic of the movement — setting aside its political, social or historical implications — is vastly different. It’s not simply that the analog replaces the digital, or that software is substituted by mechanical components. It’s that the vastness, the scale and the degree of machine-human interaction make the final product so much more visible to the consumer.

Software doesn’t seem to exist in the steampunk world; everything must be made mechanical and microprocessors are clearly out of the picture. That accounts for the huge scale of the endeavor, which means that every rotation and click of the final product can actually be seen. As impressive as the iPod is, you simply can’t observe the logic gates that drive the operations. For anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with the technology involved, the finished product is a work of human ingenuity. For anyone else, it would be a black box of, well, magic.

And then there’s the very design of all things steampunk. It’s almost instinctive to imagine delicate gear mechanisms and engraved brass when steampunk enters the picture (a Doctor Who episode I was rewatching recently did this quite beautifully here and here). It’s difficult to find two more disparate styles — today’s impetus to streamline everything, and steampunk’s baroque tendencies. I suppose that’s a product of the times as well, but I take it as a philosophy too — a point of view that acknowledges and celebrates complexity.

And on that note, I leave you with several lovely examples of objects that, if not strictly steampunk, are in the general neighborhood of it.

A Lego robot arm with several degrees of freedom; can grasp objects and pour a glass of water.

Credit: sumthinelse5790

A brilliant rendition of House of the Rising Sun, by several decommissioned bits of gadgetry:

Credit: bd594

No discussion of steampunk, I feel, would be complete without the demo of the steampunk HP laptop:

Credit: TheDatamancer

Enjoy!

Temporal Cloaking

atleastintheory — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 08:12:00 +0000

The Background

This experiment is a little too fantastic for me not to keep coming back to it. I’m referring to the experiment conducted by Cornell physicists, who played around with a couple of fundamental qualities of light to make something that I’m inclined to call magic.

That sentence doesn’t really do justice to the ingenuity of the experiment, so here’s a link to a lovely animation by the folks at SciAm.

Obviously light travels, in a vacuum, at the same blistering speed of about 300,000,000 m/s, but in specific media, blue light for instance travels faster than red light. In other media, the effect is reversed. And that’s the — if not simple, then fairly well-known — law of light that the researchers have used to create this experiment.

The Limitations

This doesn’t, of course, mean that we’re going to see secret underground societies of the future secretly traveling by temporal cloaking or anything. The effect was created for all of 50 picoseconds. That’s an impossibly small amount of time — each picosecond is a trillionth of a second, a zero followed by a decimal point and 11 friends, before the 1. The internet seems to agree that a blink lasts about 300 to 400 milliseconds. The experiment would have to create 6 billion such precisely timed blips in time for someone to vanish for the blink of an eye.

There’s also the problem of the technology not exactly being, well, cloak-like. The experiment involves lasers and a lot of optical fibre, according to the Cornell Chronicle’s story, and while that’s relatively low tech, it’s not about to be, say, the Dark Knight’s latest gadget.

The Possibilities

The story linked above, to Cornell’s site, actually posits a couple of use cases for the technology that I didn’t see many papers mentioning. Author Steele talks about inserting emergency signals and multitasking operations on a photonic computer, which are very exciting in and of themselves.

What’s interesting is that we don’t have to look too far into the future to see a potential for science fiction here. Most computers or laptops these days perform at close to 3 GHz, which means that every calculation takes 333 picoseconds. If the research can ratchet up the temporal blip to something close to that number, you could lose one cycle of calculation in a run-of-the-mill computer; in a supercomputer, more could be lost.

I can imagine something pretty destructive happening if this technology went underground. It may not take much to disrupt the sending of one packet of data; that could scramble sensitive communications.

It’s still a little further into the future, but quite fun to think of.

Items of Note

atleastintheory — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 06:46:18 +0000

So it’s a been while, and the year has ended before I’ve had time to do anything. I feel as though I should be posting about my travails with learning Perl (and what feels like half the internet, at work) but really with the way the year ended, the science news surpassed my imaginative abilities. Here are some of my favorite stories from the tail end of 2011:

The Large Hadron Collider may have found the Higgs:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/audio/2011/dec/12/science-weekly-podcast-higgs-boson?newsfeed=true

Downloading knowledge directly into your brain:

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-12/scientists-achieve-matrix-style-subliminal-teaching

Quantum entanglement in macroscopic bodies:

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/48019

On a related note, beam me up, Scotty!

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-entangle/#2

A molybdenite integrated circuit, serious contender to graphene and maybe more achievable than qubits:

http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/06/first-molybdenite-ic-delivers-silicon-crushing-chip-shrinking/?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pulsenews

Invisibility — in TIME:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2082266/First-demonstration-time-cloaking-Scientists-create-device-hide-events.html

I’d be the first to admit that most of this science is going over my head, but the possibilities are irresistible. I’d like to talk about these more, but I’d have to do a good deal more research before getting a handle on these.

