James L Adams—People and Products

New Venture

I seem to have written posts for this blog for over 5 years (over 300 of them). I began the blog to discuss product quality, since it is as topic that has always interested me, and after a heroic and successful effort in the U.S. to improve manufacturing quality (which of course reflects on overall product quality), industry drifted off into other traditional directions (profit, grow-the-organization, etc.). As I mentioned in my last post, the manufacturing quality goals were nicely described in a classic paper written by David Garvin and published by the Harvard Business review in 1987, when quality was the hot word.

In 2012 I wrote my book Good Products, Bad Products, published by McGraw Hill, to pay more attention to such critical “dimensions” of quality that even though difficult to deal with quantitatively, are very important to human users. It is also mentioned in my last post, and discussed at more length earlier in the blog.

 I wrote my book partly as a text that I used to teach a course in the Stanford Engineering school (Good Products, Bad Products), that was taken over by Professor Dave Beach when I retired, who did a wonderful job with it until last year, when the course too was retired. The book suffered from lack of publicity, and perhaps a decreased interest in product quality in the U.S. Surprisingly (or not), although the book’s sales in the U.S. have been disappointing, it is doing much better in India, China, South Korea, and Japan —countries that perhaps are presently more sensitive to the value of quality in products. After all, it was Japan that awakened us in the 1970’s and 80’s. China, India, and South Korea are coming up fast.

But over the years, I also wrote posts on subjects I was also thinking about which ranged from the fit between the directions of technology and people, the joy of working with the hands, engineering, management, and so on.

I never sought wide distribution of these posts, as I wrote them to force myself to think more deeply about my areas of interest, and I did not want to become involved in a full-fledged conversation with large numbers of people, although the responses to my posts were thoughtful and flattering. But now I have been talked into a project that sounds difficult, but worth doing, by Tim Keely, a friend of mine who is an IT person of amazing talent at Stanford. The project is for me to go through these posts, pick the ones I think are the best, organize them, edit them, and allow him to make an e-book (or several) from them. I am going to try.

This will make my posts even fewer in number and perhaps more wandering in nature as I come up with new thoughts for the book(s), but I am looking forward to the attempt and hope you will bear with me. I will continue to write posts when I need more material for this project, or when I can’t bear not to —like commenting on ridiculous wastes of technology and money such as Trump’s proposed wall on the Mexican border, which hopefully will never happen, but should it, will set an all time record for lack of overall product quality.

So wish me luck. I’ll post progress reports as I go.

2016 Christmas books

As I told you in my last post, I received a ton of books for Christmas and am going through them as fast as I can. But this is a report on one of them that is particularly pertinent to this blog, and one that is good for one’s perspective.

The first is Thank You for Being Late, subtitled An Optimist’s Guide to thriving in the Age of Accelerations, by Thomas Friedman (Farrar,Straus, and Giroux, NY, 2016). If you don’t read Friedman’s books, you should, because they are current, beautifully researched and referenced, and both entertaining and educational. He has spent his life as a journalist, columnist, and book author, heavily in the Mid East (he majored in Arabic in college) and Washington D.C., and has a strong interest in technology and economics, although he spent the last portion of this book extolling the virtues of growing up in a middle class family in Minnesota.

In this book Friedman makes a good case for the fact that technology is accelerating, and we are having trouble keeping up with it. Friedman’s writings includes a large amount of comments from interviews and interactions with people ranging from exalted to victimized, and his title stems from a point in his life a few years ago when he changed from being annoyed by people being late to meetings, to thankful because this gave him a few minutes to think and relax. He has a deep interest in the “digital revolution”, and does an excellent job of describing what it is doing to us, for good as well as evil. He ends by extolling the virtues of units smaller than national governments (he too thinks the U.S. government no longer is covering the bases, partly due to increasing population, expectations, and complexity, and partly because change is occurring at a rate greater than populations, especially large ones, can cope with. His answer is multi-directional, and includes such things as more education and thinking about what is going on, but includes his argument for more action from smaller units (not only states and cities, but parts of cities). A lot of such feelings are going around, but not usually discussed with the breadth that Friedman has.

The other book is entitled I Contain Multitudes, sub titled The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, by Ed Yong Harper Collins NT, 2016, also beautifully written and researched, and entertaining as well as educational. It is well worth reading when one looks in the mirror and thinks that what one sees is the center of the world, a member of your culture, your family, or even you

I was an undergraduate at Caltech many years ago, and it was run by physicists, who were then receiving most or the press. As an engineering major, I  definitely did not feel in the front line, and in fact at one point was honored by being asked to visit the president (a physicist), whose agenda was to point out that my grades were quite high and had I considered switching my major to Physics. I had not. But I was flattered.

It has swung to more and more interest in the life sciences and lately has been consumed with what is called the microbiome—the microbes within the body, which number in the trillions (more than the “human” cells we have), and outnumber us in total DNA. I have received so much mention of these in the alumni mail and general media, that I consider myself as a life support system for these microbes, rather than what I used to think of myself (a large single entity). As the book points out, at one point we used to think of these microbes as bad germs, thanks to discoveries of people like Lister and Fleming , and that the goal was to get rid of them all. Consider the modern hospital. And in fact some of them are dangerous, and we have served ourselves well by our attention to getting rid of them. But as you may have been reading, we just may have gone too far. I recently had a bad experience with a bad G.I. microbe, which was finally controlled by a large dose of the drug we know so well that we call it “Cipro”, As those of you know who have gone through this experience know, the Cipro kills the bad bug, but also many, if not most, of the microbes that we need to digest food.

There is presently an evil bug called c-diff moving into the U.S. that likes to take over our G.I. tract while it is in its weakened shape from Cipro, requiring a different drug called Flagyl etc.etc.etc   This approach can eventually lead to death. As my Caltech mags and the media keep telling us, the answer is to quickly re-plant the various necessary microbes in the G.I. tract (there are many varieties, so just yogurt won’t do it). Where is a good source? Heard of the fecal transplant?) So far our overly toilet trained society can’t deal with it (some people call it it a “shit enema”) so we are willing to lose innocent people. But this is the tip of the iceberg. The balance of microbes in our body is being thought more and more to be the key to health, and imbalances responsible for many presently untreatable diseases.

You may know all about it (I thought I knew quite a bit until I read this book), but you will like the book anyway—and go away with a much more realistic self-image.

Social Media—Broadening or Narrowing?

 

Jenna Wortham wrote an article in the magazine section of the Nov. 27 New York Times that caught my attention, because the title is something I have thought about. It is “We’ve heard about the power of social media to help us empathize with others. But what if, instead, it’s just cocooning us with our friends? The article is here.

My answer to that question is undoubtedly cocooning us with our friends. As the article points out, sites that offer a broader look at the world (Vine, Snapchat, Tumblr) have either shut down, or are re-targeting to please their present and hopefully future customers by serving them what they would like to see and hear. If you were for Hillary in the last election did you see and hear much positive information about Trump, and vice versa? I think most of us who were for Hillary heard and saw mostly positive information about her, and little positive about Trump. I was for Hillary and never looked at a single example of Trump’s famous Tweets, and therefore, like most of my friends, was stunned when he won (still am).

The article makes some very believable points. Social media lives off of advertisements and the sale of big data. The more people that use their site, the more money they make and the more the network expands. It is easy for them to figure out what you like (on Facebook you even tell them). And seeking profit, it is reasonable that they like to feed you what you want to be fed. In fact this is true of all media.. Fox News flavors the news differently than CNN. The New York Times flavors it differently than the Las Vegas Review- Journal. I watch CNN and read the New York Times, as do my friends, who live in the same bubble.

Is social media helping unite the country after this very divisive campaign season? Is it helping us see both sides of the picture, or is it helping us continue to gather into increasingly narrow groups of like-minded people.

This is worth worrying about. Ms. Wortham concludes her article with the statement “if we can’t pay attention to one another, we might as well not live on the same planet.

Left Behind: The Digital World and Age

I have been a professional engineer, and I think a good one, for 60 years —more if you consider that I worked as one while in college —and have had a ton of education and experience, in industry, as a consultant, and as a professor. I also have spent some 55 years around computers, beginning with big mainframes and going through all the amazing developments to the present. But I am a user, and definitely not a computer expert. In fact, when I began, engineers did not solve their own problems on a computer. Rather we would take our problems to computer programmers, who would feed them into the machine and bring us our results. We after all, could not speak machine language, and therefore did not qualify to interact with these huge machines looming over us from their daises in their windowed white rooms.

I had a wonderful time with computers when so-called personal computers came along, and spent much of my life working with them, using the internet, and generally putting up with their foibles. But in the last few years, something has happened. I have been a long time Apple fan until recently, but now I no longer think it is fun to constantly screw around with their “upgraded” software, nor accept their thinly veiled attempts to totally control my hardware or software. Of course, they are not unique. I am tired of the messages that constantly appear on my screen enticing me to go all Google. Nor do I want to be on Microsoft’s cloud, or any others. Their clouds, after all, are huge servers panting away in giant, hot buildings and sucking electricity from the net in huge quantities. Nothing “cloudy” about them.

But such is not the case with my grandkids or the college students who surround me. They seem to revel in endless new apps, “upgraded” operating systems, and new digital gadgets that don’t seem to me to be that improved over the old ones. I am afraid that after fighting it all of my life, I must admit to a less flexible brain and an unwillingness (inability?) to keep up with digital technology. I had a rude example of that yesterday, when while working with my computer, it began misbehaving. I first noticed that when I downloaded my mail, it was inserting and then withdrawing duplicates of many messages, while making a strange noise. The cursor was also flickering, and it was trying to fill out the password boxes when I tried to open web sites.

Being knowledgeable, I rebooted it, but it became worse rather than better, and after a few trials it would not even accept my system password. After unplugging it from the wall and plugging it in again, and cursing at it with increasing vigor, it finally opened without any password and showed me the screen one sees on a new computer. At this point I panicked, because obviously either the machine had failed (not unusual in these days of disposable products) or someone had hit me with a horrible hack which not only had recorded everything on my computer, but had then destroyed what had been there. (I was backed up, but it seemed like a horrible enough hack could wipe that out also.)

The next day was a Sunday and I did not want to bother my favorite IT guy on a weekend, so I was telling a person who had been a student of mine, and is quite a bit younger than I, my strange set of what seemed unrelated problems, and he said “Oh, try another keyboard”. I laughed. Then I did try another keyboard and my computer came purring back to life. How could this be? To check I told my problems to another person, this one a graduate student, and he said the same thing, as did one of my grandchildren. So I went home and thought about it for a while, and of course, a stuck key could make the strange sound, make the mail messages and cursor hiccup , and definitely fill password boxes with dots that I could not do anything about. But how could these younger squirts instantly figure that out and I did not? This was an isolated case, but not the first.

Yep, age. You know that, and I know that, but somehow it is difficult for someone like me to admit that I am not keeping up with the game. I read an entertaining interview of a man who was well over 100 years ago some ago. He was bed-ridden, and at one point the interviewer pointed out to him how fortunate he was that computers allowed him to interact with the world and learn whatever he wanted through the internet. He replied that he didn’t know how to use computers. The interviewer, caught off guard, asked him why. His reply was that when he had turned 80 he decided that he had learned enough and he just wanted to use what he knew, so no way was he going to learn to use all this new silly stuff.

Maybe there is some of that in all of us, but it is hard to admit for a long-term professor.

The Dawn of Reason?

Post Oct. 30, 2016

In the November issue of The Atlantic I found an article entitled The Binge Breaker, that I hope signals a long overdue reaction against the amount of our lives we spend on digital communication. It is here. It features a man named Tristan Harris, who although he has traditional Silicon Valley credentials (dropped out of computer science graduate school at Stanford to found a start-up), is now the co-founder of Time Well Spent, an advocacy group (consisting mainly of him) that is trying to get people to become more sensible about the amount of time they spend on such things as their smart phone.

The article points out the obvious about digital communication—there are hundreds, if not thousands of highly trained and very intelligent people attempting to get us to spend ever more time interacting on our digital devices. And they are successful. I witnessed the ultimate yesterday on the Stanford campus, where students typically have their smart phone in one hand, and are often talking into it. While riding my bicycle to my office, I passed a girl riding her bicycle, talking with her phone in one hand, and using the other to simultaneously control the bicycle and hold a cup of coffee (four fingers for the cup, and a whole thumb for the handlebar). Miss Contemporary College Student. But this worship of constant interconnection does not stop when one leaves college.

Time Well Spent is simply attempting people to think about how much of their lives they are spending on the professionally designed seductiveness of their digital devices, rather than on other activities that might be more memorable, more important in the future, and yes—more fun.

I have never followed the sometimes-considered politeness of rapidly acknowledging the receipt of messages, especially by being seduced into a conversation or some kind of “snap” activity. I am guilty of not answering most of my e-mail messages, and in fact not even reading them, and even though I write posts for this blog, I read few blog posts, comment on almost none, and definitely do not take up invitations to become friends, contact, or whatever to many people. Am I a bad guy? I think I would be worse if I tried to keep up with all the people who want to communicate with me (I am a retired engineering professor and therefore highly visible to people who are engaged with activities such as Linked-In). Although incredibly entertaining, I try to limit my time on You Tube and never surf the web. I am not going to live forever, and there are many things I want to do more than be fastened to the internet.

Old fashioned? On the contrary, I think I reflect the future. Tristan Harris is attracting a large amount of attention from companies, venture capitalists, and the world in general. I went to a party the other night and ran into an old friend and computer person. I asked him what he was doing. Of all things, he recently started a small company that intends to help individuals, groups, and organizations increase their productivity, creativity, and the quality of their lives, by not being controlled by their digital devices. Coincidence? He knew of Harris. Maybe we are starting to wake up. A few people (Sherry Turkle as an example) have been awake for quite a while—read Alone Together (Basic Books)

Too Much Too Fast?

Yesterday I went to buy some groceries at a nearby Safeway Store. I first went through the usual heavy traffic to get there. After spending a great deal of time trying to find what I wanted, due to massive enlargement of the store, acceptance of “if you make customers wander around they will buy something not on their list” marketing, and lack of employees in the store proper, I went to the check stand and stood in slowly moving lines. These seemed to be due to many factors — the checkers trying to respond to the “no” answers to their asking if the customers had found everything they were looking for, the massive use of coupons and various “award” gimmicks, the lack of free bags and baggers, and confusion over swiping one’s card and shoving it into the newly purchased (and therefore subtly different —capable of either swiping or shoving and incorporating strange unexplained symbols) credit card device and leaving it until it said you can take it. I found the entire exercise frustrating, partly because I had only a few articles and the “under 15” aisle that was open was clogged with people having many more than their allotted number. And I was not looking forward to entering the traffic again to take my meager purchases home.

While standing in my line, I could not help but remember how simple it had been to shop at this store 30 or 40 years ago. Granted there was not such a staggering choice of products available. So what has happened? True, the population of the area has soared, and Silicon valley continues to offer jobs and wealth. But also, the seemingly small change in credit cards and associated devices to the EMV format which was bothering a few people in the grocery line is symptomatic of larger problems. This change is not confined to the stores in your town, but is a world-wide bank-sponsored attempt to decrease fraud. It will take some time to put into place. But when that has happened everyone will be faced with yet another set of devices which will no longer permit swiping, but will undoubtedly be able to handle other tasks having to do with the ongoing attempts to replace currency. And so it will go. And as is more and more true of many should-be-simple-to-operate devices which are involved in our lives, there will probably be little effort paid to standardization among different manufacturers of these devices . And this is true of many more complex products — home appliances, computers and peripherals including  software, automobiles, you name it. These things are tools to improve the quality of our lives, and we should not have to spend too much of these lives learning to deal with changes in the tools that are often trivial in the long term.

I am, after all, a veteran promoter of technological progress, creativity, innovation, change and such things. They are the essential to our success. But I am also very aware that if there is too much of such things too fast, the burden on the users becomes unacceptable.

I have had it with constant attempts to make me “upgrade” the digital products in my life. I was content with iPhoto on my Mac. It did everything I wanted it to. I could effortlessly get to other editing program, and it allowed me to organize things as much as I  desired. But mainly I had used it long enough not to have to think about it. I almost dropped Apple when they changed to Photos, because there were minor changes that took effort to learn, and for me, the change was  a negative one, not only in having to learn new tricks, but in the content of the software itself. But I admit my judgement may have been clouded, because at the same time I had to go to a newer operating system and my computer had to be encoded, causing it to be much slower (Stanford’s fault, not Apple). Apple continues to be making great profit by changing and attempting to find a universal operating system for all of its products, but although I held still for Photos, I am resisting the increasing pressure from them to again “upgrade” my smart phone, and if they keep trying to make me put stuff on my computer I neither need nor want, even though I have used Apple equipment from the start, I am out of there.

On a larger note, I think that technologically advanced nations like the U.S., and the businesses within them, should start to worry about the pace of change. Certainly computers have resulted in a large number of well-paying jobs, since people like me, who have used them for many years, are now dependent on IT people, who desperately try to keep up on them on a full-time basis. But the disappearing, well paid and rewarding “muscle memory” skill jobs will not come back. Repetitive white-collar jobs are following. The re-training of people to do more cerebral and people-skill jobs will be horrendous, and may require a couple of generations, by which time the game will probably have changed again. Perhaps the wide spread support of people like Trump, although seemingly a most unattractive person in all respects, is because he seems to be offering a simpler solution to the problems of life—let him call the shots and everything will be terrific. This has been the weapon of most dictators and revolutionaries over time, as has the promise to bring back the past (which was never as good as we think it was). But in the long term it has been shown not to work.

I, for one, am both amused and worried about the present estimates by technology visionaries, such as the one that the U.S. will be highly dependent on driverless vehicles in ten years. Maybe the people that work at Tesla and Google are eager to get there, and the cars are already being used for shuttles around their buildings. But the visionaries tend to forget that there are 320 million people living in the country, many of them dependent on people-driven cars (truckers) , and may of them simply liking to drive cars (me). And historically massive changes in large populations due to technological advances have taken more on the order of 50 years. Fifty years ago, I had been working on the first lunar and planetary spacecraft at the Jet Propulsion Lab. The visionaries were predicting colonies on the Moon and Mars in 20 or 30 years. Hasn’t seemed to happen yet. Autonomous vehicles can be made, and are running around on streets in various places in small numbers. But designing and building the vehicles may be the easy part. And pushing the schedule too fast may result in incredible angst. After all, our present traffic mess has required well over 100 years to accomplish.

Swell Book —The Wright Brothers, by David McCullough

Sorry to be lagging in writing posts, but I am catching up on my reading. I just finished a wonderful book by David McCullough, one of my favorite writers, entitled The Wright Brothers (Simon and Schuster, 2015). He is not only an outstanding story teller, but an amazing researcher, although I expect he has help in his research because he typically gives credit to several people in the Library of Congress. But having won two Pulitzer prizes and twice received the National Book Award, he probably deserves it.

This book is an in depth look at the Wright brothers (Wilbur and Orville— there were two other brothers and a sister Katherine , who became a major supporter and cheer leader), their successful quest for flight, and their friends, family, and others who supported them, as well as those who competed with them. It is an American success story, and, in fact, after they became world famous and people would ask them how they did so, they would tell people to grow up in Ohio in a good family.

The difficulties they overcame were many, including Orville killing his passenger and almost himself in a demonstration flight.   People had wanted to fly like birds for most of recorded history, and at the time of the Wright brother’s effort, there were many people (Lillienthal, Moullard, Chanute, Langley, Cayley, Maxim, Bell, Edison) who were working on the problem, and many people applying for patents on flying machines, most so outrageous that they became a mainstay of humor, but the majority of people in the world simply felt that humans were not meant to fly, and those seeking the ability were perhaps a bit nuts. In the midst of this, the Wright brothers, by then proprietors of a bicycle shop, quietly set about to solve the problem—no wealth, no government support, no college, no brilliant insight, no desire to become rich and famous, just an obsession for flight and long hours of hard work. I could somewhat identify with them, because their life was somewhat like my grandmother prescribed, when sayings such as “the devil finds work for idle hands” and “people who don’t take care of their (garden, farm, horse, house, truck, etc) don’t deserve one” abounded and were laid on kids like me who were found lying in the sun. In fact their very supportive father was a minister, and later a bishop in their church.

I also identified with their ability to work with their hands as well as their mind. There is a quote in the book by a local resident after they built their “home” on Kitty Hawk, a desolate area far from Dayton chosen because of its constant wind. which is “They could do anything they put their hands to. They built their own camp, they took an old carbide can and made a stove of it; they took a bicycle and geared the thing up so that they cold ride it on the sand. They did their own cooking and washing and they were good cooks too.” My kind of guys (although my wife faults me on washing, but hey California is in a drought).

But not only were they wonderful people, but from an engineering standpoint they did everything right, even though not educated as engineers.  There was little usable theory, but they learned what existed and what had been tried, and started from there. Their competitors in the world were trying to concoct theory and arguing with each other, but only making simple fairly uncontrollable unpowered kites and gliders and flying them very little. The Wright Brothers started with a kite, gradually improved it until it could carry them, and flew in the result as much as possible. They continued after they added an engine, built from scratch in a short period by Charlie Taylor, a mechanic friend of the Wrights. The engine added a series of failures, but the process of fixing the problems, improving the machine, and flying continued, in spite of minor and major crashes and other setbacks. This constant testing and improving reminded me of my days working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, because that is how wonders such as the Curiosity Martian Rover are produced. And a major advantage that the Wright Brothers had on December 17^th, 1903, when they made their famous flight (actually they made four of them that day, the last one some 850 feet), was their skill at flying, because each of them had spent many days learning to control their primitive machines and a total of four years achieving this goal.

