TechComm Labs

The Reference Frame offers some interesting insights in the post Murray Gell-Mann: 80th birthday and interview.

He is also told by the reporter that “battles of new ideas against conventional wisdom are common in science”. Gell-Mann thinks it’s very interesting how these negative principles get embedded in science sometimes. Instead, he emphasizes that most challenges to scientific orthodoxy are wrong. Lots of their authors are cranks. Sometimes, the challenges are right. Their authors face a lot of disbelief – and Gell-Mann offers some examples, e.g. the continental drift.

It can be tough, especially when the evidence is not distinctive, to understand a new idea properly. That can lead to debate that can get a bit away from the ideal of logic and reason. It can take time for people to work over the implications and test the new ideas against their existing reality. That is why science is a discipline and requires the development of a manner of thinking and seeing and learning.

I am puzzled by what seems to me the paucity of effort to find the underlying principle of superstring theory-based unified theory. Einstein didn’t just cobble together his general relativistic theory of gravitation. Instead he found the principle, which was general relativity, general invariance under change of coordinate system. Very deep result. And all that was necessary then to write down the equation was to contact Einstein’s classmate Marcel Grossmann, who knew about Riemannian geometry and ask him what was the equation, and he gave Einstein the formula. Once you find the principle, the theory is not that far behind. And that principle is in some sense a symmetry principle always.

This is the problem with mathematics. It is one thing to play with equations and see where they go much like playing with words to see what sentences can be formed. It is another thing for the equations or sentences to make sense and to reveal meaning. Much of formal schooling is about the grammar and the methods for manipulation of equations and words. If you are a student who years to understand what the underlying principle or what is being said, your grades can suffer as that is not what grades measure in school.

Slashdot noted a Telegraph UK article asking Why aren’t children taught to touch-type at school?

All children are given endless hours of coaching in how to use the most common computer applications, such as Windows, spreadsheets and PowerPoint, all of which are likely to have moved on significantly by the time current primary school pupils enter the world of work.

Yet they are taught how to use these programs without being taught the most basic computing skill of all – typing. It is the modern-day equivalent of teaching a child to do joined-up writing without ever showing them how to hold a pencil.

Old style typewriter classes in high school were business oriented and not only taught touch typing but also much of the protocol for effective letter writing and correspondence style and formatting. Because touch typing is a manual skill, it requires practice (and drudge) to acquire. Nowadays touch typing is often taught as a computer game in junior high – without the document layout and design ideas.

Rayner also brings up another problem and that is the emphasis on learning about specific programs rather than the trade that the program supports. The nature of the problem can be seen in the Pagemaker story. When that program came out in the mid 80′s, page layout craftsmen quickly moved from manual cut and past with glue and pieces of paper to doing the same thing with images on a screen. Much of their trade melded with that of page designer as the software removed many hurdles in setting type to page. In fact, it became so easy to create pages for printing that amateurs started playing with the technology and then schools started teaching it. The problem is that many of the principles of the trade became subservient to learning the software menu structure and technique. Fonts, margins, page design, publication design, and many other facets were shunted aside. Students were taught tools and not trade. The result was ugly.

One commenter took note about teaching skills with musical instruments. That also often suffer in schools as technique in use of the instrument is placed above the art of expression in music.

Formalized instruction in touch typing is probably more efficient and can produce better results than self learned. Even some authors (e.g. Isaac Asimov) wrote many books using only a two finger technique so you can get by with minimal skills. But nearly every job requiring communication or data entry could be made more productive with effective keyboard skills. Despite the claims about voice and character recognition and other technologies, there is nothing on the horizon right now that looks to surpass the keyboard for transferring data, as in words and numbers, from mind to machine.

Now this is science! Students at the Liceo Scientifico “A. Vallisneri” in Lucca, Italy determined that there was an echo of the earth transmissions in recordings of conversations with lunar astronauts.

They noticed an echo on this recording in which sentences from Earth are retransmitted via Armstrong’s helmet speaker through his microphone and back to Earth. They used the open source audio editing program Audacity to measure the echo’s delay which turned out to be 2.620 secs and used this to work out the distance to the moon as 3.93 x 10^8 metres.

This is a modern version of repeating Kepler’s method of determining the orbit of mars – real science well within the realm of your every day high school students.

xkcd does an analysis of Urinal protocol vulnerability and implications for design of public restrooms.

Most guys are familiar with the International Choice of Urinal Protocol. It’s discussed at length elsewhere, but the basic premise is that the first guy picks an end urinal, and every subsequent guy chooses the urinal which puts him furthest from anyone else peeing. At least one buffer urinal is required between any two guys or Awkwardness ensues.

This particular analysis is a good start. A recent visit to the El Capitan in Hawthorne brings to mind that the spacing of urinals can contribute to the problem as well. What happens when the space allocated is narrower than a user’s shoulders? At event venues, the traffic at facilities clumps significantly. That means that architects are pushed to squeeze spaces to allow for higher peak volumes. Peak loads also bring up the point of trying to establish an awkwardness coefficient to be able to compare to an urgency measure.

The crowding of stalls to inhibit or prevent use by larger men is just another point on the line from plush facilities towards the ‘navy’ facilities sometimes found in fairgrounds. These are just long troughs that allow for infinite adjustment of spacing. Perhaps the equations for the discreet state could be enhanced with these other considerations to represent a proper function?

The comments in the blog also have some interesting additional ideas. There was a book on bathroom architecture that had some relevant comment as well. The book brought in the measure of ‘pee splash’ as usually seen by rusting as a means to indicate how the facility and its users interacted.

There are also the backup and reserve options. Men have a significant advantage here but generally even the standard options can get messy and have a feedback loop that does not promote desirability.