What I’d really like to do is explore the possibilities of groundbreaking research like this — by which I mean full-on sci-fi scenarios. It’s one thing to marvel at these wonders, but I think it takes a bit more disciplined creativity to come up with possible implications.

Islamic Science Rediscovered

atleastintheory — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 07:53:24 +0000

About five hundred years before Western natural philosophers — scientists, in modern day parlance — accurately measured the circumference of the earth, Abu Rayhan al-Biruni calculated it to an accuracy of 1% ¹. No one in the West had yet heard of this (the Internet not yet having been invented) and therefore, when European scientists measured this value themselves, they gained initial credit, even though they had essentially reinvented the wheel.

This pattern of Western achievement overshadowing work that had been accomplished in the Middle East centuries earlier has continued far into the modern age. When we speak of the scientific revolution, we almost always associate it with the European era that began in the 17th century. The goal of the recent Islamic Science Rediscovered exhibit in The Tech Museum of San Jose was to explore the true roots of the scientific revolution.

Personally, it was the first time I’d been to The Tech (although that’s a misnomer — the exhibit is housed in a side building) and I enjoyed myself thoroughly. The exhibit was extremely well-organized and clarified, with posters, boards, hands-on replicas and videos. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t quite enough; even while I lingered at some exhibits, examined every single station and took copious notes, I spent only an hour and a half inside. Admittedly, that could’ve just been my enthusiasm. I wished there were notes or indications of further resources, however. I’m curious now to find out what happened to prevent the West from rediscovering the work of these scholars — what the social, political and historical circumstance of those times were.

Better resources than this blog exist to chronicle the lives and discoveries of these Arabic scientists and pioneers, but the exhibition has given me an excellent location from which to begin looking up more of their work. What I have here are hastily taken notes that I’m expanding upon a little.

This period between the 9th and 13th centuries yielded quite a few important innovations. The first windmills turning millstones, the first universal astrolabes, the first combination lock and some of the precursors to today’s surgical instruments were all invented in this golden age. Crucially, some of the first translations of Greek philosophical works began in 813; without these translations, Europe would have emerged from the Dark Ages far later.

There were several important figures who contributed to Islamic science in this period, and I have enough notes to trace an outline of each of their contributions. In other cases, since my notes are old and a bit disarranged now, I have only the ways in which certain fields progressed without any particular names attached to them.

Abu Rayhan al-Biruni

al-Biruni was one of the first scientists mentioned in the exhibit, and he caught my eye immediately — it felt as though I was reading about the life and times of a Middle Eastern counterpart of Leonardo da Vinci. Perhaps the analogy is a little generous, but al-Biruni certainly made some large contributions to the body of Middle Eastern science in his times. He worked in the fields of mathematics (algebra and geometry amongst others), physics (hydrostatics), astronomy (the astrolabe, for instance), religion (texts on Islam), sociology (a history of the culture and practices in India), and language (he translated several works from Sanksrit to Arabic). Most of this information was taken from here, but I hope to find out more about him in the future.

Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi

Medical instruments of the Golden Age of Islamic science are comparable to modern instruments; one excellent exhibit had replicas of the instruments invented during the period, comparing them side by side with today’s implements. The similarities are startling. I wish I could’ve posted pictures, but I don’t think photography was allowed.

Even more impressive, to me, was the fact that this time period yielded the one of the first uses of catgut as a suture material (I believe Galen used it in the first century); some surgical tools like forceps, which are still used today; and the first use of anesthetic in surgery. The man responsible for much of this was al-Zahrawi, who was known as the foremost physician of the world in the medieval era, as well as the father of modern surgery ². I find it particularly interesting that he also paid attention to pregnancies — there is some record of the first cesarean being conducted in this time period, although I haven’t yet looked into the sources for that.

Something else that fascinated me was the advent of the first medicine complex, a place for both the sick and the elderly. Apparently, the Arab world pioneered some of the world’s most comprehensive, egalitarian hospitals, which treated the rich and poor, the Muslim and the non-Muslim alike. It isn’t just impressive — it’s inspirational.

al-Khwarizimi

There have, of course, been more than a handful of Arabic scholars who worked in the field of mathematics, but it’s pertinent to note that the world “algorithmic” seems to have evolved from the — well, first or last, I’ve not much idea how the naming system operates — of Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizimi. He wrote the first book on algorithmic theory, as well as the Indo-Islamic numeric system. He was the first to use the “0″, now indispensable to both mathematics and the digital world, in his calculations.

Islamic mathematics appears to have been an amalgamation of Greek principles and the Indian mathematical system at the time. As a side note, I think it would be fascinating to note how the academic exchanges between Islamic and Hindu/Indian scholars at the time were constructed. How would they have access to their work? How did invasions, political circumstances and vast differences in philosophy/religion influence those interactions?

al-Jazari

Excellent engineering was another hallmark of the Islamic Golden Age of scientific achievement. For instance, one of the interactive exhibits (really well organized) included a parallel system of water scoops is operated efficiently by a single turning wheel. It might not seem flashy, particularly, but it was precisely the kind of system that would’ve been necessary for communities living near large bodies of water.