This experience and  approach to testing and improvement made extending the range of Wright “flying machines” straight forward, so that five years later, the brothers won the newly-minted Michelin Cup with a flight of 2 hours and 20 minutes. They were, by then, touring the world, flying all day to the delight of massive crowds, and taking royalty for rides. They did become rich and famous, but because they wanted to fly like birds, not because they particularly wanted to be rich and famous (although they didn’t mind being in that category.)

It is a feel good book, shedding light on how one of the many advances in technology in the early 20^th century happened, and how many still do —through dogged determination and evolution rather than from one brilliant idea.  The only thing that depressed me about the book was how much better McCullough can write than I can.

Good Shoes and Bad Laces

Many years ago, a great break through was made in shoes, through the acceptance of athletic shoes (trainers in Europe) in circles that before had expected more formal footwear. They combine comfort, function, lower cost, and even fashion. Almost all people who work or study at Stanford or in what is called Silicon Valley, if not most people in the world, wear them. I took to them effortlessly, and have only one pair of shiny black shoes I wear when I figure that they are called upon. But complications set in even here because of fashion and the desire of companies to increase profit. The fashion angle occurs because of the desire to appear “athletic”, the profit from selling them to people who want to look like some one they admire (Air Jordans?).

Although at one time I was involved in sports, I no longer am, nor do I want to be. But I do walk a lot, engage in manual labor, ride my bicycle, etc. I lead an active life but not a competitive one. By rights I should be a perfect match to so-called walking shoes, and if I can find them wide enough and shaped somewhat the same as my feet (the front of my feet are somewhat square, not pointed) and in black instead of appearing that they belong to an endorsed professional athlete, they should be perfect.

But, why can’t the manufacturers figure out the laces to fit we amateurs. I don’t need extra long laces, because I don’t need or want a “heel lock”. And I don’t want to tighten them one set of holes at a time, so what’s with the little bitty holes through which the laces need to be pulled? I seem to remember that shoes had eyelets so one could simply haul on them from the top and tie them. Now they seem to want to be like runner’s shoes, where tugging them tight one crossing (or whatever) at a time makes them fit more closely. The photo below shows two different samples of my shoes, made by established companies. The lace on the shoe on the left has gone through all existing holes, and is still obviously too long. It is also obviously too fat to fit through the very small holes in the shoe. Like many of these types of fabric laces, it is on its way to losing the plastic tips that do fit through the holes. After both of these are gone, new laces will be required.

The shoe on the right uses wire loops to hold the laces except for the top holes (which an informal survey shows are not used by my friends). So for me, they are the proper length, but even though they are only three weeks old, the wire loops are stripping off the black covering, and even doing it in such a way that the covering ends up over the plastic ends, requiring a scissors to strip it away, and leaving what one of my friends calls “interesting looking” laces. So using the top holes, the left shoe laces are okay in length. The right shoe laces are okay in length if one does not use the top holes. But the stripable fabric laces make me look pretty indigent

I may seem overly picky, but I don’t want to buy new laces to fit the usage of ever pair of shoes I buy. I also don’t want to go through my vocabulary of curse words while tying and untying them. I want informal comfortable shoes that don’t pretend that I am an athlete. Been there, done that. I was pleased when it seemed that Velcro was taking over from shoe laces, but it didn’t seem to happen, leaving me often trying to stuff the unraveled end of a string through a hole of a lesser size, and spending more time than I want to fastening my shoes so I can get about my life.

Free Trade and Product Quality

Much is being made about such things as free trade and protection due to the upcoming election. Most of the discussion is about money and jobs, but very little is being said about product quality, a very important, and often overlooked variable that is extremely important to business and influenced by overseas interactions. As an example, some time ago India decided to build its industry through tariffs and other methods of protection to encourage its citizens to buy goods made in India. But of course, the quality of many of its industrial products slipped with respect to those made in other countries. When they finally realized this, they began tearing down such protective measures and more actively competing globally. They are in the midst of this process, and it is not an easy one. Such companies as Mahindra, a large manufacturer of tractors, and Tata, a large manufacturer of almost everything, are finally being recognized globally. And the quality of their products is improving, as it must if they are to do a better job of competing globally.

It is strange that those that are pushing for “protection” do not seem to think about product quality and how it is encouraged by free global competition, especially since those doing so (Trump) have an example right in their own back yard —the automobile business. Were it not for the Japanese, the Europeans, and now the Koreans, we might all be driving cars closer to 1970’s Pontiacs. They certainly would be more expensive, were it not for what is sometimes called the “Toyota Production System”. The U.S. automobile business had gotten trapped by complacency (U.S. cars are obviously the best, since they are designed and built by U.S. people in U.S. factories, U.S. citizens don’t like small cars, the big V-8 is the best of all engines, etc). It took foreign competition to wake it up and show it some new tricks.

But politicians are more comfortable dealing with complex situations that they can offer simplistic solutions to (medical care, taxes, immigration) than things like product quality, that encompass emotional and cultural factors as well as functional and economic. For the sake of our future, and our economy, we had better stay more in touch with what is going on in the world, rather than less, and one good way to do that is to compete through free trade. And as another argument, that is the future. U. S. business is not going to give up foreign markets, less costly labor, material, and services, and learning from the accomplishments of their overseas competitors. Nor are we consumers going to accept paying more for lower quality products.

The Mechanical Governor—A Very Good Product In its Day

Mechanical governors have been used with most engines since they were first developed until electronic devices took over the task relatively recently . Governors based on rotation were used to control the distance between wind-driven millstones in the 17^th Century. Later, with the advent of factories, regulated rotary motion was needed In the late 18^th century, and, James Watt invented what he called a conical pendulum, which operated on a principal similar to governors  to follow—balls attached to a rotating rod which was driven by the speed of the machine. As the speed increased, the balls tended to fly out (origin of the term “balls out”) which would cause levers to decrease the amount of steam entering the machine. A rough drawing is below.

Governors were primarily to guarantee a controlled output. You do not want the power in your machine (car, tractor, train, etc) to fluctuate with the fuel flow. You want to select the desired speed and make sure that the machine speed stays constant. They are sometimes thought to be speed limiters, and, in a way, they do stop excess speed, but they are much different than speed limiters contained in modern vehicles and other machines where limiting the top speed is required. Oddly enough, humans with political charge of states are called governors, and in a sense they are, in that they are supposed to smooth out the behavior of the state, but mechanical governors were not meant to cause radical change, as some human governors want to do. That was to be left to the humans in control of the machine—perhaps the analogue is the voters in the state.

I recently restored a Pickering Governor, shown in the photo to the right. Thomas Pickering was both the inventor and the name of the business he began in Portland, Connecticut, that was based on this governor. It was used widely on rotating steam machines in the U.S. for many years, and it still in use. It was a dominant fixture on steam locomotives, factory machines, and all manner of other steam-powered devices. And in fact, before electronics came along, devices operating on the same principal were installed in automobiles, trucks, tractors, and other machines powered by hydrocarbons.

As you can see from the photograph, the Pickering Governor has three balls mounted on spring segments, the bottom end of each being fastened to a collar that rotates but can not move up the central shaft, and the other end fastened to one that can move. As the speed of this unit (which is driven by a belt from the machine) increases, the balls tend to move out, which pulls the top collar down. This movement is somewhat resisted by the coil spring shown in the photo. The upper collar pushes on a rod that runs the length of the shaft, and moves a sliding gate in the piping ,which controls the amount of steam entering the machine. More speed results in less steam, and less results in more. Voila, constant motion, with speed controllable by compression in the coil spring. A drawing  is below, if you want more detail. But in spite of the complexity of the drawing, the operation of the governor is extremely simple—few moving parts, no tricky mechanisms, an elegant, reliable, and affordable product, which served our species well over many years, and could be understood and maintained by people with a minimum of training—A very good product indeed.

Why did I restore this governor? As you know by now, I love to restore old machines, especially if they were good products. In fact, I can hardly stand seeing such elegant and historical machines die on scrap heaps.

What am I going to do with it? Easy. I am going to put it on my desk beside my computer. It not only will represent a good contrast in modern and old technology, but will remind me that several large projects I have under way (writing books, etc) will proceed better if I work on them a bit every day. I tend to work on them in bursts, ending when I can’t stand to do so any more, and then ignore them, during which time I lose track of what I have done and where I am going, which in turn requires that I spend time reviewing what I have done and trying to recall hot ideas I had which I can’t quite remember. I need a better internal governor, and maybe this beautiful historic old external one will remind me. Also it is a more interesting object to look at than my computer (when the computer is simply showing me my desktop) and will not require constant upgrading and deleting of unwanted messages and advertisements.

Free Time, Productivity, and Making, Fixing, and Tinkering.

I am perhaps a bit late on this post because I have been down in Southern California helping my brother dig through three generations of stuff in several buildings. When we were kids we lived and worked in this series of buildings along with our parents, our grand parents, an uncle, and various dogs and cats (and before that horses and chickens). We were located on 20 acres of oranges, in the times when that and a few outside jobs were capable of supporting such a crew. After the death of our parents, grandparents, and uncle, the sale of ten acres, and my leaving for various vocations and locations, my brother John has been operating the remaining ten as a fruit and vegetable farm (Adams Acres). But unfortunately, the area has gone through hard times, and the customers for fruit and vegetables do not always match my brother’s desires in growing plants. He has an M.S. in botany, and a Ph.D. in soil science, and is a fan of fruit of a comparatively exotic nature compared to that bought by many who live in the area, who are motivated heavily by price and what they are used to. So he is selling most of the land to a developer and the need arose to "lighten up".

Although hard work, this sorting process has been both interesting and nostalgia producing. It graphically illustrates the difference in life in Southern California in 1907, when the grove was planted, and the present. I actively worked in the grove between the late 1930’s and the early 1950’s, when I went to college, never to return except for visits, and even in the 60 years since then there has been massive change. As far as agriculture, little remains in the area. As far as life style, the change is similarly complete. Work in the area at one time consisted mostly of manual labor. Now, work is scarce. Life was bucolic, with clean skies, little if any crime, and the sweet smell of orange blossoms, although the work was occasionally hard and money sometimes scarce. But compared to my present existence, and that of my friends, there seemed to be a lot more spare time.

The photo at the left shows a small hooked wool rug made by my grandmother, who died in 1965, but spent a lot of time making rugs, quilts, lace tablecloths, blankets, and such things. My mother, meanwhile. In her early days was making furniture, also clothes, and helping build buildings. Both were doing the cooking, the cleaning, and other such chores. My father, my grandfather, and I were working on the grove and the buildings, and my uncle was working full time as a machinist. But we seemed to have a lot of  time beyond these duties. This rug was not intended to be walked on!

The hooked rug is beautiful, partly because of the texture that could only have resulted from hand work. It takes a long time to make hooked rugs, but somehow the time was available. The photo on
the right  shows me in a shirt my mother made me from sulfur sacks in high school. It still fits me! She didn’t have to make me fancy shirts, but she loved to and had time to do it, and I loved the result.  She also made everything in my room when I was a kid (see below). She later became a very successful water colorist —time again.

During our sorting, we continually found evidence of this startling fact. Although the family did essentially everything having to do with life —building the buildings, doing the maintenance, working the grove, growing and, hunting and fishing for food, and making furniture, machines, and even toys (the two photos at the end of the post show a horse made for me by my mother and a toy tractor made by me for my brother).

We had a lot of free time to do such things as learn about music (I was the town pianist), read a lot of books, magazines, and news papers, listen to the radio, and do well in school, And we did not only constrain ourselves to large and challenging tasks. The  photograph at the right shows a small welder I carved, and a delicate goblet my beefy grandfather turned from Manzanita wood, complete with imprisoned ring. I admit he did this because of my grandmother’s frequent challenge to him to make something pretty since he was usually doing blacksmith work, building buildings, spreading fertilizer, or driving the tractor., etc. etc. etc.

Now it seems to be more difficult to provide for free time in ones life. Why? For one reason, in the old days in rural areas there were no diversions such as television, the internet, social networking and computers, and highways and advertisements beckoning us off to adventures in other locations. There were few movie theaters, little if any night-life, and friends were widely spread. Looking back, it seems that life should have been quite boring. But at the time it did not seem so. One could always make covered wagon models, toys for kids (my brother and I) or goblets from Manzanita wood, paint pots, or just goof around with one’s dog. And we didn’t know that life could be made hectic by endlessly “improving” ourselves.

Would I like to go back there? No. Am I glad I grew up there? Yes. I learned an incredible amount from the do-it-yourself stages of my life and my very talented family members, and gained great confidence and positive feedback from what I did. I also learned to make time in my life for hobbies that I love, and for just goofing around. Working with my uncle and grandfather obviously set me on the path to becoming an engineer, and being expected by those around me to do well in school and in my work led me toward becoming a professor, a career I have loved. And since I did have free time (nothing to do and no one to talk to) I did learn to entertain myself by thinking—an excellent way to spend time. And finally, I learned the importance of making time in my life for learning, for my hobbies (mostly requiring use of my hands), and for just goofing around.

 

Things Break and People/Machines Screw Up

I don’t know how many times I have said the words in the title of this blog to people. I admit the “Machines” is a rather rather new, because in the past machines were not considered “smart” enough to screw up, but now we must admit them to the club (perhaps I should have said People/Robots}

This comes to mind because of two widely reported incidents in which Tesla cars, equipped with “Auto Pilot” capability were involved in crashes, one fatal to the driver, and the other consisting of two impacts with guard rails followed by overturning of the car. Both of these made the New York Times, the first on the front page, the other more buried within the paper. Had the cars not been harbingers of the much reported era of “Autonomous Cars”, they would in all probability not qualified for such notice. However, we have not only bought into the possibility that machines, especially computers, will take over more and more functions from people, but that they will do better at it—i.e. fewer “Accidents”.

I am a fan of Tesla Motors, who I think has made it plain to owners of cars with their auto pilot capability that this is an aid to drivers, not a replacement, and that the technology is,in fact, new. And someone had to take the lead in using some of this technology with real people in real traffic. People being what they are, it is not surprising that owners might, as they used to say in the Air Force, push the envelope. So I find the two incidents regrettable, but not surprising, and in spite of people’s wishes, examples of the title of this post. You can kill yourself (and others) in any car if you do not understand the limitations of the technology.

Ironically, I visited my farm escape in the Sacramento Valley a couple of days ago, and there in the midst of a partly-harvest vast field of rice, was a lonely looking big-time John Deere Harvester. I recognized it as belonging to my friend, the owner, since it was in his field, but it was unusual to find it looking abandoned in the middle of the field. I found that it was broken — in short, the mechanism holding one of the tracks had failed, resulting in breakage of a huge casting and other components. The reason was probably inadequate securing of a large nut, but that is not the point. It received emergency care, with the result that it is now in action again, with a maintenance bill of only $20, 000 dollars.

The point is that this is a very sophisticated and expensive machine (on the order of $700,000) built for very high performance (one of them will service hundreds of acres at high speed with great accuracy) and full of advanced technology (gps control, etc.), by one of the leading manufacturers of agricultural equipment and it failed, either because something broke and/or people/machines screwed up.

Although the present wave of optimism resulting from the amazing progress in technology may seem to be heading to a perfect future, in which people and machines, especially “thinking” machines, never fail, don’t believe it. I am confident that the title of this post will hold true as long as homo sapiens exist.

Artificial Intelligence—Blessing, Worry, or Both?

The Economist magazine of Jne 25^th to July 1^st, 2016, contains a special report on Artificial Intelligence. It is entitled The Return of the Machinery Question, referring to the major discussions that took place during what we call the industrial revolution and concerned the effects of mechanization on society_ in particular employment for the working class. It is well worth reading, as we will all be affected, and the first part of the report is here.

When I joined the Stanford faculty in 1966, I spent some time with the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), led by John McCarthy and involved in what was later recognized as pioneering work. Since I was fresh from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and had been involved in the design of space craft, I was trying to define a research area for myself. My Ph.D. research, having to do with the remote control of vehicles, had moved to SAIL, and the new field of artificial intelligence was attracting a good deal of attention. It was not to be my main field of interest, since I have never been as excited about computers and software as maybe I should have been, but I have fond memories of my time there and the people involved.

At the time, SAIL had a couple of Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-8 computers wired together, relatively advanced at the time, but of course primitive by present standards. And the goals of the work were even more advanced, as has always been the case with the field of Artificial Iintelligence. And the work in which I was involved had to do with the control of machines. As time has passed, both digital hardware and software have advanced greatly, as has the amount of information available, but as the Economist report states, until recently the accomplishments in the field have seemed to be not as spectacular as might be expected.

But now, the field seems to be exploding, and as the report points out, impacting activities as varied as “improving internet search engines, blocking spam e-mails, suggesting e-mail replies, translating web pages, recognizing voice commands, detecting credit-card fraud, and controlling self-driving cars”. Rather than being disappointed in the progress in artificial intelligence, we seem to be becoming worried about its potential to replace people in large areas of employment. Some studies have shown that some 50% of all jobs are threatened by computed automation —white collar as well as blue.

The cause of this is a combination of radically increased computer power, new approaches to the use of computers, huge amounts of information becoming available, and large investments being made in the area. Such techniques as deep learning, which allow computers to use this information to find new patterns, develop new techniques for solving problems, and improve their own software are showing up in a wide variety of fields, from medicine to finance to education. And computers are increasingly beating humans at their own games —a recent example being DeepMind’s Alpha Go system’s defeat of champion Lee Sedol at Go, a board game considered much more complex than Chess.

The report in The Economist not only reviews the progress of Artificial Intelligence, but also discusses the possible effects of this progress on society. Here it is optimistic, relying on historical data that new developments in technology have always resulted in more new jobs than the developments have obsoleted. But the optimism is a bit offset by the emphasis on the power of these new developments, and by reference to such things as experiments in universal domestic income in Finland and the Netherlands in case they might be needed to keep economies going in the fact of major job loss—also by references to the unprecedented reach of computers as opposed to the manufacturing of the industrial revolution.

Life is never boring.

Bitcoin, Virtual Funds, and Unnecessary Technology

A couple of weeks to estimated tax time, a quarterly reminder of the painful yearly session of calculating income tax. I used to do this on Macintax, but a wonderful man who was somewhat of a surrogate father to my wife after her own father died young, generously gave her fractions of limited partnerships in pistachio orchards during a period when he was developing such things in the San Joaquin valley. Welcome to K-1 forms, and making decisions as to whether the money spent for many small quantities of such things as fertilizer, water, pesticides, machine maintenance, and labor, and therefore duelly reported to the government was tax deductible, and to what extent. So now for that reasons and others, our tax is no longer simple, and we have an accountant to help.

Why does everything having to do with money become more difficult over time? My brother, having sold a piece of property, is agonizing over delaying some tax through IRC 10-31, putting the money into an annuity or into U.S, or foreign investments, or whatever. He is not a financial type, and obviously needs help. I have taken to paying cash for purchases in stores because the lines have become longer since the chip-bearing credit cards, and had a cashier thank me recently because she didn’t have to explain the various moves her card machine required as opposed to those in other stores. Standardize? In this day and age?

And now we have Bitcoin and other so-called virtual capital. If you are not aware of such things, look Bitcoin (the largest of its kind) up on Wikipedia. Wikipedia offers magnificently simple explanations of almost everything, except you’ll probably agree that it leaves you a few questions as far as Bitcoin is concerned. For instant, can a currency be trusted if not guaranteed by the government of a large country?  And if you look you will see that there are a few wrinkles to be smoothed out before it becomes truly reliable, if ever. An article on a Bitcoin bankruptcy from the New York Times is here. A couple articles on other virtual funds are here and here. But humans being humans, there are more and more businesses accepting Bitcoin and other virtual money and agencies being willing to convert them to traditional coinage. Is it the future, or is it the largest scam in history?

I was talking with a successful relatively young farmer in the Sacramento Valley yesterday, and all he wanted to talk about was mining Bitcoin (Explained here). Apparently a very wealthy person in China, or some other country, had built a huge computer complex to do the job, and my friend was fascinated with this.   Hopefully he won't try it. Idtt is spring, and he should have enough to keep him occupied with his farm, his family, watching TV, drinking beer, making nasty comments about Trump, and other more pertinent activities.

I have spent most of my life in and around technology, but I do not believe that we should implement everything we know how to do (upgrading nuclear weapons, building a base on the moon). I am definitely not a believer in technological determinism, nor do I think that we have the responsibility to “feed” technology. In particular. I don’t think we need to develop technology that even if it  perhaps seems sophisticated, makes life more difficult. Down with such things as Bitcoin!

The Internet—Broadening or Narrowing

The internet is still young. The World Wide Web was invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist. Historically, technological discoveries and inventions have taken at least 50 years to mature. There is no doubt in my mind that the internet will change appreciably in the next 24 years, and probably continue to change after that because of its complexity in content and in the things it is trying to achieve. And it should.

Most of us can remember the hopes that the internet would interconnect the world—a free and rapid means of communication for people of all countries, cultures, and values. It is doing some of that. But it also can bbe used to strengthen isolated tribes of people who would like everyone to think as they do. Rebel groups in many countries have used the internet to coordinate and fund their efforts. If we share their interest, we think that is good. If their interests are opposed to ours, we think it is bad.  

There was a good summary of this situation in a column written by Frank Bruni and entitled How Facebook Warps Our World in the Sunday May 22 Opinion Section of the New York Times. It is here.   He speaks of the ease of increasingly interacting with people with the same values, interests, and biases that we have, and in the process becoming isolated from people of different values, thus reinforcing our own. He worries that we will turn into narrow frustrated groups unwilling to accept or even try to understand the values of others. He does not blame Facebook or other social networking services. He blames us and our need to be part of a group that reinforces our beliefs — our tribe. Networking services simplify this process for us.