Flashy, however, was still in vogue. Some of the most aesthetically appealing feats of engineering was one built by Abu al-Iz Ibn Ismail ibn al-Razaz al-Jazari, an Islamic scholar and inventor of no mean ability. His main contributions were some fundamental nuts and bolts of engineering, like the cam shaft, the crankshaft and the segmental gear. These were all either invented by him or put to wider use. It doesn’t seem like much now, not in the days of the Large Hadron Collider, but they were essential building blocks for basic utilities in the same way that algebra is a basic building block for complicated statistical analysis.

But I digress: take a look at one of al-Jazari’s most famous inventions:

All in all, Islamic Science Rediscovered was well worth the $21 ticket. I was afraid that the exhibit would be politicized, and apparently the opening did attract the wrong kind of attention from misguided people, but the emphasis was more on rediscovering the importance of science in that golden period, rather than overtly trying to change cultural prejudices. The exhibition opened within a few days of 9/11, and although that might sound like an uncomfortable time to be challenging perceptions, I think that’s exactly what the community needs. Like it or not, the Islamic world has come under attack for being too anti-West, too conservative, too illogical.

But the truth of the matter is that, like any other great civilization of pre-modern times that deserves the name, the Islamic world interacted scientifically, logically, and openly with other societies. And I refuse to believe that the tradition of science has ended in this community simply because some fanatics decided to distort their entire body of religious knowledge. Abdus Salam and Ahmed Zewail were both Islamic scholars who won the Nobel in physics and chemistry respectively.

I don’t know what the demographics of the exhibit were like, but I admit the museum-goers I saw were mostly those of South Asian origin. I’d like to know how well the exhibit actually achieved its aim of spreading the knowledge of this lost scientific revolution, and what the people attending thought of it all.

If it inspires anyone at all to reevaluate their attitudes towards Islam or the Middle East, I’ll count that as a victory. Then again, what’s the appropriate sphere of influence between science and religion, and should there be one? But that’s a discussion for another day — and in fact is the subject of a panel discussion I’m hoping to attend at The Tech in a couple weeks. Stay tuned.

Footnotes:
1. Biography of Al-Biruni: http://www.gap-system.org/~history/Biographies/Al-Biruni.html

2. ANZ Journal of Surgery: http://bit.ly/opmKyO

Talk Cloudy to Me! — Some Notes

atleastintheory — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 05:36:13 +0000

Whatever I know about cloud computing comes from Wikipedia and the How Stuff Works page, which is actually a rather good overview. The tone of these articles, though, suggests a kind of optimism rarely seen since the advent of the microprocessor, and this Meetup gave the attendees a good, long look at the difficulties involved with putting data online.

I took hasty notes in my iPad (which might have been invented for tasks like these), so here are the takeaways for each talk I attended. Anything that sounds nonsensical is most likely my own misunderstanding creeping in; mistakes are mine, not the speakers’.

Which Cloud? by Nitin Borwanker

This was an interesting introduction to the Cloud that I wish I’d been able to see in full. I wasn’t planning on catching it, but the light rail was remarkably efficient and dropped me off at the doorstep of PayPal.

The cloud might seem like a technical, IT-driven solution, but it’s become increasingly important for straight-up science. Things like studying cell lines becomes more doable if it’s outsourced to the cloud (that link is to an abstract doc I found online that briefly discusses this; I don’t know anything about its origins, it’s just an example). By the way, one beautiful proof that crowdsourcing is useful is this news about 3D protein folding.
There are basically three criteria for figuring out which cloud solution’s good for you — size, speed and ease of adoption. Borwanker thinks (if I remember right) that ease of adoption is an oft-ignored factor that really should be influencing the decision as well.
Mongo DB actually scores very well in all three factors. Should’ve checked it out when I had the chance, alas, but that’s what open source forums are for!
The Stockholm syndrome of cloud is catching up with us. When it works, we love it (Facebook!); when it breaks, we hate it (Facebook!) but we essentially end up needing it and wanting it.
Basically, take the path of least compromise towards your cloud solution. It’s not going to work out of the box; you’re going to have to modify something in your system or adapt your perfect solution to your needs. It’s going to be a compromise between what the system offers and what you need.