This can be seen building in the present Presidential election. At this point I know people who abhor Donald Trump, and others who abhor Hillary Clinton. In fact I know people who abhor both of them. None of these people have met either. They are operating on a bit of staged video and probably biased media and reinforced by their “friends”, both personal and incrfeasingly cyber. Finally there seem to be more moderate voices. I just read an article in The Atlantic Magazine entitled The Mind of Donald Trump written by Dan P. McAdams, a Professor of Psychology and director of the Foley Center for the Study of Lives at Northwestern University. It is definitely not a pro-Trump article, but he does go into characteristics of Trump that would help him as a president as well as those that would not. But it is a well researched 13 page article by an expert in a high quality magazine. It would probably not be read by many on the internet, and would certainly not fit into a tweet. It is here if you are interested.

I have for a long time been interested in and studied war, since although few people speak favorably about it, and it doesn’t seem to have much long term effect, it seems to have pretty much always been with us since we became numerous enough to disagree in reasonably large groups. But traditionally, wars have  been about such tangible things as land, treasure, and I suppose women. But now we are disagreeing strongly on such things as economics, religious beliefs, the value of human labor, education, and the rules of warfare itself.

And partly, thanks to the internet and modern media, groups taking different sides in these disagreements are spread widely. The ancient feud between Moslems and Christians, and even different branches of Islam are already established in different areas. Ethnic and racial battles are occurring, and arguments about race and gender are becoming more widespread. Traditionally enemies in war have either been adjacent to each other (the U.S. Civil War, England and France, Japan and China), and/or members of an established cultures who had access to sophisticated methods of transport (the U.S. and Japan during World War II). But now people who strongly disagree seem to more and more be geographically spread. The terrorist situation is perhaps an example.

Hopefully technology and societies will go in a direction that promotes conversation, cultural breadth, and world-wide understanding, rather than isolated nations or groups feeling that they are under attack and must respond, but I would not bet either way. We are already using drones to kill people overseas who lead causes we disapprove of— often causes who are using the internet to communicate and unite their bands. Will we import such behavior? Maybe the future use of drones will include not only delivering packages, but attacking groups of fellow citizens united by the internet involved in causes with which we do not agree.  

Technology and Noise

The past weekend must have been an informal welcoming of spring on the Stanford campus, because every dorm on campus seemed to be having a party. The parties were generally out of doors and included a band. The bands were delivering contemporary dance music through the now standard large amplification and speaker systems. Our house is quite close to several dorms, so we once again had an opportunity to cower inside our house with our earplugs in and experience the joy of relentlessly repetitively sounds at a volume well in excess of the county rules on decibel levels.

The good news, is that the music masked the noise generated by automobile and truck traffic, airplanes (especially private ones and the helicopter owned by our hospital), the myriad of two-cycle engines employed by the gardeners in the area, and the construction equipment that seems to have resided on campus for the past ten years. I couldn’t help again thinking about the change in noise level on the campus and in our increasingly urban world during the time I have been at Stanford.

In particular, I notice the increase in noise from the growth in numbers and power of amplifiers and speakers. In the summer Stanford hosts a number of “sports camps” for kids, and the leaders of these groups are all equipped with amplified speakers to communicate with them. This might seem reasonable, since the kids make a lot of noise, but the leaders used to just tell them to be quiet when they needed to do so. My office on campus is beneath a large classroom, and the classroom is equipped with an amplification system. Teachers and guest speakers use these to talk to the students, and to those of us who have the dubious pleasure of listening to them through the air circulation system even though we are totally uninterested in what they have to say. I certainly never needed an amplification system to talk to a class. The bands performing in the dorms seem to need the requisite amplifiers, mixers and speaker systems made popular by rock bands, even though such bands had no difficulty making themselves heard with much less amplification when I first came here.

It seems that people love amplifiers. If the type of amplifier/speaker used by coaches (the modern megaphone) is lying around, people will pick it up, turn it to high, walk up to a friend from behind, and yell at them with it. If an amplifier and speaker system is in a classroom (often to provide sound for video or other media material) people will use it to amplify their own voices. If a band has a rack of speakers and amplifiers, they will turn them up to a level that has been shown to adversely affect the hearing of the audience if they are subjected to it over time. Both band and audience seem to enjoy it, but the band members typically are wearing ear plugs (musicians are careful of their hearing) and those trying to study, listen to their own music, or live in a nearby house may not.

Granted that I am old and grouchy, behind on my pop music, and complaining about things that other people enjoy or that are an output of work others think necessary (gardeners and construction crews), but for the sake of all of us, since we are heading into ever increasing population density, noise has to be controlled.   It has happened with automobiles and motorcycles. When I was in high school, it was prestigious to run ones vehicles with minimal muffling. If you are old enough, you remember “cut out pipes”, that allowed the driver to divert the exhaust straight from the engine, bypassing the muffler altogether. I wondered what the result would be of clamping down on motorcycle noise, but the owners actually came to believe that a very fast and quiet machine was cool, except for a few who are now thought to be merely obnoxious. Campus leaf blowers are now all electric, powered by a gas generator, which being four cycle is much quieter than the two-cycle commonly used on yard machines. Large diesel driven machines have not quite gotten the message yet, but they will. And even as I write this, there is a campaign underway on campus to do something about bands at parties.

But what is going to happen when Amazon and other organizations flood the atmosphere with noisy drones? Drones carrying significant weight and traveling relatively long distances are not going to be electrically powered for a long while.

Technology and Sports

As in most area of human life, technology has had major influences in athletics, ranging from the airplanes that allow teams to compete even though they are very long distances apart, new medical procedures for injuries, and improved shoes, rackets, safety and training equipment, etc. And, of course, the sophisticated devices used to make games available over such media channels as TV and the internet and allowing the observer to witness the details of the game perhaps better than those in the stadium (slow motion re-plays, multiple camera positions, etc). And uniform styles have also changed a bit. The photo  at the left is me 60 ears ago attired in the cool basketball uniform of those days. Notice short pants and less colorful shoes . But although no longer worn much in basketball games, Converse’s Chuck Taylor white high-tops are still alive and well.

But technology has had less effect on the action on the field or court, with the exception of annoying things such as advertisement time-outs. Tradition and the human element hold center stage. This is good, because after all, athletics is supposed to be a contest between humans. Apparently early Greek Olympians competed in the nude, to demonstrate that they were using nothing but their bodies. Modern athletes obviously wear clothes, but are still limited in the type of tools or devices they can use.

Of course, the games themselves have changed over time. Once while my wife and I were in Italy, we attended a re-enactment of Calcio Storico, a game introduced in the 15^th century and described here. It is played on a large field with goals at each end, and each team intends to get the ball into the other team’s goal. But there are 27 people on each team, and no rules to speak of, so one method of gaining an advantage is to disable the people on the other team. It is thought by many to be the parent of modern soccer, and if so, at least soccer has become more humane on the field through paring the team size and putting many more rules in place. Of course it has perhaps become more violent in the stands. But purists would enjoy the old game as well as the new ones —a field, people, a ball, and goal posts.

Technology seldom shows up on the sport page, but the first page of the sport section in the Sunday New York Times of the Sunday May 1 issue contains a story on the automatic home plate “umpire” developed by an engineering team from General Electric in the 1950.s, and championed by Branch Rickey, a man noted for innovations in the sport. The story is here.

The year 1950 was a bit early, both technically and emotionally, for this innovation. Rickey was perhaps more interested in it as a teaching tool than a replacement for the human umpire, but it was not to happen. All of us have disagreed from time to time with the umpire, as have players, coaches, and the broadcast people, but it is probably that this human element, as well as the apparent danger to the umpire exposed to foul balls, the swing of the bat, and attack from angry players and fans, adds to the pleasure of the game. Certainly modern technology, which allows observation of everything from the speed of the pitch to spin rate, the exit velocity of a home run, and the time between bat contact and the first step of the fielder, could call balls and strikes —and I can see that happening some day, much as the video-based play reviews by the referees in football, although the tradition of arguing with and booing the umpire is integral to baseball.

But it is interesting that sports do not display more use of technology, especially in this day and age, and especially for amateurs. I am not particularly interested in golf. I do like to hike through attractive scenery, but don’t particularly want to cruise through it in a golf cart being frustrated because I screwed up the previous hole. And it is an expensive past time in both time and money. But I might be more tempted if the restrictions on the equipment were not so restrictive. An example of some of the rules on golf clubs and balls can be seen here. I think it might be interesting to see what non-pro golfers might come up with if they would relax such things a bit. I might get much more interested in the game if I could invent and use clubs, rackets and balls of my own design with fewer restrictions (no compressed air or chemical propellants). Of course, I am an engineer.

And I was watching some young kids playing basketball on a court at a school recently. They were quibbling about the score and one side was losing terribly and not having much fun. I was thinking how easy it would be not only to build in an automatic score keeping system on the court , but also to mechanize the hoops so that the basket for the team with the higher score would become smaller, move higher, or both during the game. A real-time robotic equivalent of the handicap in golf!

I am not seriously proposing this, since I used to play basketball and consider it a sacred game, but it is interesting to think about such things. After all, even with roughly the same equipment the game itself has changed since I played—increased physical contact, dunking the ball and happily hanging on the hoop, the three point shot, the giant center, etc. How about some breaks for average sized people?

Of course, technology occasionally sneaks in when not allowed, and is soon discovered and the perpetrator punished. The article here concerns a bicycle racer found to be using a bicycle using an electric motor. Can you believe these bicycle racers?

Thinking About Science, Technology, and Society

I had the privilege of chairing the Stanford University program in Science, Technology, and Society (S.T.S) for five years in the 1980’s. I was talked into this by the then president and provost of the university, so had some clout, and was able to push a couple of degree programs through the academic senate, raise some money, hire some people, and think much more deeply about the subject matter than I had before. If you are not familiar with such programs, as the name indicates the subject matter is the interaction of these three broad areas, and there are on the order of 100 such programs existing in universities throughout the world (see this link).

I found that there is resistance to such thinking and such programs at many levels and for many reasons. At Stanford, for instance, there are many majors in both the A.B. and B.S. tracks in the S.T.S. program (begun in 1970 by four professors, two in engineering, one in philosophy, and one in religion), but the program is underfunded and understaffed. There are presently 38 faculty members listed as participants, but their appointments (and salaries and often their hearts) are in other departments, And S.T.S. work is highly interdisciplinary, and although interdisciplinary work is in vogue these days in universities, such things as hiring, promotion, and tenure tend to be judged based on traditional disciplines. As a non-Stanford example of the effect of this, in the 1980’s Jerome Wiesner, a man of outstanding accomplishments in government as well as academe, was president of M.I.T., and attempted to establish a whole S.T.S school. An excellent idea. But the faculty turned against this, I think partly because it threatened traditional disciplines.  And to some people, thinking broadly, and especially negatively,  about the nature and usage of science and technology is almost sacrilegious.

In countries such as the U.S. the directions of technology, and even science, are heavily influenced by such things as financial profit and war. Granted, there is tremendous satisfaction in working in the areas, and the results make for exciting media and discussion, but the fit between new science and technology and the quality of human life does not get adequate discussion. If you look at the discussion of S.T.S programs on Wikipedia here (not the best in the world) you can see some of the problems that we should think about more, but do not. One example is the old “tragedy of the commons”, which has to do with the loss in supply and quality of necessary resources if they are free. The original example was free grazing on the town commons. Present examples include using the environment including the atmosphere as a dump, the supply of fresh water, and the internet. Another set or problems comes from what is sometimes called technological determinism. Examples abound, such as the oft-heard comment that “technology must be fed”. Always?

We western cultures are loath to thoughtfully criticize technological developments. Do we really want a sky full of drones delivering packages? Do we really want driverless cars? Certainly we are learning a lot in our attempt to control them, but cars? It seems that traffic problems are due to the large and clumsy nature of individually over powered luxury packages as well as drivers. How about the present activities in the U.S, Russia, and China to develop smaller and faster nuclear weapons? Many years ago nuclear artillery shells were being developed, but people realized that it would not be a good idea to scale nuclear weapons down so they seemed more usable. Is it now a better idea?  We are thinking a bit about CRISPR/Cas9 DNA technology (put it into your browser), but we will undoubtedly forge ahead. Are we smart enough to improve ourselves through DNA technology?

I was motivated to write this blob by an article in the April 16-22^nd edition of The Economist, concerning the decision of Yuri Milner, ((a Russian physicist and investor who intends to spend $100 million on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI)), to spend another $100 million on a Laser propelled star ship. I am not criticizing Mr. Milner, since it is his money and he can spend it how he wants and his projects are literally “out there” definitely technologically advanced, and make for good media, but wow! His proposed star ship will tentatively be powered by 10 million 10 kilowatt lasers on earth combined into one 100 gigawatt beam, and reach the planets around other stars in decades rather than hundreds of thousands of years. The catch is that the spacecraft must weigh on the order of one gram. Possible? Read all about it here. But what do you think of it as an expenditure of resources? I wonder whether the wealthy are coming down with Elon Musk envy? But Musk is an idealist and in my opinion getting us to expect zero emission vehicles and re-usable rockets is of more benefit than one gram spacecraft.

I worked on the first lunar and planetary spacecraft at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the later 1950’s and 60’s, and an early and influential SETI study supervised by Barney Oliver, a pioneer in the effort, was funded by a NASA contract I had in the 1960’s, so I am familiar with the origin of such efforts. And as I said, I believe that the wealthy should spend their money how they choose, but when it comes to government money, shouldn’t we have a bit more discussion? Certainly those involved in such things as SETI have discussed the downsides and upsides of detecting extraterrestrial intelligence, but shouldn’t there be more discussion by the public? We will probably send people to Mars, but it has been proven to be an awful place and will cost a lot of money, even though it will be a real adventure for those few who go, as well as a vicarious one for the rest of us. But is that the best way to spend the money, when there are so many useful things that could be accomplished here on earth?

I am certainly not against science and technology, and in fact lead a wonderful and exciting life by being part of them, but I see their purpose as improving the human condition, and what we are capable of doing is not always something that we should do. My years in the S.T.S program changed my life, and perhaps made me less valuable as a contributor to science and technology, but I have definitely come to think that in many situations we should think more before we leap, and perhaps even more while we are leaping.

Recycling and Deposits

There was a small article in the magazine section of the April 10, 2016 New York Times, which caught my attention. The title is How to Make Money Collecting Bottles and Cans, by Malia Wollan. It is here. Read it, it will make you feel good. It is an interview with Eugene Gadsden, who describes himself as a “canner”. In it, he gives good advice on how to follow his trade. Two of my favorite pearls of wisdom are the advice to find a shopping cart “that rolls smoothly and fits your stature and style”, and “In the beginning, prepare to feel ashamed, humiliated People might yell at you………..Don’t listen, hold your head up, you’re not hurting anybody, It’s honest work.” Gadsden claims in a typical night (1 a.m. to 7 a.m.) to collect on the order of 1000 containers, worth $50 or so in New York City.

One reason that it caught my attention is that it was the way I made money until I was old enough to mow lawns. I had my chores to do, but my parents encouraged me to also earn money to buy necessities such as candy and comic books. Since I lived in the country, there was no garbage service, and in those days (1940’s or so) , not much waste. Food left overs were fed to the cats and dogs, organic garbage went into the grove to be plowed in, bent nails and wire were straightened, cans were either used as is, or flattened for various purposes, and bottles and jars became repositories for small objects or preserves.

Items that could not be used that were flammable were burnt, and anything that was left could be put into the town dump, which was simply an unused ten acre plot. But there was one exception.

In those times, people would throw trash out of car windows, and the population was low enough and the prevailing wind strong enough that it would disappear over time. The one exception was glass bottles. Since roads were narrow, and trees close to the edge, many of them would end up under the nearest trees. But there were also bottles discarded by the orange picking crews, and people such as my father, who were always out patrolling their crops. At that time many bottles were recycled, and often by kids such as me. The economics were attractive to us, although less so to the adults who threw them away. One of the phenomenal marketing stories is that of Coca Cola. The company sold the syrup to bottlers, soda fountains, etc., and they wanted to sell as much as they could. In order to do this they convinced their customers to sell the drink (the syrup and soda water) for five cents a glass (or bottle). This lasted from 1886 to 1959 – some 70 years. The results are apparent today in the presence of the drink all over the world. But the bottles were rather fancy (photo at the left), and heavy, since they were meant to be re-used (the best type of re-cycling). There was therefore a two cent deposit on each.

In most states, there is still a deposit on many bottles, but it is so small in comparison to the cost of the drink (often still 2 cents, or 5 cents), that many people toss their used bottles into the trash can, or in enlightened areas, the re-cycling bin. But two cents was a hot deal to a kid in the 40’s, since it would buy a candy bar, or one fifth of a comic book.

So I hunted bottles and gave them to my mother, who would take them to the grocery store, and bring the cash back to me. The bottles would then go back to the bottling plant in San Bernardino, be washed and steam cleaned, filled, capped, and sent out into the world again. So I made what seemed to be lots of money collecting bottles, the bottling company got them back, and the grove (and those of all our neighbors who did not have kids) stayed clean. I was a young Eugene Gadsden.

I now live in an enlightened area that puts much effort into recycling various products, and it is somewhat successful. But we have three bins, one for yard waste, one for recycled plastics, paper, and metal, and one for garbage. They are emptied into giant trucks each week. The trucks have large automatic arms that pick up the bins, empty them into the truck, and then bang them a few times to make sure that they are empty before returning them to the ground. In the process, they make a lot of noise and exhaust fumes, and block traffic. Not too long ago there were humans with smaller trucks who emptied the bins, but they have been replaced by these large mechanical monsters. There is still a driver, but that too will probably go in a few years. How about autonomous garbage trucks? And they make a separate pass to pick up each bin, thereby competing with the leaf blowers during the day,

And of course, re-cyclable material still ends up in the garbage can, plastic in the paper section of the appropriate bin, etcetera. The result is a noisier, less complete, and more costly way of getting rid of trash than bribing kids to take at least some of it to the grocery store. That approach is good enough to get quite a few adults to take their aluminum cans in, which is good, because aluminum is a most re-cyclable material.

In my coke bottle days, the deposit was two sevenths of the buying price. I just bought a bottle of tomato juice that cost $4.50. Two sevenths of that would be about $1.30. For that I would have definitely taken the bottle somewhere, or even re-sorted my bottles. But I just tossed it into our re-cycle bin, and since it was probably non-biodegradable plastic, and different plastics don’t like to be mixed, it will probably end up living forever in a landfill.

Product Quality and Serviceability

I have several small machines (chain saw, hedge shears, blower, weed whacker) powered by gas engines that no longer work.  For  some time I have intended to go through them and heal their problems, but I keep postponing this, so I made a vow a few days ago that yesterday (a Sunday), I would work on them. But I didn’t. Instead I spent the day happily working on a non-working old tractor I own. It is a late 1920’s Cletrac that has not been run for many years, during which it was rained on enough to develop the nicest uniform coat of rust I have ever seen, and through lack of use was terminally gummed up.    

The small machines, after I repair them, will be immediately useful in the garden. The tractor will not be—in fact it does not even fit in the yard. The small machines will help my wife in her gardening, and will make her happy, even though she hates the sound of small gas engines (as do I – we won’t be pleased when the air is filled with drones). The tractor will not help her. What is with me?

Partly it has to do with when, where, and how I grew up. My parents and great grandparents went through the Great Depression scraping out a living on a small orange orchard plus outside jobs in Southern California, which at the time was occupied by many people doing the same thing. Because of this, no one considered themselves poor, and in fact in terms of satisfaction in life they weren’t, but people made what they could, bought the minimum of what they couldn’t, and repaired everything to the point where many of their possessions they built and maintained are still being employed by my brother, my children and I, including a house they built of materials such as siding from no longer used freight cars and shingles made from old orange boxes (nice house in great shape still lived in by my brother). The reigning ethic was never to throw anything away (hours spent straightening bent nails and bailing wire) and repair anything that broke. I can still hear the voice of my grandmother, sounding like the wrath of God, saying “If you can’t take care of it, you don’t deserve it!

I grew up in the middle of this, and somehow came to love making and fixing things and generally tinkering with them. Probably why I became an engineer and was attracted to hobbies that involve such activities. But I have not been able to escape wondering why these activities seem to appeal to some people (me), and not to others (my wife), and why some of them are more fun for me  than others . For instance, in the case of the tractor vs. the yard machines I can think of several reasons . First of all, to me it is more of an accomplishment to rescue something that is rusted together and hasn’t worked for years, than simply diagnose and repair something fairly new. Secondly, I find older objects, with their history, different ways of accomplishing their function (and often with great aesthetic appeal overall and in their parts), sometimes more interesting than contemporary ones. And strangely enough, the task is often easier.

Why easier? Farmers were the main purchasers of tractors and other such products and they had spare time to maintain them when the weather didn’t allow them to work directly on their crops. They demanded serviceability. As mentioned they often didn’t have enough cash to hire other people to maintain their products. They often liked to work on machinery. And in those days tractors were designed to be assembled in the factory more by hand, rather than by machines, so they were designed to be worked on by humans. Finally, they were less sophisticated technically (no digital circuitry) and manufacturing technology  did not allow the complexity that one finds in such things as modern multi-functional injection molded plastic parts

As a result, the Cletrac is relatively simple to take apart (few fastener types and not that many of them), understand, diagnose, and put back together. A couple of photos might help make the message, even though they are a bit confusing. The first one on the left shows shows my tractor minus its sheet metal parts and a large casting that covers the clutch, gear train, brakes, etc. Stripping it down to that level, despite the rust, took little time and was straightforward. Note the resulting easy access to the various components, compared to access of similar parts in an automobile. The photo on the right below is a close up of the components of the drive train —the differential, the transmission, and the brakes— at the same stage. If you are not familiar with such things, they are beautifully explained on the internet. But take my word for the fact that in old tractors like the Cletrac they are easy to reach and identify, and only a few standard tools are needed for further disassembly and repair, And as you may be able to see, one can work on these things without cranes, special tools, grease pits, or lying on the ground under the machine. Granted the parts are dirty and one becomes so also, but the dirt is easily removable (except perhaps under the fingernails, but dirty fingernails show that one is doing useful work).

The blower could be called more sophisticated, but although cleaner, and with smaller lighter parts, taking it apart and diagnosing what is wrong with it, finding the necessary parts, and putting it back together will be much less fun. Even the meager instructions are less intuitive. One dead giveaway to complexity and strange  fasteners is the phrase “Service on the blower must be performed by qualified repair personnel only”. Another is “Using a Torx screwdriver to….” I would bet that most people buying this sort of product do not own a set of Torx screwdrivers.

It is easy to tell the difference in what is often called serviceability with respect to the tractor and the blower by looking at the manuals that came with each. The blower manual mainly consists of instructions on how to operate it (should be obvious by looking at a good product), warnings about safety, various notices obviously for the purpose of avoiding lawsuits, a full page of exemptions from the warranty, and notices such as “if these solutions do not solve the problem, contact your authorized service dealer”. I happen to have copies of the Instruction Manual and Parts Manual that came with the tractor, and they represent the opposite end of the spectrum. The Instruction Manual spends a bit of time on the tractor operation, but then goes into the details of each sub-assembly of the tractor, how to assemble and disassemble it, and how to maintain it including beautiful drawings. The Parts Manual offers drawings of each part in various exploded views along with part numbers. Neither has warnings about safety, pleas to contact the dealer if anything goes wrong, or statements of how wonderful the product is.  And certainly not instructions to rely on “qualified repair personnel only”. The photo below shows two pages from the Cletrac Instruction Manual as an example. They show a portion of the undercarriage of the tractor and accompany a detailed discussion of how to test the assembly, take it apart, replace parts of necessary, and put it back together.

As I said in a previous post, serviceability is one of the central components of product quality. I am afraid we have lost a great deal of that as products have become more complex and difficult to understand. Or possibly we are considered (are becoming) less capable of taking care of our products. Or lost interest in doing so —throw it away and get a new one (as in "Oh goody, now I can get  a 6S plus with 64 gigs "). Or looking at it more positively, perhaps we would rather outsource the service function to specialists, thus creating more jobs for skilled workers. Maybe I should un-retire and fix things for money for other people instead of working on my own stuff. But then  my grandmother’s voice would be even louder. 

And I will fix the blower tomorrow.

The Small as Well as the Large

As I discussed in my last blog, we can improve our lives by developing a better feeling for very large (to us) quantities, but the same is true with the very small. As I mentioned in a recent post, some modern integrated circuits contain over five billion electronic components (a large number), with transistors separated by only 22 nanometers (small— a human hair is approximately 75,000 nanometers in diameter). Integrated circuits are all over the place these days, and I think it is fair to say that most of us have only a marginal feeling for five billion, and none at all for a nanometer. Does this matter? I think so, for reasons both economic and our overall understanding and appreciation of our world.

 As you may have read, not too long ago, through the use of extremely sophisticated instrumentation, scientists succeeded for the first time in detecting a gravity wave, an important phenomenon theorized by Einstein, but only recently measured. There is a nice article by Bryan Green on what that means in the Smithsonian magazine, entitled Catching a Wave, here. The wave had been traveling through the universe for over a billion years, after having been generated by the collision of two black holes the size of the sun. Since gravitational waves travel at the speed of light, there are some very large numbers indeed involved here. I find thinking about the dimensions and the nature of the universe to be good for me, because I can’t even begin to get a sense of them. It certainly keeps one from becoming too centered on oneself. I think we should all occasionally think about how trivial we are as individuals in the cosmic sense of things. But as the Smithsonian article states, detecting this wave required an instrument capable of measuring a variation in length of a laser beam of less than a billionth of a billionth of a meter —a very small distance.

At present there is a great deal of research in an area called nanotechnology with an increasing amount of successful application. In fact we are increasingly profiting from our ability to make use of our knowledge of the behavior of very large numbers of very small things. Some examples are here. Related examples, are resulting from study of the microbiome, or bacteria population of the human body. Our bodies contain more bacteria than human cells. Exactly how many and what kind is still being determined. An interesting article on the topic is here.  Or you can just type microbiome into your browser.

Without these bacteria, we can’t live. Anyone who has had a large dose of ciprofloxin (an antibiotic commonly used for treating food poisoning, but that kills good bacteria as well as bad) has had a bit of insight as to the importance of these bacteria. Out of this microbiome research is coming such things as fecal transplants and other new and powerful methods of curing previously difficult medical conditions, which I will not discuss because my wife considers them gross, but which can be found on the internet. Feel free to type it into your browser.

The estimate in one of the web links above is that we have about 50 trillion bacteria in our body, of which 40 trillion live in our colon. We have approximately 30 trillion of our own cells, of which 80 percent are red blood cells. (more big numbers of little things)

Incidentally, another method I have of realizing I am not as big a deal as I sometimes think I am is to consider myself primarily a very sophisticated system to provide food for the bacteria living in and on me. At times they seem much more impressive than I—of course I am better looking.

Digital Clutter

The “Technology Quarterly” section in the March 12^th-18^th issue of The Economist magazine is concerned with the future of computing. Quite a few people, many in the media, are predicting that Moore’s Law, which has predicted the incredible increase of computing power over the past 50 years, is beginning to no longer hold true. Initially, in 1965, Moore’s law, named after Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, predicted that the number of electrical components that could be put into an integrated circuit would double every year.

In 1970, he changed that to every two years, and it has been amazingly accurate. It is difficult to realize what this means, but as the author of the initial article in the section points out, an integrated circuit manufactured 44 years ago by Intel had 2,300 transistors on it, which was thought miraculous. But since then the count has doubled 44 times, leading to a recent chip released from Intel that has over 5 billion transistors on it, only 22 nanometers apart. This incredible shrinking of transistors and increasing power of a chip will probably continue, but at a slower rate. As chip dimensions have increased, and the size of the electronic components decreased, they have become incredibly more powerful. But now the transistors are becoming so small that the performance gain is not as great, and simultaneously the manufacturing is becoming more expensive, it is probable that Silicon chips will to some extent slow down their miraculous growth

But no one expects the growth of computation to slow. Many organizations are working on alternate ways to build digital devices, ranging from using the strange behavior predicted by quantum theory, to using light, to carbon atoms, to following the processes in the human brain. But The Economist articlea emphasize that a great deal of development and business will accompany the better and alternate use of the integrated circuits we now possess. In particular, it speaks of the predicted coming of the “internet of things”, in which low cost, and perhaps lower performance integrated circuits will be integrated in almost everything we use or contact. As examples one article predicts refrigerators that order food, washing machines that ask dirty clothes for instructions, and paving that is capable of monitoring traffic. Apparently a consulting company named Gartner is predicting that by 2020 there will be 21 billion connected devices in the world. You can find the section at http://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2016-03-12/after-moores-law#section-3

I read it with mixed feelings. I am an engineer, and have made use of computers since 1960 when I ran into an early IBM mainframe when I went to work at the Jet Propulsion Lab. Like most people, I have been amazed at the rapidity of their growth in power, and am fascinated that the little thing in my pocket that insists on slipping out and falling on the ground has more computing power than the big computers of those days, and the spacecraft we were designing and successfully launching on then exotic flights contained computers that would hardly deserve the name these days. But these days, I am not involved either in building spacecraft or trying to model the atmosphere, and am quite frankly swamped by the relatively small amount of digital equipment I own and use. This is partly due to the constant “upgrading” I am being asked to do and learn, the proliferation of hardware and software, the various encryption and security packages I am required to have and use, and in particular the lack of standardization. Most of my friends who use Apple desk-tops (as I do) are fed up with the frequency of operating system upgrades, what seems like backward progress in their programs such as the move from iPhoto to Photos, and the increasing “features” which make almost everything more, rather than less, confusing. In fact many of us would switch to Windows, except we did that when the University decided to standardize on it, and although the operating systems are not all that far apart, the distance is enough to be confusing, and Windows will not hold still either.

As to reliability of “things”, within the last few months I have replaced a washing machine, a dishwasher, and a microwave oven because the digital control systems gave up and replacing them was more expensive than the devices were worth. The old fashioned “machinery” part of them was fine. And now, a couple of months after I bought the microwave, the touch pads that control the cycles that depend on humidity are beginning to fail.   On the other hand we have a gas stove that is probably seventy years old and a refrigerator that is probably thirty, and they are doing fine —nothing digital.

I am tired of being unable to open my friend’s cars at night from the back seat, being required to read the operator’s manual (if available) on modern TV’s and audio systems in other people’s houses and in motels and hotels, and risking my neck in random rental cars that have too many controls that operate functions I don’t want located in what seem like strange places. Do we need this?

I realize we love innovation, and that digital capability is moving fast, but maybe it’s time to consider more standardization, before we connect up all of the 20 billion devices_— In fact, before we design them. I realize that great diversity of digital devices makes for challenge and  feelings of accomplishment, for engineers, lots of profit for companies, lots of IT jobs and openings for people who write instruction manuals and give classes on how to use the newest thing, and big profits for companies who can rapidly replace their products with “new and better” ones. But I want to keep using hardware and software that does what I need done, I know how to use, is reliable, and especially does not become useless to me  because the company developing it no longer ”supports” it. Many devices being considered for the “internet of things” should have a lifetime of many years, and perhaps will be imbedded in “things” in a way that makes it difficult to change them, especially if the format keeps changing (think of Apple’s projector plugs, the increasing flavors of USB plugs, and the pile of different looking, and sometimes different voltage transformers that pile up in people’s basements until they hit the trash barrel}.

It’s time for digital devices to start growing up. They are supposed to help us, not clutter up our lives with buying and learning to use new features we don’t need or want. Maybe if the magic growth of integrated circuits is going to slow down, we should take advantage of the opportunity to learn to build devices that fit the average user a little better, and the people who want to make exotic equipment should target users who need it—somebody must be building a simulation of expected earthquakes on Ceres. 

Having criticized the direction Apple’s desk tops are taking, I should say I think their iPhones are following a much more reasonable change pattern, since features (apps) are optional, and the yearly releases don’t change radically in operation. Maybe Apple is putting more effort and thought into hand-helds than desk-top models. But I just had to buy a new phone, because the operating system in my old one could not be encoded by whatever software is being used by Stanford to encode smart phones. And it is still ridiculously difficult to change iPhone batteries.

The Training of a Pickup Owner

Some time ago, I wrote a post complaining about my then reasonably new Toyota 8ft. bed pickup. My complaints had to do with its size (except for the 8 foot long bed). It was simply too big.  But since I still have it, it must have some good points, so in all fairness.I figure that I should mention a few redeeming virtues to it.

I first experienced pickups when I rode around with my dad in his 1939 Chevrolet. Eight foot bed, but smaller machine. Eight feet is a magic number, since building materials, single mattresses, and all sorts of other things can be put into an eight foot long space, and if there is a closable end (the tailgate) they will stay there. He drove the truck for over 25 years, before losing it in an accident, and then acquired a 1966 Chevrolet pickup, which he drove until he died, at which point it went to my oldest son, and now I am restoring it. All eight foot long beds. But pickups have grown.

At one point, I needed my own pickup, and bought a new small Toyota truck (six foot bed). It was a wonderful machine, and passed through the hands of two of my children before it was finally sold. My older son is into his second small Toyota (Tacoma), and has had terrific luck with them, but they all had shorter beds. I meanwhile went through an 8 foot bed blue Ford F150 (wrong color for California’s central valley), and a white one (more acceptable to the culture). Both of them served me well, except as the bells and whistles increased in number and complexity, although the drive trains in both of them gave me no problems, I had increasing problems with failures of remote control features, electronic ignition systems, etc. So I decided to buy another no frills Toyota, and go back to the smaller model because of its convenience in parking and driving around cities. But as I tested the new Tacomas, I realized I had somehow gone from a large person to an extra large person, and I couldn’t easily get my knees under the steering wheel, my head under the top of the door opening, etc. Perhaps less flexible?

Also, I have always been  an ad-hoc camper, and had shells on my Fords, enabling me to sleep in the 8 foot bed in the rain, and my wife to ride in back on a mattress and read books and listen to music when we took long trips (probably illegal, since there was no seat or seat belt back there). So I bought a white Tundra, even though it had the shortcomings I mentioned in the earlier post.

1. Too high off the ground, demanding a running board for my wife to get into it, and making it impossible to reach objects in the middle of the bed.
2. Door too wide to be fully opened in tight parking situations.
3. Turning radius too large due to wheelbase of the truck, in turn partly due to an overly long cab. I wanted a single seat, but the “conventional cab” has room behind it, presumably to put things. But the space is such that things put there will disappear forever, because it is a high and narrow space, and how many of us are going to remember what we stuff into a space such as that?
4. Too “car like” instead of “truck like”. Large body panels with little structure behind them which dent easily, lavish and expensive rear light enclosures that are difficult to change when the break (it is a truck), etc.
5. The step on the back bumper enabling you to easily get into the back is covered by the tailgate when it is open.
6. And more

My previous experience had taught me much about ordering a pickup. I knew it was important for me to:

1. Order the minimum of bells and whistles (remote control devices, TV cameras, luxury upholstery, etc.), since over long usage, they would be likely to fail. If you lose your manual key to open the cab and start the engine, you probably have another one, and if not, the nice people from AAA can solve your problem. But if your digital “safety system” fails, you probably better hang on to your wallet and take it to a mechanic.
2. Go for the smallest engine available. It will have plenty of torque and speed for me and I don’t plan to race my pickup.
3. Go for two wheel drive. Four wheel drive obviously has more traction, but tempts one to try to attempt overly heroic feats. There is nothing more pathetic than a stuck four-wheel drive vehicle.
4. Get an eight foot bed. The two extra feet are worth the extra move needed to get into a parking space in most lots, and the worry about whether you are going to make the U- turn at the intersection. Besides, your friends and family always want to move eight foot long items. Security is a load of plywood sheets and other building material with the tail gate closed. And you can sleep in it.
5. Get one that is easy to get in and out of, because that seems to be a primary activity with a pick up.
6. Unless you have a dog or very small kids, forget anything behind the main seat, but make sure it can seat three people. I seem to do quite a bit of moving for young perhaps newly married couples, and they both want to go along, so stay away from fixed central consoles.

So what have I done to now be much more fond of my truck, than when I initially bought it?  I have not done the major modifications I had planned, like lowering the body and beefing up the springs.  But other things have happened.

1. First of all, I have accumulated the various dings and scrapes having to do with normal usage of such a truck, so I don’t have to worry about it. The truck and I can curse together when we find a new scrape in a parking lot, which makes us closer. (Incidentally, when people ding your pickup in a parking lot, they tend not to leave you a note—I guess that’s reserved for cars). I once had the unsettling experience of observing a farmer friend of mine drive a new pickup home, only to attack the inside of the bed with a crowbar, since he did not want a bed liner, and did not want to have to worry about the shiny new paint and bumpless interior. He wanted to put it to work immediately. I understand that, but can’t bring myself to do it.
2. I put running boards on it, just like in the 1930’s
3. I built several fine sturdy yet light weight boxes that I could stand on to reach material in the center of the box, and use to easily get in the back when the tail gate was open. But after the boxes were repeatedly stolen by people for storage containers (especially my wife}, I shortened an old rake which I keep in back to help me reach things. And I learned to climb in the back, using the bumper step, before I open the tail gate.
4. I have learned a set of skills associated with the truck. I have a plastic removable bed liner in the back, because I frequently load and unload heavy objects and it is somewhat slippery so that objects slide more easily on it. I have become quite good at moving things where I want them while en route. I can move them forward by an usually abrupt stop. I can move them backward by accelerating up the hill to my house. Just a few hours ago I had three toolboxes, some old tractor parts, and a bunch of just-bought loose groceries in the back, and I was able to use the uphill road to my house, my brakes, and my steering wheel to arrange everything in the order I wanted them—sophisticated swerving adjusts things sideways.

So I now love my Tundra. It has just taken fifty thousand miles for us to get used to each other. | It is still too big, too far off of the ground, and too fancy. But now it is looking older and more used like I do, and I am looking forward to the next fifty thousand miles.

Do you suppose people become more fond of products that they use a long time, both because they become more skillful at using them, and because they become “old friends”? I sure do. What does that say about constant new digital equipment and continual new “upgrades”?

U.S. Growth in the Future

I am reading various books and articles concerning future predictions of the U.S. and other countries because of the Homo Demi Sapiens book on which I am presently working. I have just finished reading The Rise and Fall of American Growth, subtitled The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (see recommended books), and loved it, although it is a heavy book, both in weight and in content. The author, Robert Gordon, is an economics professor at Northwestern University, with a deep interest in history, in this case the history of technology and related effects.

He makes two major points in the book: one being that simple measures such as GNP do not adequately describe the effects of technological developments, and the other being that the time period 1870 through 1970, and in particular 1920 through 1970, may be unique in the U.S. as far as growth is concerned.

He includes improvement in the quality of life in his measure of growth, as well as economic data. He particularly addresses a number of what he calls “great” inventions that happened in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, such as electrical light and power, internal combustion engines, the germ theory of medicine, wireless communication, and water, gas, electrical telephone and rail and highway networks. He feels that these inventions and developments, and the resulting exploitation of them, ranging from urbanization to rapid and affordable instant communication and rapid travel to household appliances and mass production rapidly changed the U.S. in remarkable and positive ways, ranging from urbanization, to much longer life expectancy, to education and entertainment.

But he thinks that the huge growth resulting from this activity is unusual, and perhaps is beginning to return to a lower, and more normal rate of growth. This is a rather unpopular view in the U.S., and quite different than the one present candidates for office are promising if they are elected. We fully expect to return to the high rate of growth we attained in the period 1920 to 1970. There are still areas in which great change is happening rapidly, the obvious one being information, communication, and entertainment as a result of digital technology, but Gordon offers a large amount of data and arguments that even this is slowing down, that such activities are allowing us to do things much more rapidly and cheaply than we could before, but we could do them, and information, communication, and entertainment are only a small part of the many factors that define our standard of living.

He finishes the book by specifically pointing out four factors that slow down growth—increased inequality, inadequate education, demographics, and repaying debt— and suggests what we have to do to combat them. But he clearly does not think that we will ever reach the rate and revolutionary effects of the growth that occurred in the period which he discusses in the book.

I found the book very thought provoking, and tend to believe many of the author’s arguments, even though I have been involved in technology (even “high” technology, whatever that means) all of my adult life. But although I am a great fan of Star Wars movies, I don’t think they predict where we are going (I hope).  I think we will figure out how to overcome the obstacles to growth that Gordon identifies to some extent and to help people displaced by digital devices to provide better and more satisfying lives. And too much growth and change can be unsettling to a large and growing population.  Finally according to Gordon, part of our stimulus to rapid growth during the 20^th century was due to recovery from the great depression and the spurt in production and recovery during and after World War II. That was a hard way to grow!

Wired Magazine—in my Opinion, a Good Product Gone Bad

As you may know, I am very interested in the quality of industrially made products. Certainly magazines qualify. I do not set myself up as an arbiter of taste, and do not usually question other people’s likes and dislikes, but sometimes I am amazed at the direction some products take,I guess in order to make more money. Wired, which used to be both fun to read and informative, had the good judgment to jump early into things digital. It featured articles on new and exciting technological developments, explained the way things worked and had interesting statistics about applications. But then Conde Naste bought it, and the result might be an improvement if you are looking for luxury goods such as ten thousand dollar watches and three thousand dollar bicycles, graphics that make the text much more difficult to read, and yet more news and interviews about and with movie actors and other wealthy glitterati.

I let my prescription lapse at that time, but I seem to continue to receive it with various inducements to re-join the subscriber list. This seems to be an ear mark of many magazines, especially those who carry a large amount of advertising. They seem to want to continue to be able to add you to their subscriber list, probably to boost “readership” and demographics to maintain and increase advertising income. Conde Naste seems to excel at this. Perhaps I will turn them in for putting trash in my mail box. But just to make sure I am not making a mistake I opened the last edition (rather than just throwing it into the trash) and did not change my mind. It has little left for me.

The cover article has to do with General Motor’s re-entry into the electric car business. Not exactly new news, and I wish them luck, but I plan to wait and see (yes, one of my sons was an early Tesla employee). Ads for Kit and Ace (luxury athletic clothing ), and TAGHeuer (luxury watches) follow, On the back cover is the Lincoln Black Label MKX (a Detroit Luxury car) and inside is an ad for Morgan Stanley. None of these are widely sought after by the people I know involved in digital devices or applications.  In between are lots of full page ads (including the kind that fold out), articles such as one about the 20 most politically influential “Tech Insiders”, an article on the GM electric car (the Chevrolet Bolt) and one on trends in transportation (bold face statements taken from text turned sideways and put in the middle of the page on both). And of course, suggestions for the well-appointed techie, including a $2000 table and a $870 office chair. The articles end with one treating a bizarre brain operation that I guess was intended to make the person owning the brain (who paid for the operation) more susceptible to being hooked up to a computer?????