History of Cloud by James Watters

Watters seemed to concentrate on examining the myths of cloud computing. His angle is that it was “all marketing”. So the three myths he examines are:

“Easy Provisioning”: this, says Watters, is a big win. Cloud lives up to the hype of making life easier once the system is up and running.
“Commodity pricing”: As far as I could tell, Watters was saying that although DRAM costs were falling, the ones who were really benefiting were the much larger companies, not necessarily the SMEs. That means that the per hour cost of a startup is going to be the same now as it was maybe three years ago, but that costs for large companies like Google would be dropping steadily. I’ve written “Is google big enough to do good costs?” which makes little sense now, but I wonder if he was referring to Goog cutting costs for people using its cloud services. Actually, for that matter, what about Amazon?
On the other hand, Google Apps Engine seems to have taken their costs up to ten times the original price, because individual instances of the apps were proliferating; RAM footprint goes up.
“Scale is more important than software”: Not true, says Watters. For instance, memory compression software is some of the most interesting software around, and that sort of thing still needs to be written.

Speaking about the Urban Airship startup, which was begun to solely handle notification systems, Watters pointed out that it’s all about scale. When it began, UA was doing about 1 million notifications; now the number’s closer to 5 billion.
So scaling is the most powerful thing about cloud — and at the same time, hardware still matters.
He also began to touch on code development on the cloud, saying that we’d rather not have testing done on multiple VMs and that we should just be able to push code to an automated system. I wonder if this is how CI (continuous integration) comes into the picture.

Cloud Computing Evolution at eBay: JC Martin

First, some cool stats: eBay’s internal cloud is about 6000 app servers; the company loses about $2000 every second that the site is down; and the company has about 90 million users, roughly the entire population of the Philippines.
Obviously cloud solutions are of interest. There are so many sites and countries but even when eBay is international, the site has to provide the same agility and security to each and every instance of the site.
Cloud was developed internally to improve the agility and productivity of eBay’s developers.
Martin went on to explain that, on top of that, traffic to eBay is spiky; servers are only really pushed to capacity half the time. When they are, though, why not burst to the cloud? eBay won’t want to rent on the cloud all the time, but it could be useful to have the extra capacity around, especially during emergencies and holidays.
So eBay decided to build a hybrid model of private-public cloud. Right now, they would focus on the public cloud; and then in the future migrate to a public cloud.
They are also looking at open source solutions that will let them build their own solutions. At the moment, there is a public IP layer that makes private data visible to the public space. In the future, they want to extend the internal cloud to the external IP space. Some “DNS magic” has to happen to make sure the spaces work, said Martin.
One of the troublesome aspects of being more physical, said Martin, was that coupling between applications was high, and that latency between applications cannot be guaranteed. Bids and buys need to be updated immediately, but unknown latencies could be problematic for those. And to get low (and guaranteed) latency, eBay needs to be thinking about easily scaled databases, like MongoDB.
Then Martin explained that the old silo’ed app servers were highly inefficient; each server had to be labeled manually and then changed if necessary, and deployment after receiving and configuring servers would be several weeks. On the other hand, using rack-and-roll servers, the deployment time dropped from weeks to 45 minutes. Those were some seriously impressive timelines on his slides, if I was understanding him correctly.
Martin also mentioned that though open source clouds were widely available for some applications, they weren’t yet available for many purposes. As the apps became available through the infrastructure layers — from hardware to application level — eBay would be thinking about replacing their own internal systems with open source ones.

Such stuff as dreams are made of: Patrick Chanezon

I enjoyed this talk for reasons other than Chanezon’s frankly rather attractive accent — he spoke about cloud for developers, for the sorts of practices and philosophies we should be carrying over now into the future if we want cloud to really work for us (I like how I’m including myself in the “developer” category).
He thinks that now, after mobile and social apps have taken to the cloud, that it’s going to finally become mainstream. Chanezon also thinks the singularity is “bullshit” — that not everything will be automated. Software, he says, is still a craft. And cloud can play a role in increasing productivity.
In the 60s, computers were mainframes. In the 80s, they were client-side, like Macs and Windows. In the 90s came web-coding, and now the web is like the mainframe all over again.
Now, with HTML5 and mobile apps, we can push code to the cloud and it should be able to scale and distribute it for us — code once, deploy millions of times.
Chanezon thinks we’re at the peak of the cloud app — the speeches, the marketing, everything. “Cloudy with a real chance of innovation”, he explained.
Some observations he made revolved around the fact that we are moving from vertical scalability to horizontal scalability, with databases managed by a single provider. Storage capacity, he says, is increasing faster than Moore’s Law.
“Cloud is a productixation of the grwing virtualization at private companies” — which sounds impressive, but I believe he’s just restating the nature and importance of cloud here.
Chanezon wants the Internet to be viewed as a platform — “platform as a service”, but something that could be a architect’s dream and a developer’s nightmare.
He called for a rewrite of the ACID principle: now, it should be “Associative, Commutative, Idempotent, and Distributed”.
Here, Chanezon breezed through the “Starbucks doesn’t use two phase commit” example which I’m afraid I didn’t fully understand. His point I think was that baristas don’t begin guessing at your coffee, make it, charge you for a coffee, you reject it, and then they make it again. I’m not quite sure how the analogy itself plays out, though.
Now for some very nice “cultural” changes that he introduced, which I found particularly relevant. Instead of having a huge monolithic code base that ships changes on a schedule, to everyone, Chanezon pointed out that code testing now is becoming far more adaptable and agile. Facebook and Google, for instance, roll out code as soon as they think it’s ready for some beta testing, getting their feedback from their users and taking massive risks sometimes (Wave, anyone? Buzz?)
But then again, you learn from failure. Chanezon was formerly of Google, and quoted the “fail often, fail quickly and learn” principle. This gives you time to invent and learn along the way instead of trying to be perfect from the get-go and having no energy to be flexible.
The API culture is another big deal — when Twitter started out, they built a huge monolithic internal backend which they later farmed out to developers as their API. Now, Chanezon says, it pays to think of an API first and a UI later.
What’s the deal with platforms? Chanezon sees them as a service — developers don’t want to install a billion VMs and build on those; they want to be able to test and deploy quickly on the cloud, which will automagically help them with it.
Interestingly, Chanezon thinks that another aspect of the culture change will be the craftsmanship model — that we’re going to move from learning from large organizations to small bloggers or certain specific experts. This is interesting, because “craftsmanship” gives me the impression of small, inefficiently scaled things which reduces availability for people. But then again maybe I’ve been brainwashed by capitalism or whatever; to think about it, open source is a bit like the organic food movement all over again, isn’t it? Freeing up code for the masses!
One of the biggest takeaways involves some profanity (WARNING): “be your own bitch”, says Chanezon. “Don’t depend on third party platforms, examine the business mode and strategy of the provider — where are they headed? Will they eat you up or buy you out like Twitter, for instance? Look at terms and conditions. Can you monetize? Be safe from your providers.”
And finally, some personal advice: forget expertise in a single language. Be agile; UI design is extremely important, and I can see exactly how that would be. Software is becoming mainstream — or rather, whatever’s mainstream is finding its way into software. It’s not the military network anymore, it’s the internet for the average citizen. Learn Javascript, says Chanezon, and become used to the Babel of languages.