I perhaps am not being fair to Wired, but I miss the old emphases, and don't seem to get much from the new. I admit I have a bias against Conde Naste magazines, except for the New Yorker, which has done a good job of holding onto tradition , and one expects luxury ads in it. It is difficult to escape these magazines, as they tend to end up in doctors offices, dentist offices, and other places where one encounters waiting rooms—they are especially worrisome in doctor’s offices because they feature models who clearly have eating disorders. And they even appear in my house. As an example, my wife subscribes to Architectural Digest (she refers to it as a “guilty pleasure”), and I hate it. First of all, there is little in it about architecture. It occasionally contains impressive houses (usually owned by celebrities) , but the emphasis is on the furnishings and decorations in the rooms.  The items are all identified by source, and can be bought from dealers often listed in the magazine if one has a large amount of money to spend on such things. But the three reasons it annoys me the most is the staggering amount of advertising in the magazine (they should pay me to read it), the fact that very few of the spaces in the magazine show any signs of human habitation (no toys on the floor, magazines on the table, glasses on the drainboard, bicycles on the porch, or butt-dents on the couches), and third, the letters seldom of ever fall short of raving about the magazine and its contents. I admit that I have never written a letter to the magazine, and maybe I will to see what happens. I will have no trouble at all in finding something that I consider awful, and I suspect they will not print my letter. If they do, I will write an apology to them and a retraction to this post (maybe).

Are Computers Turning Us Into Slaves?

Are Computers Turning Us Into Slaves?

In 1996, Clifford Stoll, already a long-time computer user, wrote a book entitled Silicon Snake Oil, which was critical of the internet. I loved it and recommended it to all of my friends. It was a breath of fresh air in an atmosphere which was polluted with the breathing of people sure that computers and the internet would solve all problems and generally lead to nirvana. Many of the latter are still around.

One observation I remember from the book, was that in the early days of the computer, he claimed he spent half of his computer time simply trying to get his equipment to do what he wanted it to do, which was reasonable, but in 1996 it seemed like he was still doing this, and it hardly seemed reasonable at all.

Now it is ten years later. It has been raining for the last two days in California, and although I probably should have gone outside and played in the rain, it being miraculous in our drought ridden state, I decided to stay inside and work on my computer, happily typing on books, getting my photographs out of Apple’s new and disastrous Photos software, doing small things such as this post, and so on. I did none of that. Instead I worked on our relatively simple home computer system, which consists merely of two computers, two printers, and related equipment.

At the beginning, my wife was having problems with scanning material to Word, and downloading Christmas photos from her camera, and my printer was doing an awful job printing pictures – streaky and too dark. The streaky was clearly from a printer needing cleaning. But the too-dark seemed like maybe something more profound. The result was a struggle with color balance, where was it being controlled, etc, and the usual downloading of new software. Still too dark. So I ran it through the cleaning sequence three times. No difference. At that point I had already spent far more time than the printer was worth, so I went and bought a new printer, and you know how much time that takes, especially since it is sales season, people are still returning Christmas gifts, and the traffic is a nightmare in this area anyway. And of course, there was then the time spent learning to use all of its features, most of which I didn't need.

After selfishly solving my own problems first, I attacked those of my wife, and made a slight bit of progress. Like most people we work with lots of peripherals and are hampered by finite desk space and large screened maschines with not enough USB ports (which are in the back of the machine, and therefore sweep everything on the desk to the floor when the computer is rotated to reach the damn things). She was powering one USB hub off of another one, and since the light on her card reader was not going on, maybe not enough power to download the photos? So I did the usual shuffling of USB cords, including trying to trace them through the snarl that accompanies most computers, hoping that some combination would let everything work, but no luck. I then re-entered the post holiday traffic and got a new and better brand of hub, but still no luck. I finally tried her card on my computer and it also didn’t load – woops, something wrong with the card. It turns out she bought it overseas, so I set that one aside for later.

On to the scanning. Somewhere in the recent “upgrading” we have been doing due to changes in operating systems (required on mine by the encryption now demanded by Stanford servers and hers demanded by peripherals and consistency with mine), and resulting obsolescence of applications, she couldn’t find her favorite method of simply scanning to RTF and then saving the document as a Word document. We worked on that for a while before succeeding, also trying to translate the marketing language concerning available new optical character recognition software that maybe we should download (impossible to learn such things over the phone, all advertised as the best on the internet, and I wasn’t about to go driving again). But by then, my two days were over.

So, Mr. Stoll, in those two days days, I  far exceeded spending half of my time trying to get my “system” to do what I want it to. I  spent ALL OF IT. And was not done! And to make matters worse, quite a bit of my time was spent accommodating to having to “upgrade” software which, I didn’t want to do, because it will require me to modify useful habits I have acquired over time, and the changes will not improve my life—so far, quite the contrary. In my present mood, typewriters were pretty cool.

Following day note: My wife’s computer had lost its connection to the internet the day before in all the excitement. We initially thought it was because we had pulled something loose in the afore mentioned swarm of wiring which not only interconnects our computers, printers, and so on, but also allows us to participate in a beta test of Google Fiber and TV, all controllable from a pad and working through many black boxes. My credentials would seem to indicate that I should be better than average at screwing around with this kind of stuff, since I have been an engineer for 60 years, have used computers since they became available, and I guess was once a “rocket scientist”, since I worked on spacecraft at J.P.L.  If true, I have great sympathy for those who are only average and are in the same boat as I seem to be in.

Turned out it was a faulty power strip, now replaced and all systems are go, except that one of the external back-up drives seems to be balking.  I will now post this thing, call for help from a friend, Tim Keely, the world’s best IT person, who will know what is up with the external drive (no clue from its manual on the web), get back to the imported photo card, and then begin my periodic unsnarling of wires that seem to love to intertwine beneath desks and tables and behind sofas, bookcases, heavy chests of drawers, and other heavy objects. My world is not yet wireless.

And aren't computers supposed to serve us, rather than the opposite?

A Great Book About Everything

 Every once in a while I read a book that really impresses me. Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari (HarperCollins books, more info on recommended books at left), is one of these. Maybe it is because I am working on a book concerning the influence of our evolution on problem solving. Sapiens is a book about us, including  a bit about the evolution of our brains. Maybe it’s because I learned a lot and tend to agree with what he says.

It also impresses me because Harari writes better than I do, is better at referencing sources than I am, and perhaps is smarter and knows more than I do about the history of the human race. But I will only admit this to those of you who read my posts, because I trust you not to tell anyone. And it doesn’t make me feel too bad, because he is a historian (writing and referencing), and probably doesn’t know as much techy stuff as I do. But his photo doesn’t make him look very old…………..

I have read many books about the origins and evolution of homo sapiens, but none that are as fun to read and that cover as broad a span of material. There is a quote on the front of his book from Jared Diamond, who is definitely no slouch in the knowledge and writing departments, and it pretty well summarizes the book. It is “Sapiens tackles the biggest questions of history and of the modern world, and it is written in unforgettably vivid language”.

The book is divided into four sections, The Cognitive Revolution, The Agricultural Revolution, The Unification of Humankind, and The Scientific Revolution. It’s emphasis is more on relatively recent times rather than primitive (more history available after we developed writing). It gives a few insights into where the author thinks it is all going, and although he leaves open the option that we have that ability to destroy ourselves, and may do so, it is generally positive, although he does point out a few mistakes he thinks we may have made. One example I found interesting, was his questioning of the agricultural revolution. He suggests, for example, after talking about life before and after the Neolithic Revolution, that wheat domesticated us instead of the opposite, turning us into slaves to increase it’s population and health at the expense of our free time and relatively crime and worry free lives.

Another interesting section is his ambivalence about money (economics). He is definitely convinced that money was one of the main reasons that we went through a major change in our material world. When we bartered for our help and goods, we were restricted on what we could get by what we had to offer. When money, which could buy almost anything, came into the picture, we not only had more access to what we wanted, but we could now grow in our ability to do this buying through loans and other financial means.

But as he does a good job of pointing out, modern economic systems are entirely based on faith, require growth, and lead to leveraging. He believes that in the long term the world will become one (if nothing else, business pushes this), and our varying faith in money and financial institutions as to the value of money could cause much more serious and wide-spread panics and crashes.

But enough. If you haven’t already, read the book. You’ll enjoy it, learn some things, and be able to argue with your friends about it.

Space and Nostalgia — the Joy of Successful Projects.

When I watched the video of the successful landing, after deploying eleven satellites, of the Space Exploration Systems Corp. Falcon 9 first stage booster the other day, I teared up, which I also did when I watched the successful landing of the Curiosity Mars Rover. Why? Granted they were both incredible technological successes, but for me there was more.

I worked for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena CA part time in 1960 and 1961, and then full time until 1966, when I joined the Stanford faculty. It was a wonderful time to be there, as the U.S. was in the “space race” with the Soviet Union, NASA had taken over the lab from the army (although it is managed by Caltech), the military had built the necessary booster rockets, such things as solid state electronic circuitry and computers were available. Despite the Cold War, it was also a happy time in the U.S., as far as confidence and the economy were concerned, and a comparatively innocent one, since the U.S. was still in its post World War II victory mood (despite the Korean War), and not yet facing the many large problems at home and in the world that bombard us from all directions.

In 1960, when I arrived, the Lab employed about 2000 extremely competent people and built its products internally, as it had learned to do while developing rockets for the army. It was then working on the Ranger spacecraft to the moon, which was to accomplish a number of missions having to do with learning more about getting there, and its nature. I joined the people in the Lab who were thinking about exploring the planets and other bodies much further from Earth. In those days, many unprecedented problems needed to be solved, and the Ranger project, in which the first six missions failed for various reasons, was the big learning experience, which resulted in much technology and understanding used in following missions. The first launch was in August of 1961, the first successful one in July of 1964 (the photographs of the approach to impact that flooded every TV screen in the country), and the final one in November of 1964. Although I was primarily involved with the first Venus and Mars flyby spacecraft (Mariner 2 and 4 were highly successful, 1 and 3 failed, so we were better, but still learning), The various technical groups had continual contact with each other, so we planetary folk were very aware of what the lunar people were doing, and took as much advantage as we could of what they had learned and designed and built.

I worked on various temperature control and structural problems for the Venus shot but was on the preliminary design team through design, fabrication, and mission control for the Mariner Mars — probably the high spot of my time working on aerospace projects. At the time I was at JPL, the work was not only technically extremely challenging, but a bit romantic, since traveling in space has always had a certain cachet, and we did not yet know that the other moons and planets were as barren as they turned out to be. People still believed in canals on Mars, and at least some form of life. Also, through the Ranger failures, we had learned the difficulty of designing very complex and necessarily light weight, and therefore somewhat fragile equipment that could survive the launch environment and was extremely reliable from launch to the end of its mission. I will not try to describe the feeling when these spacecraft, which represented years of hard and challenging work, succeeded in their mission. One reason I cannot capture it, is when one works on a complicated system involving many disciplines, goals, and processes, one becomes increasingly aware of how many things can go wrong. Also, at the time I was at JPL, spacecraft were attracting an amazing amount of attention in the world, and failures were not accepted by those not involved in designing, making, and flying them. The failure of the first six Rangers earned a Congressional Investigation for JPL, which was no fun at all.

So I teared up upon watching the Falcon 9 landing and the people who made it cheering on my TV because it stirred up feelings I had over 50 years ago. I managed R&D groups, was involved in feasibility studies for future projects such as the Voyager series, and did other overall jobs at JPL, but nothing came close to the feelings of being an anonymous part of a larger group successfully completing a difficult project that they considered significant.

Kudos to Elon Musk. He is definitely carrying out his goal of making a difference. My son Dan was an early engineering employee at Tesla and worked there until very recently, at which point he resigned and joined a start up. He had a wonderful run at Tesla, and I imagine quit because he does prefer smaller companies.   He joined Tesla because he is very conscious of the environment, and Tesla’s goal was (and is) to demonstrate the feasibility of electric cars. They certainly have accomplished that goal. Next year a whole series of electric cars will hit the road from other companies.

But Tesla, and now Space X, whose goal was to get the private sector involved in space travel?   Is Musk for real? Perhaps he is a more highly developed life form. He speaks often of wanting to build a city on Mars, die on Mars, etc. Perhaps he simply wants to go home. But I hope he stays here. We need more like him.

Oh, by the way, if you have not seen the video of the Falcon 9 flight, it is here

And Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Thinking and Writing

I am presently working on a couple of books I have been thinking about for years, as well as my “rescue old machinery” projects, house maintenance, and life in general. I will from time to time talk about all of these, but fortunately the title of this blog is People and Products, so I have given myself a lot of room to move.

One of these books is about the benefits of working with one’s hands. I have always had hobbies/jobs that require this, and such activity seems to be necessary to keep me fulfilled. The book is about why working with one’s hands is a good thing to do. It is perhaps a defense of the fact I spend quite a bit of my time in such activities, and of many of my friends who also do so. In my opinion use of the hands becomes more and more necessary as more and more of our lives seem to be focused on interacting with digital devices. To me, typing just doesn’t quite qualify.

The other one has the working title Homo Demi Sapiens (Half Wise Humans). The gist of the book can be seen below, which was the final slide I included in a talk I recently gave to a 50^th reunion class of the Stanford Graduate School of Business,  They agreed with me.

HOMO DEMI SAPIENS
Maybe We’re Not Quite as Smart
As We Think We are

AND MAYBE WE SHOULD FACE IT!

PERHAPS THERE ARE NO PERFECT ANSWERS TO MOST IMPORTANT PROBLEMS,

OR MAYBE WE AREN’T INTELLIGENT ENOUGH TO FIND THEM.

MAYBE WE SHOULD ACQUIRE A BIT MORE HUMILITY ABOUT HOW SMART WE ARE.

MAYBE PEOPLE ON THE OPPOSITE SIDES OF FENCES SHOULD LEARN TO BETTER COMPROMISE

AND COME UP WITH AND IMPLEMENT SOME WORKABLE CREATIVE SOLUTIONS.

 

This book has been years in the making, although I didn’t know it at the time. The initial edition of my Conceptual Blockbusting book was concerned with blocks to individual creativitiy. But as time went by, I included group creativity and organizational creativity. Homo Demi Sapiens is concerned with problem solving in even larger populations —religions, nations, the world, etc. A perhaps grandiose attempt, but fun to try.

A book I have read many times over the years is entitled Sagittarius Rising, and was written by Cecil A. Lewis, who was a World War I fighter pilot, later to become one of the founders of the British Broadcasting Company and a successful writer. The book, which is beautifully written, is a flattering picture of flying, but much of his World War I flying was over the trenches, in which he could look down from the beautiful sky to see people killing themselves in the mud and wreckage. One comment from the book  was “Man individually was sane and reasonable. Only collectively was he a fool.” True?

That comment has stayed with me, and perhaps is one of the reason I am writing this book. Other stimuli are such things as the international situation, replete with such things as the Middle East impasse, the environmental situation, and if we want to remain a credible world power, the war between the democrats and the republicans in the U.S. It is past time for we humans to get our act together. Termites have been around for 250 million years. They have what is sometimes called group intelligence. How long will we last? Our group intelligence as a species has not yet been fully tested. The modern form of humans showed up only 200,000 years ago, The Neolithic revolution (agriculture, settlements) happened only 12,000 years ago. In the past few hundred years we have made major changes in the way we live, but they are leading us in worrisome directions. If C.S. Lewis is right, we had better start worrying more about the “Sapiens” in the title we have given ourselves.

Virtual Reallity —Media Flavor of the Month

I trust you had a happy Thanksgiving.  The University (and I) take a thorough vacation being thankful, so I am being a bit sloppy on posts.  But I am back, for better or worse.

Judging from the media, the world is agog with the thought of virtual reality devices and programs being available at a reasonable cost.  VR, as it is sometimes called, is being heralded as the next best thing, the replacement for television, and so on.  Apparently billions of dollars are being spent on developing the hardware by major players in the digital world and which is imminent on the market.  I am definitely not involved, and my only experience with VR is because a few  weekends ago the Sunday New York Times put together a down-loadable sample of how their material could be presented in VR, and included one of Google’s cardboard box viewers with their paper. 

 At this stage of the game, one cannot expect to receive a technologically mature product for free, but we had had a lot of fun playing with it. and it is indeed mind-boggling to be able to turn your head and watch the world swim by.  The image in the sample was not comparable in quality to that presently available on a TV or computer screen, but probably superior to the first TV image I ever saw, and if the decreasing cost and increasing ability to handle data continue, it will continue to improve.

 But I have had the privilege of observing movies  go to color and sophisticated sound and projection equipment and now three-d, TV going to color and larger screens with ever-increasing resolution and accompanying surround sound, opera doing a wonderful job with "hi-def", and everything from theater through vocal performance to classic orchestras taking advantage of technology.  These improvements have definitely made for a more complete experience, but I am not sure how much they have revolutionized the experience, because people seem to adapt to technological innovation, and take it for granted. 

In my opinion, the main factor in entertainment, is the quality of the message being presented.  Three dimensional films have not obsoleted the “old fashioned” film approach, which does not totally surprise me, because I happen to know a few people who have lost sight in one eye, and do not claim a great loss in their enjoyment of life.  My wife and I seem not to desire a TV screen that covers most of a wall.  Neither do we need woofers that cause discernable changes  in the size of our chest cavities.  In fact, we are often drawn to presentation of first class material presented in a more primitive way (old movies?)

 So my question about VR, which obviously requires more complex and therefore expensive camera and viewing equipment, is what is it best to be used for?  Obviously it will be used for games —it will add to the realism of war games if one has to worry about being shot in the back or bombed from straight over head.  But I recently looked again at the New York Times sample news presentation and found the VR to be somewhat distracting to its purpose.   The New York Times story in the sample concerned  children who had been displaced by war, something with which we should be very concerned,  but the wheat fields behind my head, seemed to fill no great need, especially because I kept checking what was there rather than focusing on the children and their problems.

  Theater often has great power because it focuses on a few characters and a set which adds to the story.  I am not aware of a travelogue movie that has used three d.  In fact, travelogues are usually made more interesting by including interesting characters and some sort of plot, on which the viewer can focus.  Even then, I am not sure that they are superior to high quality still  photos. Advertisements in Grocery stores tend to try to focus our attention, not allow us to see the merchandise behind us.

 So I think the future of virtual reality, other than in games and as a novel way to present information (for a while), depends on the ability to generate programs that can accomplish things that can not be done more cheaply, with simpler equipment, and perhaps more effectively due to less distraction by material not germane to the intention of those producing the material.  Good luck to it, but I plan to focus on real reality for a while.  

Edible Automobile Wiring - Homo Sapiens vs. Rodentia

My wife has a 2004 Acura TSX, which she loves greatly.  But maybe due to where we live (lots of greenery), maybe due to where she parks it, maybe due to changes in the environment, we have had a few sessions of rodent damage to the wiring, a couple of them worrisomely expensive.

Rats, mice, and squirrels love to nestle around or in cars, build nests, and chew on automobile wiring.  This has happened as long as I remember, but it used to be possible to see the damage, wrap some electrical tape around the bare copper, and get on with life.  No longer.  Wiring harnesses become increasingly complex as owners demand more and more electronic and electrical gadgets in their cars, so that the damage is often not visible, and can be found only by weird behavior on the part of engines, transmissions, lights, instruments, etc. etc. etc.  And as near as I can tell, wiring harnesses are installed early in the assembly process and are often buried within the body, so often even I, who pride myself on my ability to fix anything that is broken, have to rely upon mechanics who have the proper equipment and detailed knowledge. 

 Our last adventure took place a couple of weeks ago, and cost us a thousand dollars and a good bit of inconvenience.  My wife was parking the car in our carport, and it was not only protected from rain, but when she returned from driving it, the engine compartment was  warm and snug —a rodent’s dream. A new wiring harness was required.  The day after we brought the car home, there was a beautiful new nest and signs of more gnawing.  I was able to tape over the bare copper and destroy the nest, we moved the the car's parking spot (many rodents can remember how to find food spatially as well as by smell), and we sprayed one of the many available “rodent repellants” in the engine compartment and on the exposed wiring.  Most of these don’t work very well, and the next day it happened again.  Upon looking more carefully to see where the soft and clean nest material came from, we found that the source was a mat of uncovered insulation fastened to the front of the fire wall, probably to reduce noise.  What could be more convenient for our invaders?

 So, we went into full war mode, complete with deep research and many traps, poisons, bought and hand made potions, noisemakers, lights, and changing parking locations.  So far we are holding our own against the enemy.

One thing I learned, is that we are certainly not alone, although people seem to be a bit reluctant to talk about this problem.  Maybe they feel kind of stupid, as we did since we had been through it before. A check of the internet by putting something like “rodent damage to car wiring” in one's browser results in an explosion of outrage and advice.  As an example, look at this thread.  The people who are writing to it are probably nice gentle family folk, who have been driven to say things such as “I want these little f***ers to stop chewing the wires in my car. Ideally, this would be because they are dead, with their bleached skulls posted on stakes around the driveway as a warning to the next generation”. The thread shows an interesting contrast between people who love rodents (they are small, cute, and fun to watch —I even got my daughter a pair of white rats as pets when she was small) and have not had their wiring eaten, and those who have.

 Apparently some rodents have teeth that continually grow and they must gnaw to keep them in control.  Also, apparently some car wiring insulation is made of soy, and is very tasty to rats. But although there are many commercial products available, and much advise on what to do to your automobile and cute fuzzy animals that all of a sudden have become “pests”, the problem continues.

 Of course, being a simplistic engineer, I wonder why automobile manufacturers do not make cars with wiring that is repellent to rodents.  It would certainly make for good advertising, and if one manufacturer did so, the others would probably be pressured to follow.  Maybe rodent damage is a boon to the repair part of the automotive business.  And it probably would take a bit of research to figure out what to do, since looking at the ground squirrel population in the local hills, the tree squirrels leaping happily from branch to branch, and the amount of rat and mouse poop that builds up in unused, and especially warm nooks and crannies, the rodent population is wide spread, and in parts of the world, growing.  And probably rodents have been around longer than people and will continue to be here long after we are long gone.

 But I consider the appetizing nature of wiring to be a serious quality flaw in at least some automobiles.  I have always loved Honda (the mother of Acura) products, and in fact my wife’s car is fun to drive and a great success in all other aspects that are important to her.  But we have other vehicles around, and rodents seem to give them less attention, so this may be a factor for us in determining future purchases.  I asked my son who works at Tesla whether they were worrying about this problem, and he assured me that they were.

Flaws in Complex Systems

As systems become more complex, flaws tend to appear.  A few weeks ago, the lining began to peel in our microwave oven, exposing a worrisome expanse of metal.  It was old and we clearly needed a new one, so we ordered one from Amazon, a usually straightforward action.  We promptly received an acknowledgement, saying it would arrive in two weeks, which seemed a surprisingly long time.  In a week or so  we received a message from “Tempus & Co. – Amazon Marketplace”, telling us that our oven had been packed and shipped, and it arrived soon after, and we walked out of our door one morning to find a large box with our new oven.  But strangely, although it was brand new and made by a different manufacturer than our old one, the lining was also peeling off of it.

 The shipping/billing receipt in the plastic envelope on the side of the box showed that it came from Home Depot, with no mention of either Amazon or Tempus & Co., so we called the local Home Depot store customer service people to find out what to do.  They were not sure but told us to bring it into the store and they would refund our money.  But we had paid Amazon, and there was no shipping order for them to get back to either Amazon, or Tempus & Co., nor any of the usual Amazon return literature.  So they started phoning, and could not find any way to connect the faulty oven we had brought them, with the Amazon payment.  Finally, after an hour or more (seemed like three) of phoning (difficult if you have ever  have tried to phone Amazon) and the participation of the store manager, they made some kind of connection, found the original shipping number and figured out how to refund our money.  Apparently the oven had been purchased from another Home Depot store (not specified on the paper work), they guessed by Tempus & Co.,who when I checked on the internet, looked like a toy store, so none of us were sure what “Amazon Marketplace” meant.  I think we all ended up confused, and my wife and I had no fun at all cooling our heels in the Home Depot store and not knowing how and whether we were going to get a refund on a damaged  piece of merchandise.

 We had returned items to Amazon before, and had no trouble.  But I got the distinct feeling from this interaction and some of the comments made by the Home Depot store people that Amazon's operation has become so large and complicated that it is perhaps picking up more problems associated with size and complexity.

 As an interesting similar experience, our washing machine failed at about the same time, so we bought a replacement at Best Buy, a store at which we had always had good experiences.  The one we bought was discounted, since it was not in the box and had a couple small dents in the side, but otherwise appeared brand new.  Best Buy contracts out the delivery of their large appliances, and not only does one have to wait several days for this to happen, but the delivery people have the policy of calling the evening before the delivery and giving a four hour window when they will appear the next day, and someone over 18  years of age must be at the delivery point to receive the merchandise — kind of inconvenient for a younger working couple.  But we are retired, so were there to meet the delivery, but the back of the washer had been brutally smashed in.  The truckers explained that this happens occasionally in the warehouse, and that if they were us, they would not accept the washer.  Not a hard decision for us to make.

 So back we went to the store and bought a new one, went through the ritual again, and are happy with our new washer.  But we spent a great amount of time waiting for the delivery day, the truck to appear (twice) and driving to the store and back (tough to buy and exchange washing machines over the phone or from the information on the internet).  The people in the Big Buy store apologized for delivering the smashed-up one, and not only returned our money but gave us a discount on the new one, so we still like them, but it seemed to me that they should have a bit closer control on their warehouse and delivery schedule.  Are large chains, now that they are selling over the internet as well as from stores, suffering from operating with too few humans, forgetting that humans and computer systems are fallible, and tending to lose a bit of control over contracted and non-computer aspects of their business such as warehousing and delivery?  Not surprising if it is happening.  The more parts there are to fail, the more likely there will be failures.

Bye Bye Tank

I recently sold a small British army tank I have had for some time.  To be formal, it was a British armored reconnaissance vehicle—CVR(T)— Scorpion.  It was classified as a light tank, built in the 1970’s, and at that time it held the speed record for the fastest production tank in the world (51.10 mph).  Photograph at left.

 I acquired this tank perhaps because I had never  owned one, and always thought it would be fun to drive one around, and because this one is light (9 tons – made of aluminum to be air-freighted), small (17 ft.long. 7 ft. wide, 7 ft. high) easy to work on, and equipped with all the bells and whistles available at the time  periscopes, lights, tools, antennas, lots of electronics, equipment boxes all over the place, and even a boiling vessel for making tea (British).  It is also fun to drive, being equipped with a Jaguar engine (I do know Jaguar engines), a centrifugal clutch, and a motorcycle-like foot gear shift.  And lest you worry, it was part of a collection and legally de- militarized (the cannon is not operable, the machine gun had obviously been removed – this is California).

 I also was probably influenced  to buy it because at the time I was on the board of the foundation that owned this collection, the largest private collection in the world of beautifully restored military tracked vehicles, which belonged to a man named Jacques Littlefield, one of my all-time favorite students.  The collection was a magnet for tours, kids, my students  (I taught a course on the historical relationship between technology and war), ex-tank crew people, and generally people who were interested in machinery and military history , and I finally could no longer fight the urge to own one. The collection, incidentally has joined the Collings Foundation headquartered in Stow, Massachussetts, which has an outstanding collection of vintage automobiles and aircraft.

 Other favorable factors were that Jacques  sold it to me for an excellent price, his people were a source of knowledge and extra parts, and my kids and grand kids thought that it was wondrous..  The only slight downside was that my good wife considered that it was symbolic of violence, and should not be in our yard, and might not even be welcome on the Stanford Campus.  So I located it  at my friend's farm up in the Sacramento valley, comfortably covered by a barn and surrounded by lots of dirt roads and open fields.

 But many years passed, my kids were no longer fascinated by it, I was not going to my friend’s farm as often and beginning to worry about it not being looked after, and then the major factor— I could barely get into it and move around any more.  So one of my friends (who took on the responsibility for finding a home for the big collection after Jacques died a few years ago), found a person who was looking for a tank like mine, and who would obviously give it an excellent  new home, so I sold it to him.

  The photo on the right shows it being packed ready to  go.  In a sense, I am glad I sold it, because I wasn’t really using it and don’t have to worry about it any more.  But it is the only one of my hobby machines I have sold—and it was the only tank I owned.  Maybe a little seller’s remorse.

 My wife is not unhappy at all.

 

 

Resistance to Change:

Anthropologists sometimes speak in terms of generations (25 years) and in those terms, our species (homo) has been around some 240,000 generations (6,000,000 years), This is plenty of time for us to evolve a la Mr. Darwin.  But we did not have the advantage of stone tools until the Paleolithic period which began about 100,000 generations (2.5 million years) ago – 140,000 generations with no tools, probably no fire, definitely no athletic shoes, roaming the land in small groups (probably extended families )for our food and shelter, but plenty of time to evolve into tool users.   

 The Neolithic Revolution, when we discovered agriculture and began living in fixed areas, was about 500 generations ago (12,500 years). This period of time since we began farming and building towns and cities is a bit shorter, and we are obviously still involved in working the wrinkles out of such activities. 

 But think of what we have done to ourselves since the industrial revolution which occurred in Europe only about 10 generations (250 years) ago—or for that matter since transistors were invented some 70  years ago (three generations)—a major change in our life style with little opportunity to evolve to match it.

 I have been expecting a back lash against the recent high rate of changes in our lives, much of it resulting from developments in science and technology, over the past few years, but so far it has not happened.  In fact, we seem to be fascinated and entertained by these changes, providing that they don’t inconvenience us too much as individuals.  But there are signs that a backlash is beginning, ranging from mutterings of people being forced into “upgrading” their computer software, to the increasing worry about job loss, traffic, scarcity, and environmental degradation, to the increasing gap between the rich and poor, and the loss of the essential middle class.

 An example is an angry article in the October 25^th issue of the New York Times written  by Mark Lynas, and entitled Europe Turns Against Science.  It is here.  The article criticizes the 17 countries in Europe that have announced bans on the cultivation of genetically modified(G.M.) crops.  The author feels that this will not only be extremely costly, but even though the bans do not include research, will cause these countries to fall behind those who are including genetically modified plants in their agriculture (the U.S.?).  These European countries have great influence in the world, and apparently much of sub-Saharan Africa is also forbidding the growing of G.M. foods.  This is in spite of a great amount of research showing that G.M. foods are safe, and strange inconsistencies, such as the importing of some 30 million tons per years of soy and corn based animal feeds by these European countries, much genetically modified, and much from the U.S.  And since many G.M. foods are designed to be immune to many pests and diseases,  the use of pesticides and other polluting and expensive chemical agents will continue to increase in these countries.

 And then there is the problem of sufficient food production in the world.  G.M. crops  often are more productive.  The United Nations, which keeps track of  population trends in the world, has for some time predicted that the world population would peak at  9 million by the end of this century.  We are now at 7.3 billion (the last billion of which happened in only 12 years).  The U.N. has now upped its prediction for the end of the century to 11 million, a large portion of which will be in Africa.  In fact, one prediction is that by 2050, Nigeria will have a larger population than the  U.S.  Where is the food going to come from to feed everyone?  Lynas has a couple of quotes in his article to back up  his argument about some extreme African attitudes toward G.M.foods.  One is by Tobaiwa Mudede, described as a crony of Robert Mugabe, who singles out G.M. food as the cause of the “huge problem of sexual dysfunction in the U.S”. , where “males become impotent around the age of 24, at the prime of life”. The author also mentions being interrupted while giving a talk in Tanzania by a farmer who said  he would never grow biotech crops because “they would turn my children into homosexuals”.

 I blame resistances such as these on changes happening too fast for the comfort zones of our species.  We don’t seem to be that bothered by the much slower ongoing activities in “improving” plants through cross-breeding. There is some value in this typical  human resistance to change, because it results in thorough study of secondary effects of new developments. And I am expecting the next resistance to appear either in the area of associated with computers and the internet, or to extreme and very expensive developments in medicine oriented toward immortality .  But the downside is that many people who could benefit from these developments are deprived of them. The undernourished in Africa?

Intelligence and the Computer

Intelligence is a broad word.  If you want to check it out in Wikipedia, it is here.  Of note is that although usually applied to humans, it is also used in conjunction with animals, plants, and increasingly to machines (artificial Intelligence.)  If we consider the word “smart”(perhaps a subset of intelligent), we seem to include everything with a chip in it (smart cars, smart houses, smart thermostats, smart toys, etc.)

 Here in the heart of Silicon Valley, there seems to be increasing confidence that the computer and related information systems will continue to become more intelligent as time passes.  In fact, a few hard-core folk believe that computers will surpass humans in intelligence. There is an educational venture in the Silicon Valley area that calls itself Singularity University and which studies innovation and so-called exponentially accelerating technologies. Singularity in this case refers to digital technology, and is defined in Wikipedia here.   One of the co-founders, and now Chancellor of the  University, is Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and technology visionary..  He has written a book entitled Singularity is Near, and believes this singularity will occur in 2045, and that we should prepare for this time when computers become more intelligent than humans and continue to advance more rapidly than we can.

 Admittedly, I do not have the technical reputation that Kurzweil does, but I do not believe this at all. Computers have steadily taken over activities that humans used to do—calculation, recording and organizing information, controlling machinery, making decisions based on input, and so on.  But I see no way they can take over the ship.   For one reason, we humans, not computers, define intelligence, and we do so selfishly.  Think of how much faith we place in the I.Q. test, which˙ after all merely measures how well one does on a traditional “test”(according to traditional questions) rather than overall intelligence.  Nevertheless we believe in it, But should should computers out perform us at taking the test, we will change the test. As computers do better than humans at various tasks (Big Blue beating Kasparov at Chess, once thought to be a game requiring great intelligence, and speed at calculation, which got me good grades at Caltech), we seem to change our minds as to how much intelligence is necessary to accomplish these tasks. And there is always Dave’s approach to HAL, his misbehaving AI computer, in the 1968 movie A Space Odyssey—shut it down.  

 I first encountered the then large mainframe computer in the 1950’s when I worked first in the Air Force, and then at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  I was fond of these machines because they could do complicated and involved calculations that I really did not like to do, and practically never could have, by hand.  I have worked with computers ever since, and like most people, I consider them not only immensely useful, and wondrously capable of speeds and data handling with which humans cannot compete.  But I don’t think of them as particularly intelligent, any more than I thought of the Library of Congress, adding machines or telephones as Intelligent.   I know that Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches are being applied in an increasing number of ways. And the role of computers will change a great deal by 2045, which after all is 30 years from now. The digital age is still quite young. The invention of the internet was approximately 30 years ago and of the World Wide Web only 24 years ago. Computers will continue to amaze us , until we take the new miracle for granted, but we humans will continue to lead the movement.

 I am a believer in artificial intelligence when humans are in the loop.  When I joined the Stanford faculty, I worked a bit with the then Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, headed by John McCarthy, one of the early pioneers in AI.  One of the graduate students was working on computer vehicle control ,  and was using a remotely controlled cart I had built for my Ph.D. thesis (remote control by a human with time delays in the loop) a few years before.  It was clear to me then that computers would take over an increasing number of information processing tasks that people had traditionally done, but even then I was skeptical about how far they would go at being truly intelligent.  At some level, we humans have always had to tell digital devices what to do and how to do it.

 In the early days, AI was very interested in the workings of the human mind.  But the human mind is beyond complex.  Yesterday there was an article in the New York Times entitled “Will You Ever Be Able to Upload Your Brain, by Kenneth Miller, Co-Director of the Center for Theoretical Neurosciences at Columbia University”. It is here. He wrote it because of the attention being paid to an increasing number of people who seems to want their brain frozen and stored until science has progressed to the time when someone can thaw it out and start it up again. His answer is “maybe centuries from now”.  I have another reaction, and that is “who would want to”?  But the article does give an insight into how far away we are from truly understanding the human mind, despite a great amount of brain and behavior research.

 AI researchers no longer think of duplicating the human mind on silicon, but the search for computer based intelligence that mimics human intelligence is alive and well. In fact, as computers become better and better at crunching numbers and handling “higher” mathematics, and as they are equipped with better sensors and actuators and integrated into more and more nets, they become more and more useful to us (with a few exceptions, such as handling “big data” for marketing purposes and being involved in pranks and crimes). But the more time I spend screwing around with such things as new operating systems and applications, handling the increasing number of people who want to send me e-mails or texts, find things on the ever-increasing internet, or become my friend or contact on social networking sites, the dumber my computer seems at handling information for me,  and I have never considered allowing it to make decisions for me.

 The good news is that I don’t have to worry about Mr. Kurzweil’s singularity, because I will be dead by then.  The bad news is that computers may hasten my death, but only through frustration, and not because they are more intelligent than I.

Job Loss and Support for New Directions

There was a passionate article in last Sunday’s New  York Times by Paul Theroux, a prolific writer of books, and in particular travel books,  He is noted for spending major times in local areas and writing about the lives people live there.  This article was written after he had spent a great deal of time traveling in the U.S. deep south working on his latest book, “Deep South.  Four Seasons on Back Roads”.

 The article was about poverty resulting from the loss of jobs due to the closing factories, which in turn Theroux blames on outsourcing, which he in turn blames on the greed of companies.  This is not a new problem, but Theroux writes with the emotion of having spent time with people (in his words)  “towns with their hearts torn out of them” from factory closings.  This is not a new message, but to read Theroux at this level of anger is unusual.  You should read the article, if you have not.  It is here.

 Among other charges, he delivers blasts at various foundations and wealthy people in business and government in the U.S. who advertise the help they give to poor people in developing countries, but have not helped poor people in these towns he visits in the U.S.  I am a believer, having followed the bankruptcy of San Bernardino California (where I went to high school) from the closing of income producing activities ranging from an air base (Norton) to train maintenance shops (Santa Fe), to a nearby steel mill (Kaiser, which ironically was carefully taken part and moved to China, where it was re-assembled). An article about the collapse of the city is here.  Among other San Bernardino statistics, during the 2012-13 school year, 33,274 students (8.1% of the total) experienced homelessness.

 A large number of people who lost their jobs in San Bernardino have families,  little cash or credit, probably house mortgages, and may not have had  the training or education to easily find other jobs. I was discussing this with a colleague earlier today, and we agreed that somebody should help people in such a situation (and the deep south), because it was not their fault that the income base of the city collapsed. But we could not figure out who.  Should businesses insure their employees against a collapse?  Not much precedence for that, and probably not a lot of support from businesses.  Should the government do more in the way of offering training and education?  But that would possibly result in more tax on businesses, who are already screaming that taxes are too high, and outrage people who think that government aid is already too profligate. 

 And this might only be a preview of future problems.  Although most of the attention has been paid to blue-collar workers, computers have already taken over many tasks formerly done by white collar workers (CPA’s, lawyers, administrators, medical workers, clericals, etc.).  There is a great debate going on as to whether this will cause new work opportunities for white collar workers (“The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies”, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee ) or whether the white collar job loss will eventually be larger and noisier than the blue collar loss.  We will find out, and perhaps the white collar workers will be able to more easily slip into new jobs, but once again, many of them may need help, and who will pay if they do not have the resources to learn new skills, or are at a stage of life where it is extremely inconvenient to re-locate? Or do we thoughtful and sensitive U.S, citizens just say "tough luck"?

Product Quality, Maintenance, Service, and Standardization

In his now classic paper “Competing on the Eight Dimensions of Quality”, Published in 1987 in the Harvard Business Review, David Garvin included serviceability as one of the critical eight.  This service must sometimes be performed by experts (the Boeing airliner), but often can be accomplished by the customer (oil level in a car, a bent prong on an electric plug, maybe replacing plumbing or getting a recalcitrant gas engine or your furnace to run).  People like me prefer servicing everything possible ourselves, for reasons ranging from economic to satisfaction.

 Products become more complex over time, as more features are added and technology becomes more sophisticated, and it seems to me that manufacturers are paying less attention to the owner’s ability to service the product.  The incentive for them to improve serviceability is offset by the profit to be made by being able to convince people to throw away the malfunctioning product and buy a new “upgrade” , and by the money to be made by the professional service people.  A clear example is Apple, whose products are very difficult to maintain, and who obviously don’t mind people taking their ailing equipment to the Apple store, so that Apple “geniuses” can try to sell them new equipment and while they are there, add-ons such as cool cases and new apps.

 But I am personally fed up with what appears to me a strong emphasis on designing for manufacturing (good), but less on owner service.  As a minor specific example, let me say a few words about the proliferation of nuts, bolts, and screws in the world.  We in the U.S. are somewhat guilty, since we insist on refusing to join the metric system, even though all nations except for Myanmar and Liberia have ( I think a wonderful example of U.S. arrogance ), and because of our major dependence  on  and participation in trade, have caused the world to use both systems, even though the metric system is far more straight forward and much easier to use. 

 But beyond that, although sizes and thread dimensions seem to be standardized, people continue to invent new geometries, and granted that many have advantages (especially in manufacturing), the tool requirements on the owner are getting ridiculous.  If you want to get an idea of the diversity in screws, nuts and bolts, run down the several pages of a table that might interest you here.

  The photo shows some of my own “standard” (slotted and Phillips head) screwdrivers.  Granted there is some duplication here, caused by defending against the normal response of borrowing but never getting around to returning screwdrivers, but due to modifications I have made on various ones to fit various odd screws, I use them all.  And of course I have a complete set of “Allen” hex (six sided)  wrenches (metric and U.S.) and a complete set of sockets and screw drivers for Torx screws (invented by the automobile industry but spreading widely).  But still I run into developments that amaze me, like the alternate screws developed by Apple to prevent “tampering” (which includes changing a battery,etc.)  The good news I suppose is that it opened up a new market for tools ( see the Amazon offerings here), and I have already participated by buying a battery kit over the internet, (but not without major resentment).  The bad news is that it is difficult for the average tinkerer to keep up with the tool requirements needed to use the expanding array of fasteners.

 So my plea to the manufacturers of the world is “Pay more attention to the ability of your customers to service your product”, because even the best of commercial service is an convenience and typically slow and expensive.  And my  plea to the rest of us to be more aware of the real cost (including resources and environmental damage) in throwing away a dishwasher because a new control panel plus a visit from a professional costs almost as much as a new one.

And there are many other reasons for making services simpler.  When I was younger my friends and I loved to “work on our cars”, and therefore were a natural market for well-used and cheaper ones, and came to love cars in general.    Nowadays, cars are much more difficult to “work on”.  Also the interest in cars among young people is plunging.  Suppose there is a correlation, auto manufacturers?  Kids don’t have as much money, but they are your hoped for future customers.