What Science Gives Us

atleastintheory — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 07:18:05 +0000

Recently, I have been on a real Doctor Who kick. For the sadly uninitiated, it’s a sci-fi British TV show starring a time-traveling alien and his various human companions. The most recent episode, and possibly my favourite, was The Impossible Planet; in it, a crew of humans are attracted to a planet revolving in a geosynchronous orbit around a black hole. This is quite literally impossible, a fact the Doctor is quick to point out, unless there’s some power source fueling the orbit itself. It turns out later that the power source is really some sort of huge beast, claiming to be the Devil — the original Satan himself. There’s a happy ending, but that’s not what caught me — what really struck me was the sheer curiosity in the entire enterprise. The curiosity that led humans to set up base in an impossible planet, the curiosity that fueled them to keep drilling below to find the power source, to discover the Devil.

This is what science gives us: it gives us hope, the future, and a target for curiosity. It’s curiosity itself, whole, defined, except a sort of … processed curiosity. The feeling of discovery, distilled into theories and laws and hypotheses and experimentation.

When married to ethics, it is meant for development; divorced from it, science is growth for growth’s sake, the philosophy of the cancer cell, to rephrase Edward Abbey. With imagination, science is progress; without, it stagnates and becomes dogma.

That’s the point, really — striving for a better sort of future, the hope that our lives will improve, will be infinitely more enriched because we’ve discovered the next elementary particle.

Science is not, regardless of what we’ve been taught in school, what happens when we plug in equations. Those are tools. This is like equating the colors of the rainbow to the entire concept of art. It’s the intent behind it; it’s what drives science.

Robert Metcalfe on the Enernet

atleastintheory — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 06:36:09 +0000

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Last night, I had the pleasure of listening to a lecture by my college’s first ever Professor of Innovation, Dr. Robert Metcalfe. To list Dr. Metcalfe’s credentials would probably take more space than WordPress has, but his main claim to fame is the invention of Ethernet, which is what drives Local Area Networks at some specific location. Until recently, he was a venture capitalist; as he puts it, he was getting tired of it and looking around for a new job when he decided to sell the idea of Metcalfe the Professor.

To a very large extent, he seems like the man for the job: he’s articulate, entertaining, and informative. And there’s no doubt that he has some interesting ideas. After a while I couldn’t help myself; I ended up scribbling notes haphazardly into my book.

The thrust of his presentation was that the energy problem could be solved by applying the same principles that support the existence of the internet (so Internet + Energy = Enernet). At least, that’s what I gathered. He doesn’t seem to be the most adept PowerPoint user — actually, he admits that this is the first ever PPT he’s done, despite founding the company that developed PowerPoint — because a) the colors clash horribly, b) there’s no table of contents, and c) his points are therefore all over the place. This post, therefore, is an attempt at summarizing his talk using my own (perhaps inaccurate) words.