 

 

Creativity and Control, Innovation and Tradition

 I recently read a book entitled The Innovators, by Walter Isaacson, (see recommended books) who attracted a lot of notice writing a book about Steve Jobs after his death, and is an excellent writer with a good ability to deal with technology, science, and the people involved (although from my viewpoint as an engineer who has put in my time in industry and in academia I think he is a bit biased toward the sciences, although he recognizes the need for the “faceless” engineers, as he calls us, and often confuses engineers with technicians, machinists, and other worthy people). Since I have spent much of my life living and working in Silicon valley and teaching at Stanford, I have had a chance to get to know and work with a few of the heroes and many of the “faceless”, and am very familiar with the truths and myths.  I feel that Isaacson does a reasonably balanced and interesting job of telling his stories and drawing conclusions on the necessary qualities needed to innovate in what is called “high” technology (I am never quite sure what differentiates “high” technology from “low” technology).

 I apologize for not sending this post out at my usual Sunday or Monday time, but like many people, my wife and I took an end-of-the-summer vacation trip around Northern California, and a vacation to me includes severing as many links as possible with the internet.  During our trip, I couldn’t help but consider how much the many miraculous innovations described in Isaacson’s book (the internet, the smart phone smart phone,  computers, and all the features the digital age has brought to me through appliances, entertainment, etc.) have  improved my life.  The conclusion I kept coming to, is that there is good news and bad.  Certainly technical work has been greatly aided by the computer’s ability to calculate and simulate and provide information, although I suspect that one’s understanding of the assumptions and uncertainty in such things may be impaired.  I have much easier access to information, communication, and entertainment although it is all becoming seriously less fun through ever increasing use as a marketing tool.  I also have to put up with expectations of instant response (texting) and endless messages from people I don’t know who want things I cannot or don’t want to provide.

 But to me, the computer and the internet have always been tools to accomplish things I want to do, and like most tools, when I acquire a facility at using them, I resent them being changed, unless there is a major benefit to me.  And here we get into the conflict between the new and the known, because a great amount of the profit in and excitement about digital hardware and software is about creativity, innovation and change.  But as the title of the post implies, these can clash with control and tradition, and effort is needed to accommodate to the new—and time, which is becoming more important to me as I get older,  I am no longer amused by changes in software and hardware because some designer or manager, or entrepreneur has a “better” idea which I am forced to incorporate into my life even though I don’t need or want it.

 In a previous post I think I mentioned my ongoing problems involved in changing from Apple’s operating system 10-6-8 and associated applications, which I had used for years and was very familiar with, to 10-10-5, needed because a major hack had convinced the Stanford University computer people to encrypt all of us.  This, of course, resulted in my need to upgrade many  applications and deal with information such as  a great many photographs that had been re-arranged because Apple (not me) thought they should be.  The more time passes, the more annoyed I become at the time I am still putting into this change.  It is as though one manages to learn to juggle five balls, and then someone changes one of the balls.

 I understand the cost of backward compatibility in software, but when one already has as much capability as one needs/wants, can’t someone figure out how to preserve that?  In the case of Apple going from iPhoto to Photos, since I had not been upgrading my iPhoto (I preferred the older format), the “upgrade” (means change even if it a negative one) included in the new operating system happily re-arranged my images and put them in Photos (the new version that I don’t like as well) and informed me that I could no longer use  iPhoto because my iPhoto software was not the latest issue.  When I tried to download this latest version of iPhoto, I found it was no longer available at the Apple store, and I could not find it anywhere else on the Web.  With the help of a friend, I managed to find the iPhoto upgrade, so I can now access my old iPhoto files, but iPhoto and Photos are not easily compatible.  So I am still up to my neck with re-arranging images, getting information where I want it, and fears of future moves from Apple that will attempt to force me to use Photos, or worse.  The result is that I am going to go through the pain of getting the photos off of my Mac, and am even considering leaving Apple products because it seems to me that they are sacrificing a lot to make operating systems of desktops more compatible with smart phones and their other "portables", and I don’t want to go through endless iterations in which they strip things down so the desktop operating system is compatible with an Apple shirt button, or whatever else will follow their watch.

 I built much of my professional reputation promoting, teaching, practicing,  and consulting in things having to do with creativity and innovation.  I am a believer.  But unless they are properly balanced with control and tradition, over time the loss may be bigger than the gain.  Over time, new goodies tend to become boring, and one should not overlook the costs of change to users. 

 

 

People, Products, and Quantities

People, Products, and Quantitities.

 The  U.S. “k through 12” educational system is presently burdened with many expectations — to get us more highly ranked internationally, make the sometimes less than brilliant children of wealthy and powerful people smarter, equip people to escape poverty and lead clean and rewarding lives, etc. etc. etc.  This is a far cry from teaching the ABC’s with a little arithmetic thrown in.  But to add my two cents, I wish our kids were being given a better feel for quantities than we were.  I am not talking about more calculus tricks here, but rather the ability to make order of magnitude estimates, handle probabilities, and deal with quantities with which we have little experience.

 Every time elections approach I become aware of the pleasure candidates get from throwing around large numbers (the national debt, the cost of Obama care, the number of immigrants in the country, and so on).  They do this knowing that most of the electorate has little experience with or feeling for such numbers, and will agree that we are in bad shape and should vote for the candidate dropping words like billions and trillions.  In a sense, their tactic is a good one, because we have not been trained to process such numbers.

 We are first exposed to quantities by learning to count our fingers and toes (probably the reason we use ten-based numerical systems and why parents did not appreciate the “new math” introducing digital and octal systems).  As we grew we picked up experience with thousands (car and house prices in the old days),  and have now grown used to millions (the population of large cities, and the net worth of well-off people.  But we are now being bombarded with quantities that we can’t handle with our intuition. We are cramming a billion transistors on a silicon chip, communicating with the Voyager spacecraft over 12 billion miles, and buying two terabytes (billion bytes) of computer memory for less than 100 dollars.  Bill Gates is worth 70 billion dollars. On the other end of the scale, we are fascinated with nanotechnology (the manipulation of material on a molecular or atomic scale)—the nano refers to a billionth of a meter, or the order of  10^-9 .   meters, (If  you are uncomfortable with this notation, you should be even more uncomfortable if I wrote 0.000000001 meters.  The total number of particles in the universe has been estimated at 10⁸⁵ You want to see 85 followed by 85 zeros? I doubt it.)

We also have difficulty thinking about long time periods.  The government usually defines a generation as 25 years.  The so-called Neolithic revolution, when we became hooked to agriculture and quit being nomad, was about 10,000 years ago, or about 400 generations. During that time, we have learned to do serious harm to our resources and environment.  We are not going to repair the damage or even quit causing it in one generation.  Yet we seem to have difficulty thinking and acting beyond our individual deaths.

 Part of our problem is the U.S. refusal to completely adopt the metric system.  We cling to our strange units such as inches, miles per hour, British Thermal  Units, ounces, pounds, and so on. At present, Myanmar, Liberia, and the U.S. are the only countries in the world that have not adopted the metric system, and we are the only so-called developed one.  In 1971 there was a major government study entitled “The Metric System, It’s Time Has Come”, led by Daniel DeSimone.  The government accepted it, but it didn’t take.  Can you imagine the price we pay in trade and travel for this, as well as needing to constantly figure out things like how many cups are in a gallon and how U.S. times in the 440 yard race compares with 400 meter times?

 But the problem mostly stems from lack of experience with very large and small numbers, and being taught methods of gaining perspective on them.  Orders of magnitude are important.  My older son has some land on which he sometimes raises tomatoes. Modern machine-raised tomatoes can produce on the order of 50 tons per acre.  Probably not too meaningful.  Better we should think of 100,000 pounds.  That’s a lot of trips to the store. If you have a spare one tenth acre on your lot, you should be able to raise 10,000 pounds of tomatoes.  That get your attention? I used to have fun asking students to quickly tell me how many hairs were on their head, or how many blades of grass were on the football field.  Over time they would get much better at order of magnitude guessing —not exact numbers, but a feeling for quantity.  In 1977 Charles and Ray Eames produced a short film entitled “Powers of Ten”, which gives a feeling for what happens when one adds or subtracts a zero from a number.  It’s still available, and worth watching if you have never seen it. It is here.

 We all need to become more familiar with quantities. The probability of dying in a car accident in the U.S. is on the order of one in 10,000 per year.  The probably of dying in an airplane accident is one in millions.  Why do people sitting in airplanes seem more worried than those sitting in cars?  There are approximately 12 million Mexican residents in the U.S.  That is about one per each 30 non-Mexican residents.  Is that too many?  I sure don’t think so, since the ones I know are hard-working, non-complaining, fun loving people, and after all quite a bit of the U.S. was taken away from Mexico by armed force.  Let’s not let ourselves be convinced that Mexico is taking us over. And let us face the fact that providing first class healthcare and education for everybody and keeping our  highways in good order  is very expensive, and someone will have to pay for it.

Good Show and Challenging Task

I just returned from one of my favorite antique machinery shows—— The Oregon Steam up, held on the last weekend in July and the first weekend in August in Brooks, Oregon, north of Salem and South of Portland at Antique Powerland just off U.S. highway 5.  There are a very large number of such shows in the world each year, but this one is outstanding for the breadth of old machinery there and in operation, the well-done museums on the land (which are open during the year), and the swell and knowledgeable people who put it on, and who show and demonstrate their stuff.   For me, it is also of a nice scale and convenient because it is on the West Coast of the U.S. in one of my favorite states.  If you are interested in antique machinery you will especially enjoy this gathering, because of its emphasis on both steam and gas equipment and the in-place large engines, sawmill, etc. If  you are not interested in antique machinery you should be.  Don't you wish you had the vehicle in the photo above to go shopping in?

 But I had another reason for my visit.  Some years ago I began restoring a McCormick Daisy reaper, a machine that is in the American history books, and is fascinating to watch, as after it cuts the hay, it has arms that sweep it off of a deck onto the ground in piles, which can then be tied together and taken to the next stage of the harvesting process.  The six  arms can be controlled so that every arm sweeps the deck each pass, every other sweeps, every third arm, etc. My problem is that the very critical part that controls all of this is missing from my machine.  So I need to make one.

 There is one of the few complete Daisy reapers like mine that I know of at the Brooks show.  A photograph is below.   The part I need is sort of contained in the red outline in the photo below (apologies for the photo— the white blur at the bottom is my hand), although many weird curves and shapes are not visible.  The part includes the pivot. A complex curve hidden in the photo, the hook at the top, a curved rack of gear teeth that must engage the worm gear inside the main casting as the part turns upon its pivot, and a contact pad at the top of the rack.

I have several problems in re-creating it.  First of all, it is difficult to make, since it is a casting with no symmetry, no “parting lines” which would allow a mold to be separated, and critical and strange alignments between the parts which interact with the surrounding parts.

And, don’t say 3d printing —been there.  Three dimensional printing is not as easy as the media makes it seem, especially if scanning is involved,  and I want a steel part.  Sure I could make a mold from the part and cast it, but not surprisingly, the owner and museum were not eager to let me take the machine apart (also difficult) and take the part 400 miles away to use as a master while I copied it in my shop and Stanford’s foundry.  Had I been them, I would have felt the same.

 So I went to Brooks to take many photographs and make measurements (which I did) to work from.  Even with them, it will be a challenging job, as there were no base points on the part or machine to measure from, so I will have to cut and try and weld and curse until I get a prototype that will do the job, and then make a finished version from the prototype. But strangely enough, I love to do that sort of thing.

 I will write a post on the process and the finished part, but don’t hold your breath.  I am guessing several weeks, since my life is beautifully endowed with many other things to do, many higher on Marian's priority list than my making this part.

The Vanishing Machine Aesthetic

I really miss being able to see the details of machines.  Not only are they exciting, but often beautiful.  I am suspect, of course, being an engineer, but so be it.  When I was a kid, I used to love standing too close to steam powered railroad locomotives, not only for the emotional thrill of their size and sounds, but also to try to figure out how they worked (possible for a kid in those days).  I don’t stand too close to modern train locomotives, or in fact, even notice them.

 Something happened many years ago (1920’s and 30’s) to start us hiding the workings of machinery. 
The photo at the left shows a caterpillar 30, probably built in the 1920’s, with the usual kid playing on it.  The next photo shows a restored caterpillar 10 manufactured a few years later, but with a more “modern” approach to design.  Note that the workings are shrouded in sheet metal.  The third photo shows a beat up caterpillar 10 without the sheet metal (I am restoring it and straightening out the sheet metal).  To me, it is more interesting without the sheet metal, but I will put it back on so it doesn’t bother people.

The final tractor photo shows a caterpillar tractor manufactured in 1995.  Certainly looks faster (it is) and more powerful (it is) and more technically sophisticated (it is), but what is inside of its sports-car body panels?  Give or take a bunch of electronics and a steering wheel rather than clutch/brake levers, it is similar.  But I’ll bet the reaction of most people (not farmers) is not to care—they just like the exterior. (I do admit it is a great tractor and I like the exterior also).  But this tractor is perhaps more difficult to understand and to maintain than the Caterpillar 30, as well as not as much fun for kids to play on.

 

I think it is worrisome that we are no longer paying as much attention to how things work.  Personal computers are a good example —no clue as to what is in the package.  In fact, most of us are perhaps happier that way.  But the role technology is playing is increasing so that hiding it may delude us, especially if covered with modern marketing. The “Cloud”, being touted by companies with enormous server capability (Google, Apple, IBM, Amazon, etc.) is causing massive ignorance.  Traditional clouds are beautiful, especially close to sunset, the weightlessly drift through the sky, ever changing, and hopefully in California promise eventual much needed rain, and in summer cooler weather.  They are almost magic.

 The “Cloud” being sold by computer companies is another example of intentionally hiding technology that our society should better understand.  It consists of access to the company servers (not all servers), and is an attempt by the company to function as our digital memory and provide our operating systems, applications, and other software (conveniently allowing them to charge us a monthly fee).  This cloud consists of glass fibers and other conductors under ground, on the ocean floor, and occasionally in sewers, feeding massive number of digital devices in anonymous , windowless, extremely hot  buildings that suck  huge amounts of electrical energy not only to accomplish their function, but also to prevent themselves from overheating.  Some time ago I mentioned a book entitled Tubes, by Andrew Blum.  An excellent read if you think the “Cloud” is either beautiful or magic, or if you don't understand the physical components of the internet.

 What’s happened to us?  Many things, but the directions of technology and the strengthening of the design profession have certainly had large inputs.  The realization of the advantages of low-drag aircraft, beginning with the evolution of fighter planes and the design of airplanes such as the DC-3 in 1934 was certainly instrumental.  The photo at the right  shows a famous pencil sharpener prototype designed by one of the leading designers of the 1930’s, Raymond Loewy in 1933.  It never hit the market.  But granted that it would only sharpen one size of pencil, it does look like it could move through one’s office rapidly, and would have probably sold because of the then love of “streamlining”.  I have opened the hood of a few “luxury” cars only to find that the engine is almost entirely shrouded, although it represents a high level of craftsmanship.  And I can tell long and now amusing stories of putting a new battery into my admittedly sleek Apple iPhone.

 I am for unwrapping and better understanding how things work.  Not only is it interesting, but we can better evaluate what we are doing to ourselves.

 

Brains and Minds

There is an increasing fascination,  at least among  media folk, with brains/minds.  I write brains/minds, because brains are the approximately three  pound pieces of complex meat that adults have in their skulls, and to many people, minds are more.  The fascination has to do with how they work, and  is a reaction to the many new insights from instruments (functional MRI scans, Pet scans) and insight into the structure and chemistry of brains.

 There are several problems involved with understanding how brains/minds work.  There is a perhaps cynical view (which I at times hold) that it will take something more powerful than a human brain to understand a human brain.  But to be more charitable to the neurologists, psychologists, computer scientists, and other people who are engaged in this task,  a major problem exists because the various disciplines involved are often not comfortable with each other.  There was an article  in the June 28^th issue of the New York Times entitled “Face It, Your Brain Is a Computer”.  It was written by Gary Marcus, a professor of psychology and neural science at NYU, who has just written a book entitled “The Future of the Brain”.  The article is here,  Happily, the article is not saying that the brain is a computer, as computers are commonly thought of.  Rather the author  is saying that thinking of the brain  as a computer  is perhaps a good way of structuring brain research.

 The magazine section of the same issue of the newspaper contains a section entitled “Head Trips”, which speaks of brain/mind function as seen by people ranging from a talk therapist to a person with a history of bipolar disorder, to a person doing research on the effects on the brain of microbiota that grow in the gut.  There seems to be agreement that  brain research must involve many disciplines, since the brain does seem to exhibit some “digital” behavior, certainly involves chemistry, electrical signals, and biological processes, and is strongly affected by behavior, experience, and emotion.  But many outstanding specialists are biased toward their own discipline.  When I read the article by Professor Marcus, I wondered how many of his friends were bio chemists.  I was very interested in the description of Mark Lyte’s work on the influence of microbiota, but he seemed far from the traditional talk therapists, who seem to be losing ground to the people in the “hard” sciences. In my opinion, theory that does not impress all of the intellectual camps involved, is not adequate.  We need a giant AHA, that sets all parties dancing—the equivalent of the double helix insight.

 Most of the brain/mind theories I am aware of are thought provoking and explain certain aspects of  thinking, responding, interpreting, predicting, and other things brains/minds do. But can the theories be integrated into a satisfying model?  That we shall see.  In the interim, I think brain research is one of the more entertaining things on which to stay current (except for the Golden State Warriors, of course).   

Shadow Work, by Craig Lambert

  This is a short, easy to read, and provocative book by Craig Lambert (more info. at recommended books column at the left), that claims that our leisure time is being eaten up by doing work that used to be done for us.  The reason for this is partly technology (the computer), partly because business has discovered that by off-loading work to customers it can cut its payroll (pumping our own gas), and partly because we honor work in our culture.

 This book got my attention because everyone I know seems to be bemoaning the loss of leisure time, even though supposedly the information revolution is helping us by taking over increasing amounts of work, and because I have just blown away a ridiculous amount of time in first of all, going to an outrageously complex multi level password system needed to use the Stanford server (the university was badly hacked a while ago), and having my computers be encrypted (which of course required "upgrading" the operating systems, which required "upgrading" apps, etc. etc. etc. ) 

 Lambert defines shadow work as work we do without labeling it as work, and for which we are not paid.  One example is the constant mucking around we do with our computer(s), as manufacturers keep “upgrading” them to sell us even more features we don’t want (and remove some we do).  I hate Apple’s new “Photos” program, a supposed improvement over IPhoto.  To me it is a step  backwards enshrouded in meaningless changes and crowned with the loss of useful features.  Even worse, once one allows one’s computer to make the change (mandatory with OS 10-10-3 on), one can’t go back unless one has the latest version of iPhoto on the machine—apparently not known by my favorite IT person who knows everything.  Dumb move by Apple.  And lots of Shadow Work upcoming for me, as I am going to bail out of their photo organization software so I can organize my photos the way I want them, not how Apple thinks I should. In fact, maybe I'll bail out of Apple.

 The book has many examples of this phenomenon.  The replacement of travel agents by web sites, for instance.  Granted one has the ability to compare endless flights, hotels, rental car deals, etc., but the time and effort spent as contrasted with letting a travel agent do this (at one time paid by airlines, hotels, etc) can be huge.  Another is shopping, especially in big box stores, or even large grocery stores, in which it sometimes seems impossible to either find what one wants (especially if everything has re-arranged to be compatible with the now popular marketing technique of forcing the shopper to pass by everything in the store) or find a person to give one a helpful clue.  Another is the time spent figuring out all of the non-standardized kiosks, credit card readers, and other digital “aides”, all slightly different.  I just had a brand new-looking gas pump consistently refuse my credit card, and upon complaining to the one attendant, was told that I had to withdraw the card slowly.  Interesting after years of being told to withdraw it rapidly.

 Lambert also goes into topics such as doing one’s own taxes, legal work, and other activities formerly done by others.  And the time we spend filling out medical forms, and providing information on ourselves to internet vendors so that it can be sold in the Big Data world.  He agrees that many of these activities are cheaper and maybe faster than hiring professionals, and perhaps our time is less valuable than that of the doctor who wants the information, but his main point is that we do an increasing amount of “work” that used to be done for us, without realizing it, and the result is perhaps more frantic lives and less human interaction.  Definitely describes me.

 He also talks about the incredible time and effort spent by parents outside of the home that did not used to occur.  When I went to school in the dark ages of education there were no organized kid athletics, no summer camps, no parents driving  us to school or helping us with our homework (not much homework), no PTA or other volunteer groups, or parents organizing campaigns against teachers and administrators (too much homework—not enough homework).  I look at my children and the time they spend chauffeuring their kids around and attending events, and I think Wow.  I learned to play sports and did well in school without parent involvement, and it worked.  In fact, we would have been uncomfortable if parents were hanging around our ball games and attending out school productions.

 And finally, his argument again reminds the reader of the loss of paying jobs awaiting us in the future.  I went through a divorce many years ago.  It did not include large estates, criminal behavior, or anything that would result in a novel.  In fact it was even called a routine divorce by the judge, who chided the two attorneys for making it into a war and not coming to an agreement.  But they did earn money for a whole year.  An example where computers could have done better, but we do have a lot of attorneys to support.

 I recommend the book.  It is an  easy read and will make you wonder how much “Shadow Work” you are doing.

Polluting the Internet

There was an interesting article in the magazine section of the New York Times, June 8, 2015.  It was written by Adrian Chen, entitled  The Agency, and is here.  It is about the major effort going on in Russia not only to use the internet to spread positive feelings about the country and its activities (Putin, the  Ukraine, etc.), but also to spread confusion in “western” countries such as the  U.S., and in general, dilute the credibility of what is referred to as the “U.S.” internet.  It focuses on a fairly secret organization named the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, which hires large numbers of young  people with computer skills at relatively high salaries to put information on the internet that will accomplish these aims. No particular knowledge of the world, politics, economics, or sociology is needed.  The employees work hard (an example was a woman who worked two twelve hour days in a row followed by two days off), and in the two days was expected to file five credible political posts, ten non-political posts, and 100 to 150 comments on other people’s posts.