The Blue Movement

Metcalfe opened with an introduction to the Internet era, dispensing dry wit and charm as he spoke about the early days of the Internet: a scattering of computers — “none of them in Texas!” — across the US, huge lumbering machines that spent more time communicating within buildings than between the various hub points, at least at MIT. Metcalfe described the “hardening of categories” that sprung up in the first era, a separation of video, voice and data that proved worthless later on; the Internet now, which is equal parts communication and computers; and the fatal mistake made by corn ethanol supporters, who assumed that the feed/fuel/food equation could be tampered with when they drew upon corn production to develop alternate energy sources.

Then he suggested, perhaps not entirely deadpan, that we’d have to call the Green Movement the Blue Movement: the earth is mostly water, and the Green people seem to be anti… well, everything, including solar and nuclear sources of alternate energy.

Enernet Principles

I liked the use of the nifty comparison table, which listed the corollaries between the factors affecting the Internet and those affecting the energy industry. Metcalfe likened energy and power to today’s bandwidth and information, Carnot’s thermodynamics principles to the Shannon Information Theory, and ergs and joules to bits and bytes.

But these were just the superficial comparisons between the two systems; Metcalfe introduced some other features of the Internet that he said the Enernet could borrow. One was the layering system of the Internet — the seven layers of communication systems, which starts from the physical coppers and proceeds through the Ethernet and HTML to the user applications — which might come in useful for the Smart Grid concept.

And like the Internet, where both downloads and uploads happen, Metcalfe sees the Smart Grid as being a distributed system of users who both buy and sell electricity amongst each other.

Perhaps most interestingly, he predicts that something analogous to Moore’s Law will happen. Moore predicted that integrated circuits would double in density and computing power once every two years or so. That meant that you’d have smaller computers for cheaper money. Now, Moore’s Law is beginning to strain at its limits because at the very small level, quantum side effects become hard to ignore. While we grapple with that problem, however, Metcalfe says his colleague has a prediction of his own: Sachs’ Law, which predicts that eventually the cost of solar cells will fall below the cost of wholesale coal-powered electricity. That’s a big assumption to be making, but it’s true that a bunch of interesting research has come out recently that is driving solar power forward.

It occurs to me that, simply because the Internet was forced to grow so quickly, it was limber enough to develop some standards for itself, whereas the energy industry is entrenched in the status quo (another thing Metcalfe seemed to be dead set against) and is unable to reinvent itself. Perhaps that’s where his talk was headed.

Enernet Research

Metcalfe is not a man who’s short of opinions. Amongst some of his strongest criticisms was the fact that the Department of Energy in Washington was a huge waste of time. His main gripe seemed to be that the research was dictated by politics — he was probably still sore about the corn ethanol fiasco — and the lumbering machinery of government bureaucracy. On the other hand, he suggested that the only companies who have the funds to do corporate research are those which later develop into monopolies, like Bell Labs and Microsoft.

Which, of course, leaves universities and other academic institutions.

These aren’t wholly without taint, of course — I’m sure academia has its fair share of not-quite-ethical corporate tie-ups. But on the other hand, places like UT have enough independent money (I hope) to conduct good research. Metcalfe further says that the competition amongst universities for governmental grants will improve the quality of the results.

Further Reading

Quite a few more of the slides were left out because we only had an hour, but most of the questions were relevant and interesting. It was here, though, that Metcalfe’s technical chops were tested and perhaps found wanting. I don’t mean to say that the inventor of the Ethernet didn’t know what he was talking about, but that he seemed unable to provide technical answers to questions. I don’t know why he didn’t present more technical content to a room overflowing — literally — with computer scientists and engineers. When asked about the potential of the Internet to both liberate and oppress, he seemed rather taken aback. “Is that really happening?” he asked the questioner, who seemed as surprised as he was.

But he had high hopes for nuclear and solar power. Small, distributed nuclear units, Metcalfe asserted, were on their way in, as were more efficient solar cells, perhaps those using photosynthesis methods. He also seems to believe that there will be the proverbial silver bullet when it comes to the Enernet, but he’s been forced to eat his words before, so I don’t think many will hold him to that.

I was a little let down that Dr Metcalfe hadn’t actually intended to present a new world vision or anything, but the blueprints will be interesting enough for several years. You can find the full PowerPoint presentation, in all its hideous glory, here. It’ll be interesting to see how his predictions and prescriptions play out over the next few years. And my main regret right now is that I’ll have graduated by the time he begins teaching his course in the fall. If his humor, intelligence, creativity and boldness are any indication, those should be an interesting three months.

Now if only he could handle PowerPoint.

Rushing The Research

atleastintheory — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 10:10:35 +0000

Random sciency image of the week!

I recently read an article (Biomedical research: Don’t let bean counters rule, The Straits Times 10 Jan 2011) on the state of biomedical research in Asia and the problems it’s facing. Ironically, it’s not that institutions lack money but that they’re being pushed to produce results much faster than makes sense. Senior journalist Chang Ai-Lien quotes a researcher at the University of Tokyo, who says “Government officials are the decision makers when it comes to funding but they usually do not understand genetics. They are pressing for short-term results because they have to show progress during their term in office.”