 The article gives examples of their work —building carefully orchestrated, but fictional hoaxes (Columbian Chemical Explosion in Centerville Louisiana, Atlanta Georgia Ebola epidemic) and disinformation of all sorts.  Although the article focuses on the one agency, which is modeled after a corporation, the author implies that there is a wide effort to do such work, and the workers seem to be challenged and rewarded for their work.  After all, this is a chance to do mischief for money.  What could be more fun to young people than writing negative material on all candidates for U.S. president, and not being at all inhibited by the truth.

 The  article is well researched, well written, and not surprising.  The Internet is heavily dominated by the U.S. and annoys at least the leadership of many countries.  TV is continually degraded by advertising, but is not targeted toward particular interests or beliefs, because it wants as large an audience is possible.  But the internet is consciously/unconsciously selling U.S. values (superiority of Christian capitalistic democracies, easily available porn).  It is  only natural for leaders of countries who are not interested in having their country be like the  U.S. to attack the internet.  What better way than to hire kids who like to play with computers to do so, through pumping into it information that is seen as positive by these leaders, and random information that is not based on truth ? 

 In a sense, this is an attempt to lower the quality of the internet by injecting junk and biased information into it.  I am usually doing things in which gains can be made by increasing quality. As far as I am concerned the internet already contains plenty of junk and biased information.  But it was interesting to me to read this article and realize that there are situations in which perceived gains can be made by lowering quality, and that people can earn good salaries by helping do so.  

Computer Hype and Reality

I was glad to see a column in the New York Times by Paul Krugman, entitled “The Big Meh”.  It is here.  Krugman is a prolific writer and a major force in economics, having won the Nobel Prize, and having been named the second most influential economist in the world by The Economist.  He points out that despite all of the hype about the information economy, the computer revolution, social networking, computer games, smart phones, and other digital marvels, the U.S. economy is and has been sluggish for the last ten years, and in his mind, except for a few spikes, has been disappointing for the last 40 years. 

 But the hype in the media grows, and here we are, waiting for our virtual reality kits and lining up to buy the latest expensive Apple miracle.  True, Apple, Google, Facebook, and such companies are boasting extraordinary cash flows, but, how much are we actually benefitting from all of these digital miracles? Krugman, in looking for reasons that our dazzling new technology does not seem to be strongly affecting the nation’s economy, states that perhaps the new technology is more fun than fundamental.

 Certainly many Stanford students want to start a company and make a fast pile of money, but most of them won’t.  And how about those unfortunate young people without college training who can’t find jobs —see the last Economist magazine. The cover features a drawing of a young white male sitting in a crashed male symbol, under  text reading “The Weaker Sex; No jobs, no family, no prospects” .  The lead article is entitled “Men Adrift”, and is here.

 We are realizing that there is a social cost from automating work that was formerly done by humans, and will realize it even more when CPA’s, attorneys, truck drivers, and others capable of making more noise begin to be displaced.  It seems to me that driverless trucks make at least as much sense as driverless cars, but clearly the media is a bit shy about taking on the teamsters.  We are also realizing that there is a cost to us in changing our lives to meet the demands of being “connected”, and having our habits known in increasing detail so that we may be more efficiently bombarded with more marketing material, as well as having our attention fractionated in many ways. Psychologists are having a field day with the latter.

 So far new technologies have taken on the order of 50 years to mature.  Tim Berners Lee, a British scientist, is given credit for having invented the World Wide Web (the basis of the internet) in 1989.  That is only 26 years ago.  We have a long way to go before it reaches anything close to maturity.  To me, it is presently becoming more difficult to use, and requiring more and more time to handle features that used to work, but are now overwhelming (e-mail), and more and more time to separate, as they used to say, the wheat from the chaff (ads, gripes, and baseless opinions).  And as a tool, I find that the time I spend using it is highly compromised by the time I spend trying to keep up with changes in the software associated with operating systems, apps, and programs that by now should be mature, but are constantly showing up with new (and to me unnecessary and sometimes negative) bells and whistles.  But I am an optimist, and believe that eventually it will settle down, take its place in our lives (although it will cost us to get rid of the distractions and trash bult into it), and the hype will go away.

 So I agree with Professor Krugman.  Let’s can the hype, figure out what we have and what we need, and make it serve us, instead of us serving it.  Incidentally, I just ordered a book entitled Shadow Work; The Unpaid Unseen Jobs that Fill Your Day, by Craig Lambert.  I'll give you my reactions after I read it.  It concerns work that used to be done by others for you, that you now have been tricked into doing through partial automation and cleverness on the part of companies through digital electronics.  Think of shopping in big box stores.  Remember when there were people to help you in stores?  I, and many of you,  even remember when people didn't  pump their own gas.  When I grew up, working in a "service station" was a sought after first step into the economy.  Now these jobs have gone away, along with the service.

 

 

 

 

No Wonderful One Hoss Shays

Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote a poem entitled “The wonderful One Hoss Shay”, about a shay (buggy) belonging to a minister, that when it finally failed, completely fell apart — all parts broke at once.  It is here. It was given quite a bit of notice when I was in engineering school, because one goal of designing a good product is to ensure that it does not contain weak components that cause early failures.  The last stanza of the poem is the punch line.

 The challenge to minimize weak components in a product is a worthy one, and my experience is that it is not receiving enough attention these days.  As an example, I have had problems the past few years with actuators (the components that convert electrical signals to mechanical outputs) in my cars.  Due to emphasis on reliability in the 1980’s and 1990’s, manufacturers have done a good job on the drive train (engines, transmissions, etc.) and body.  But cars have acquired more and more remote and automatic features.  The integrated circuits and wiring harnesses are quite reliable (until rats, mice, or squirrels chew on the wiring insulation— a common occurrence).  But many of the features (electrically operated door locks, windows, trunk lids, climate control systems, etc.) must at some point turn the electrical signals into a movement, and here the problem seems to lie. 

 A common way to perform this function is through a solenoid, a device that uses an electro-magnet to do the needed work.  But the last Ford pickup I owned had so many solenoid failures, typically in actuators that were difficult to replace, that I bought a Toyota because I could get one with old fashioned mechanical window cranks, door handles, and other features.  So far, so good, but as I write this I am feeling pressure because the front door lock actuator on my wife’s beloved Acura TSX has failed.  Viewing the internet and talking to a mechanic friend, I find that is not unique. Looking at a photo of one, I am not surprised, because the exterior is a very complex plastic injection molding, and I would bet that inside there is a plastic gear or two that has simply worn out.  But to replace this, I will either have to order a replacement from the internet and spend several hours cursing and dropping fasteners inside the door where they are difficult to retrieve, or take the car to a mechanic and give them several hundred dollars for doing so. 

 I was perhaps overly trained when I worked at JPL, since there are no mechanics in interplanetary space, so failures of components before the mission is complete are very bad news to everyone except the media. So attention is paid to all components to ensure that they will not fail and compromise the mission.

 I know from briefly working in the automobile business that the major components of automobiles are thoroughly life-tested for reliability, and much attention is paid to the design and manufacturing quality of them.  But how about things like door lock actuators?  Or if for some reason (cost or whatever) they are of shorter average life, how about making them easier to replace?  Instructions on how to do almost anything are on the internet, but how about ensuring their quality in the case of diagnosing and replacing components of complicated products that are likely to fail?  And how about having nuts and screw heads visible like in the old days with some attention to allowing the use of traditional tools,  rather than special plastic body panel removers, Torx-head drivers, and custom clips?  Arms with extra joints and tiny hands would help also, if maintenance is not better considered in design. 

The Engineer's Lament—Malcolm Gladwell

The May 4, 2015 issue of The New Yorker magazine contains an article by Malcolm Gladwell entitled The Engineer’s Lament,  with a sub title of Two Ways of Thinking About Automotive Safety.  It is here.

 Like many people, I am a fan of Gladwell, because he is both a terrific writer and capable of focusing on important and provocative topics. As an engineer, especially one who has witnessed controversies resulting from differences in the viewpoints of providers and consumers, I very much appreciated this article.

 My experiences have included working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratories during the early days of space exploration in which failures of the first Ranger missions were greeted with a Congressional Investigation; working at Stanford when a difference in viewpoints as to the purpose of overhead on government contracts lead to a Congressional Investigation; and working in a start up when differences in opinion between the founder and the venture capital firms as to the pricing of the product (help the needy or maximize profit) caused a great deal of strife.  In all cases, from my viewpoint as an engineer, the critical parties, although clearly trying to do good, just didn’t understand.  I am sure they returned the favor.  As a consultant, I have seen this situation occur time and time again both between and within organizations.

 Gladwell’s article is focused on the process of deciding whether or not automobiles should be recalled for reasons of safety.  Recent examples have included the recall of Toyota products because of potential “sticking” accelerators, recall of General Motors products because of ignition switch problems, and the older, but very significant recall of some 1.5 million Ford Pintos (suspected exploding gas tanks in rear-end collisions).    I am sure you saw the plentiful media coverage of at least the more recent ones. 

 From the point of view of the companies, and admittedly many if not most of the engineers,  the products delivered to the public are the best they can do within the monetary and time constraints demanded by competitive pressure.  Automobile companies (I briefly worked for one) are extremely sensitive to issues of safety because they are staffed by humans , aware of their large liability exposure, constantly challenged by the shortcomings of drivers, and brutally attacked by the media when one of their  components fails and kills innocent people.  But being part of one is also to be aware of the very large numbers of components in an automobile, the numbers of automobiles delivered in a year, and limited time to ensure that no “bugs” exist in the final product. After all, the Curiosity explorer now on the surface of Mars has proven to be an extremely reliable product, but required 12 years and 1.8 billion dollars to produce.  Granted that the environment it has been asked to survive is challenging, but so is that in which automobiles operate.  And engineers do not have 12 years and 1.8 billion dollars to develop a single automobile.

 Also, as Gladwell points out, the causes of automobile accidents are primarily due to such things as driver distraction (texting, talking, eating), alcohol, and poor skills, rather than automobile equipment failures.  But victims of such failures (and their eager attorneys) see things very differently.  Most people expect their equipment to be 100% reliable and safe, but not willing to accept the associated penalties.  As near as I can tell, at some level of complexity and change, people (and robots) will screw up and things will fail. But it is possible to improve the situation by striving for simplicity, spending more money, and taking the time to do more testing.  But we don’t want that.  We want spiffy new stuff now with more bells and whistles at low price.

 I am not putting Gladwells’ article in the “recommended book” column at the left of this page, but certainly would if it were a book.  The good news is that it takes much less time to read than a book, and a link to it is in the first paragraph of this post. And it touches on a critical problem where product quality is concerned. Take a look at it. My wife loved the engineer jokes.

 

 

 

 

Sherry Turkle and Alone Together

Sherry Turkle, an excellent writer, is a clinical psychologist and a professor at M.I.T. and has spent her career examining the effects of technology on society.  She has written three books focusing on computers, the first, The Second Self, written in 1984, was dedicated to the interaction of computers and people.  The second, Life on the Screen, was written ten years later and devoted to the use of the computer to form online identities. Both were quite positive about the potential of the computer to help us develop.  Her last one, Alone Together, subtitled Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. was published in 2011, when her daughter was in college, and shows much more worry about the effects of computers on us, particularly on the young.

 Her research subjects for this book ranged from young children through college students, and being a social scientist, she interviewed and interacted with a large number of them. Her findings and associated information about trends in computer application are covered in the very readable book.  I read it when it was first published, but I just re-read it, and found it even more thought provoking, perhaps because my grandchildren now range from 3 years to 17 in age, and I have been able to compare the effects of computers on them with that of my own children, and on my brother and me — three generations of drastically different usage.

 The first section of Turkle’s book talks of robots – computers and computer controlled devices intended not only to serve us, but to evoke emotions in us.  A sizeable business exists in computer controlled toys for both children and adults that do so, ranging from simple toys such as Tamagotchis, Furbies, My Real Babies, AIBO’s,  and Paro’s through the much more “human” appearing and acting products being experimented with at places such as M.I.T.  Turkle discusses the ethical and practical issues associated with machines designed and built to stimulate love and other emotions in humans through such mechanisms as neediness, communication, and aesthetic appeal.  She delves into such issues as their use in caring for and interacting with the aged in nursing homes and with children.  In the case of providing companionship for lonely elders, she points out the value in providing them with something to love and care for, but also questions as to why real humans are not doing this instead. She also responds to an apparent increase in desire for robotic mates on the part of extreme computer believers, by pointing out that robots themselves have no emotions and even though they may seem to love you, they do not care for you at all.

 The second section is about communication and interaction over the internet, and nicely overlaps the first, since although they do not have three dimensional bodies, there is certainly an essence of robot in the avatars we design for ourselves in many games and in the role that social networking can play in our lives.

 Turkle goes into great detail on the positives and negatives of internet communications, and in her usual style tells many stories, good and bad, as examples of what is happening.  Since I still mix with college students, it has been interesting to me to see the progression from telephoning to e-mail to instant messaging to texting.  What next?  More and more messaging of shorter and shallower character?  She tells stories of students texting each of their “friends” 20 times a day and staying away from telephone conversations for fear that they will let their friends know more about them than they would like;  of  hurt feelings and misinterpretations; of overly controlling parents; of treating people more like things and things more like people;  and finally of the tremendous amount of time and energy devoted to social networking.

 When our children were young, my wife liked  the analogy of tree people and phone people.  When tree people had problems, they would climb a tree and try to figure out what to do to solve them.  When phone people had problems, they would instantly get on a phone and call their friends to discuss them.  Now it seem we have progressed past phone people to tweet/text people, and trying to communicate with more and more people by saying as little as possible. Why do we seem drifting toward huge quantities of shallow statements? Is a sound bite mentality the natural defense to a surplus of information?

 In the March issue of The Atlantic magazine, there was an excellent article by Graeme Wood entitled What ISIS Really wants.  We subscribe to The Atlantic, and I had read the article, which was very thoughtful.  But in the May issue, they printed several reader responses, and then, to my amusement they put in a “Tweet of the Month”, which was “Disagree w.parts, but @gcaw’s new Atlantic essay on ISIS is the rare, genuine must-read. I felt challenged, even provoked, through it all”.   The tweet was from @shadihamid, who is a Brookings Institute Fellow, and undoubtedly an expert in this area.  But was I not a subscriber to The Atlantic, and even if I was and had not read the article, Mr. Hamid’s tweet (if I read it, which would have been unlikely) would probably not have convinced me to.  Granted that he is good at restricting himself to 140 characters, I would bet he deserves a few more, and if he had them could convince more people to read the article.

If  you have not read Sherry Turkle’s book Alone Together, I recommend it highly.  It is even more pertinent than it was when she wrote it.  If you did read it when it was published, you might find it interesting to read it again.

 

 

My Cup Runneth Over

I figure that I have enough projects to keep me happily busy until I am 150 years old.  But judging from my friends and my body, I may not live to be that old.  Clearly trying to complete them more rapidly doesn’t work, because I am becoming slower.  I am still moving reasonably well.  I am well into becoming better organized (my wife will snicker at this), becoming more embroiled in writing my mythical two books, and catching up on my reading (difficult because excellent new books seem to be coming out faster than I can read).  And I am moving along at restoring stuff .  The photos below show the before and after condition of the McCormick mower I mentioned in a previous post.  It is now working well and I am about to take it up to my son’s farm and let him test it with a couple of his huge horses.

The photos below show the before photo of the high-pressure water pump I included in my last post, and the finished restoration, ready to pump. 

But I am still acquiring outstanding old hardware faster than I can restore it. And the hardware I have restored drastically needs more attention.  And of course there is my growing family,  my old and needy house, my failure to succeed in completely cutting my ties with Stanford, and frequent assignments from Marian.

What to do, what to do?  I am going to devote the next post to a book entitled Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, by Sherry Turkle, one of my favorite authors (Basic Books, 2011).  I read this when it was released, but re-read it when I ran across it recently, and it spoke more directly to me now that I am further behind and my grandchildren are older.  Turkle is a psychologist on the M.I.T. faculty, and specializes in the interaction of technology and society.  This is the fifth book she has written during the “information revolution”, the previous ones being quite positive about computers, the internet, and so forth.  Fifteen years had passed since the last one when she wrote Alone Together, and her daughter was now in college.  This book discusses many worries about what the internet is doing to us and our children, and I will recommend it highly if you haven’t read it.

 In particular, it got me thinking about the increasing chunk of time my computer and the internet are requiring from me.  When I wrote my Good Products, Bad Products book, also released in 2011, my publisher talked me, an innocent, into entering the social networking scene in order to publicize the book.  With some reservations I joined Facebook, Twitter, and Linked in, and started this blog.  I enjoy writing this blog, because it makes me think, but have never really felt comfortable with the social networking sites, with the result that I have neither tried to increase the size of the pool of  people who I presumably interact with, nor have I done a good job of interacting with the people in the pool.

 And like many people, my e-mail has gotten out of hand.  I seem to be showing up on lists faster than I can make filters to stop it—probably partly because of my Stanford connection, the exploding number of overseas students looking for financial aid and admission to college in the U.S., an increase in technical meetings and consulting opportunities, and just plain marketing.

 So during the next week I am going to think hard about my interaction with the internet and digital communication in general.  Some years ago, Don Knuth, author of the set of classic book entitled “The Art of Computer Programming”, informed his friends that he was quitting e-mail, in order to have more time to think deeply and work on writing projects.  Since he is a god in the computer field, this attracted a lot of attention.  I am not a god, but I am feeling the same way right now, especially toward social networking.  I am fortunate in that I have a large number of real friends I love, and am not looking for cyber friends  or contacts.  And my computer is demanding an increasing and already far too much of my time.  I am certainly not alone in this feeling.  People are waking up to the downside of all of these digital miracles. More about this in my next blog.

 

Matthew B. Crawford, and the Issue of Manual Skills.

In 2006, Matthew Crawford, (equipped with a Ph.D. in philosophy, an obvious fan of working with his hands and proprietor of a small business of restoring/maintaining vintage motorcycles), wrote an essay entitled Shop Course as Soul Craft, which was published in Atlantis magazine.  A friend of mine, Dave Beach, (who has built and is responsible for a very successful and large activity in the Stanford Engineering School called the Product Realization Lab in which students design and manufacture products), and I found out about it and spread it all around the local community.  It covered the advantages of manual skills in life and the importance to individuals, schools, and organizations of encouraging them.  I am one of a large number of people who are believers, and who take great pride in their ability to make and fix things and I have seen the positive effects of doing such things on the lives of many other people.   I depend on such activities for keeping me from occasionally becoming less likeable from lack of quick feedback and an overdose of mental activities seemingly divorced from reality (yes I am a professor). Dave and I are also both believers, along with many other people, in the contribution of such activities to producing products of high quality.

 Crawford's "Shop Course" essay was later developed into a book of the same name, which made a large splash because it made its way to many people of like mind, and coincided with a time of much worry about the inroads computers were making into skilled jobs.  If you haven’t read the article or the book, you can find the article here.

 Now Crawford has written another book entitled World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, N.Y.).  This one is somewhat broader in reach, having to do with our mental attention in an age in which large numbers of individuals and organizations, backed by powerful media, are competing for for this attention, to the point where we may be paying a cost in individuality and in the ability to focus as well on our main interests.  His “Shop Class” book was broader in reach than his Atlantis article of the same name, and this book is broader still.  I read it and loved it, but it is a more difficult read.  Crawford is now a senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, as well as being a fabricator of components for custom motorcycles, and I think he is showing the signs of immersion in an academic scene .  It is difficult for academics to write books that are easy to read, because in a university, life consists of communicating with people in similar disciplines and assuming they have similar backgrounds and familiarity with material—in this case philosophy.  The result is an understandable tendency to refer to people and works that the general reader has not met or read, nor will probably ever do so.  After 50 years of fighting this problem, I know it well.  I even run into it at home because I occasionally find myself trying to explain something that is interesting to me, like quantum computing or the working of make-and-break ignition systems or the physical portions of the internet to my wife, who is brilliant, but was trained as an historian, and seems to  have little need for techie jargon and details.

 But the message in Crawford’s book is straight forward and powerful.  He again makes an argument for hands-on contact with the world,  He begins with the attack upon our attention from all sides, from advertising to internet communications and seductive digital toys.  He then goes into the problems resulting from handling an overload of stimulation by seeing it in terms of broad representations and generalizations rather than reality (“the public”, “government”, “farmers”).  He talks about joint, or group attention, its importance, and the increasing difficulty of obtaining it.  He worries that we are  losing the “real”, by dealing with these generalities and stifling our true nature and individuality in the process.  He finishes the main portion of the book by presenting what he considers an example of good focus—an old and traditional pipe-organ company, in which people learn from the experience of others and gain their pleasure from attaining expertise in the building of their products. Once again, the shop. 

This book is especially timely since many college students now seem to be trying to stay in contact with an ever increasing quantity of people and changing information and are planning to start companies even though they are equipped with little experience and with a minimum of skills learned through practice.  Even some devotees of creativity seem to be swinging away from experience and the learning of skills. I wish them luck.  These are invaluable tools in life.

 If you are interested in things controversial and in modern trends, I recommend you read this book and that you discuss it with your friends, especially if you are neglecting hobbies or work you love that allow you to get your hands dirty.  Dirty hands for me seem to result in a cleaner mind.  I recommend them to all.