This is a point that was brought up both during discussions in my science writing class as well as in a more personal discussion with my cousin who’s working on his PhD. It seems as though the increasing complexity of science has created both investors who are unable to grasp the finer details, as well as the effectiveness that attracts investors in the first place.

What I find particularly interesting, however, is this line: “Asian scientists grumble that they are hampered by their own governments’ red tape, unreasonable expectations and infighting.” The first and the third are pretty much given, especially in countries where there might be a lot of monetary padding, shall we say, to carry the research through. But it’s important to consider where the unreasonable expectations come from. What government officials are exposed to is the media; what the media portrays can be wildly optimistic, premature or downright inaccurate. If their information comes from the media — and they may not exactly have time to pore over Campbell and Reese — then that’s what they know.

And that’s why inaccuracy or over-optimism in the media hurts investors/governments and the scientists themselves who are trying their best.

As the article itself mentions (in passing, and almost obliquely; this appears to be a “response” to an article in Nature called Singapore’s salad days are over), Singapore has itself begun to go down this route. While before, it seemed as though money could be given to any worthwhile project (in itself a loaded assessment) without much concern as to its immediate industry applications. But now, the tides are turning and the government’s apparently obscure regulations have researchers scrambling to find industry partners and put together applications because the Powers That Be want to see results.

The thing is, science doesn’t really work this way. Sometimes it’s not clear until much later what the applications of something can be. For instance, the effects of radioactivity on the human body weren’t well understood, but that didn’t stop some enterprising people from marketing radium as tonic water, perhaps even as toothpaste. That was quackery, but now it’s being used as cancer treatment, although of course with plenty of side effects. And no amount of media reporting or governmental regulations or industry partnerships will be able to magically uncover the true and full nature of some piece of research — without the extra effort being put in by the scientists in question. On one hand, the additional attention could lead to more money and further research and perhaps earlier discoveries. On the other hand, researchers could be pressurized into publishing shoddy work.

We like to think of science as something above and beyond human pettiness, as though there were some vast treasure trove of “real truths” waiting to be discovered. That might be so. But the practice and perceptions of science are a completely different and entirely human matter. They’re influenced by the people doing the research, the politics of the institution, the money and regulations that investors and/or governments throw at them, the way the media portrays science’s successes and failures… a whole host of things, in fact.

That might make the whole edifice of science and science reporting and researching suspicious; certainly the transparency of science reporting cuts both ways. Either science is discovering a million things in a week or it’s furiously contradicting itself about chocolate or wine or coffee or all three. Or both. The confusion’s understandable. But it’s exciting at the same time, and I like to think of the possibility of working in a field that, despite everything, is always on the lookout for the next big thing.

Programmable Bacteria

atleastintheory — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 23:04:46 +0000

A good bit of the news that I get is through Facebook, when geek friends post about something cool and techy. Like this article about programmable bacteria.

I want to figure out in what ways this science article succeeds and in what ways it doesn’t, and maybe — with my limited knowledge — talk about some of the nuances and the implications of it.

The CNN Article

The article begins with a short, snappy phrase — “bacteria that can be programmed like a computer” — and then goes on to describe how the logic gates are built from genes instead of wires and metal (I assume the quotation marks around “logic gates” isn’t to express skepticism but to illustrate that the genes were just acting like logic gates). Then the article talks about digital processing, and in just the third paragraph, leaps straight into the implications of such a programmable bacteria colony.

First of all, this is incredibly cool and more than a little exciting. If I’m understanding this correctly, the genetic code of simple organisms like bacteria can be programmed to act like the digital logic gates of an electronic circuit such as can be found in computers. So, say we want someone who’s diabetic (which usually means that you’re not producing nearly enough insulin, a hormone that controls the level of sugar in your body) to start producing more insulin — I suppose cells could now be “re-programmed” to respond to certain types of input (like too much sugar?) and that would artificially create insulin. Or perhaps they could just grow vats of pre-programmed bacteria which would produce natural chemical hormones.

The thing is, this sort of application is never explained in the article. They seem to simply go from “here’s a rough idea” to “here’s what we can do fifty years later”. “The findings hold promise for fields such as agriculture and the pharmaceutical industry,” says the CNN piece. But how promise? What promise?

Perhaps that might be easier to understand if we had been told what a logic gate actually is, how the genes could be rearranged to create such a logic gate, and what sorts of example inputs and outputs the bacteria colony would be producing. How is that colony linked up by the logic gates, anyway?

CNN, unfortunately, didn’t link to the academic paper in the article. Additional information on mathematical models, figures, etc can be found here. There are pros and cons to this: on the one hand, if you’re able to read the paper, you might realize that they were hyping it up a bit and we won’t be able to cure cancer by mere thought or something, decades into the future. On the other hand, a far more prosaic and realistic reason could be that most of these articles which are about to be published aren’t actually accessible without a (quite costly) subscription. Your average layperson certainly isn’t going to shell out thirty dollars for something that they — and this is the other crucial point — most likely won’t understand.

The Journal Abstract

But the journal abstract could tell us a few things, if we knew some basic knowledge. The journal article talks about how a NOR gate was constructed to drive promoters and repressors. This might sound like Greek, but honestly it’s not that bad. Logic gates just take in some inputs and spit out a function according to whatever they’re supposed to do. An AND gate only gives an output if both its inputs are happening at the same time. For instance, you’d go to bed only if you were sleepy AND you’d finished all your work. A NOR gate puts out some kind of positive output only if neither of the inputs is present. That sounds simple enough, but the important thing is that the NOR gate (and the NAND gate, which performs the exact reverse of the AND gate) is a “universal” gate: you can build any of the other gates, including the NAND, out of this one. That’s probably why the researchers chose to build that (again, the article doesn’t confirm that) and that’s why it’s a good thing that it appears to have worked.

And the repressors and promoters are, as far as I can tell, the means by which florescence was either turned off or turned on (respectively), which was the method the scientists were using to observe the success of their experiment.

The News Release

All that sort of information would’ve been really useful in an article of this kind, but CNN is not the only one to blame. The first source of information for science articles like this is usually the news release from the department or university itself, and it should list the purpose of the investigation, the people involved and their roles, the results and their implications. It’s basically like a science news article, except that the biases are clearly towards the scientists and the universities themselves; for instance, the press release for this included details about Voight’s previous awards or recognitions. It also included the crucial fact that Voight was not the lead author. It was, in fact, Alvin Tamsir, a fact that CNN left out entirely.

Now, looking at the news release, one thing jumps out at me: it’s not any more informative than the CNN piece itself. By this time, quite a few people know, even vaguely, that 1s and 0s form the basis of computation. The average reader is also aware that genes are what produce a lot of our individual characteristics, and that they can produce diseases which are sometimes impossible to cure (e.g. cancer). But the link between them is drawn imperfectly here. Yes, “any substrate can act like a computer”, but how is that substrate doing this?

So the press release takes on some blame as well for this sort of rather shoddy reporting. But that’s not quite fair, is it? Some CNN drone had to do their job and write this up by lunchtime and really they don’t have space or time.

If that’s your stance, go back to that article. Scroll down to the comments. If that’s representative of CNN’s readership, or representative of the average American, I’m seriously concerned for this nation.

And that’s why I think that the problem of mentioning examples, instead of vague declarations about revolutionizing pharmacy and agriculture, is something that needs to be fixed as soon as possible. Voight says, “It’s not that we’re trying to replace computers with living cells. But it means we could gain programmable control of everything biology can do. You’d like to be able to control all these programs.” To a rational, scientific-minded, reasonable skeptic, he sounds hopeful (and maybe a bit too optimistic). To those commentors, he sounds like Dr. Frankenstein. He should have either explained himself to his press team, or refrained from making hugely sweeping statements of the sort.

That, or the commentors could have been educated a little better, but that seems too much to hope for at this stage.

In the midst of this gloom and doom, however, I am able to offer some consolation: a better article! Here it is, at a site I’ve never heard of, called kqed.org. Knowledge is power, folks. Enjoy!

“Well, this is embarrassing.”

atleastintheory — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 03:49:41 +0000

It’s practically a meme. Some of them are quite good. I’m talking about the 404 error page, of course.

If this doesn’t seem like “science writing”, let’s consider the general category they fall under: the “let’s make the Internet a friendlier place for dummies” type of wording on many pages.

For instance:

1. Google releases comics documenting its new technology. Incidentally, I just found this lovely little book on how the Internet works, courtesy of your favorite neighborhood search engine.

2. Facebook’s fairly detailed explanation of privacy settings, which have almost never been enough for those who’re bent on letting The Users know how they’re being subtly taken advantage of.

3. Grooveshark, like many other popular websites, keeps a nicely informal — but still pretty informative — blog.

4. Pandora, even with the annoyance of ads, strives to develop a certain pal-iness with the user: “Cool. We’re glad you like it. We’ll be sure to play more songs with similar musical qualities.”

I can actually remember my family’s first ever computer, a chunky Acer which I thought was the best thing in the world, so I think I can say this with some authority: the geeks are getting nicer. In a sense, that’s helping out the people who are still wary or unused to the Internet by providing something more than an impersonal facade to interact with. And, what with the explanations and transparency, I think this sort of friendlier content is really a niche arm of science writing, in a sense; it’s trying to make clear the gears and wheels of the process, or at least humanize some of them.

Which makes sense. The Web is becoming more of a community than a hierarchy, at least in that the content being developed gets extensively supported, vetted and vetoed by the users. That’s power right there, so it’s only fair and sensible that the most user-friendly sites reach out to their (overall younger) users in an attempt to get them involved in the process.