The Weight of Things
A cat on your lap.
A heavy coat when it’s cold.
A stout walking stick.
A load of wood for a campfire.
A weighted blanket and a thick book.
A backpack with a picnic inside.
Not so heavy as to be a burden, but rather ballast—a counterweight.
They give rise to a feeling of stability and solidity more than they do effort or strain.
Wrong Languages
I studied German in high school. I thought it would be interesting to learn it because I have a German last name and half of my family tree was German. Relatives had at some point come to America from Germany. It seemed like I might get to know a little something about my heritage by learning German, though I wouldn’t have put it in those terms at the time.
Many of my classmates told me that I was wasting my time; that I should learn Spanish instead, on the grounds that it was more useful. After all, we share a border with Mexico, not Germany. But I wasn’t interested in the Spanish language, and I was determined to study something relevant to my family history instead.
Which did not come in very handy when I found myself traveling alone in Sweden for work in the 90’s. I stopped for gas on my way back to Stockholm and went inside the station to pay with the company credit card. The attendant seemed very business-like—not quite what I was used to growing up in Minnesota where warm smiles permeated every transaction. There was a problem with the card and she seemed to need more information.
Unlike everyone else I had met on my journey so far, she spoke no English and two or three attempts to communicate (Swedish vs. English) what the problem was didn’t advance our mutual understanding. I remembered that someone had told me earlier that there were a few German television stations that broadcast in Sweden. (No explanation for this was ever given.) So in an attempt to understand and be understood, I asked her—in German—if she might speak some German. She scoffed and frowned as if that was absurd and pathetic; as if I had suggested we consult a Ouija board to figure out what to do next.
In the end, I finally understood that she needed an additional number to complete the transaction. I think she keyed in my driver’s license number (or maybe my zip code or birthday—I never did find out) and I was able to pay.
And as it turns out, according to a DNA test, I’m only about 5% German; the rest of me is Scandinavian.
Interfaces
Because I’m an engineer, I notice and think about interfaces a lot: touchscreens and buttons and dials and switches for all sorts of devices and gadgets. Designing the interface correctly counts for a lot with a product, because it’s the thing that the user touches, sees, hears. It’s where the rubber meets the road. (OK, bad metaphor… It’s actually where the hands grab the steering wheel. The tires and the road are handled by a different department.)
Anyway, when we put down our phones and get out of the car and walk out into the natural world there cease to be interfaces as we usually think of them. It’s not like trees are designed so we can climb them or lakes so we can swim in them. The idea of an interface, no matter how well a stick or a rock fits in our hand, becomes substantially less relevant.
Until you consider your body. Your body is the thing you use to interact with the world—the only thing you have to interact with the world, I might add. It is your world-interface, and it is the best one you will ever own. Your body is the gateway to all of the sights, sounds, textures, tastes and smells of the Earth.
The best technological experiences can feel magical for our eyes and fingertips, but it’s only because our eyes and fingertips are astonishing in their capabilities to begin with.
Food In Motion
So much of cooking is preparation—mise en place—and so much of preparation is cutting up large pieces of food into smaller pieces. I think if I’ve become any faster or more efficient at cooking, I owe it to learning how to efficiently cut food.
Knowing how a piece of meat or fruit should be cut up is certainly part of it, and there are very helpful procedures for everything from a chicken to a mango. But what really matters is this: keeping the blade working. There is little forward progress whenever the blade is at rest.
Handedness plays a role in efficient cutting: the food is stabilized or repositioned with one hand and the knife is used with the other. (Any time I’m tempted to use both hands to grasp a knife, I’m quietly wondering to myself about my next close call.) Using either hand for any task would be interesting, but it suggests switching hands—an interruption in the flow—and it would also require developing some skill with both hands, which takes time and repetition. Handedness leads to asymmetry; a kind of specialization on a small scale. But handedness gives us an advantage by reducing time to proficiency.
Each hand is busy with a distinctly different, but related, task. They are coordinated. The “knife hand” can keep the knife busy because the “food hand” is doing its job anticipating what the knife hand needs next. It is a process, a workflow. Food moves from one side of the cutting board to the other, not unlike the way it moves from the cupboard to the mixing bowl to the pan to the oven. Food in motion; asymmetry as an engine.
New England Chowder
My wife and I try New England Chowder almost everywhere we go. If we see it on a menu somewhere—we aren’t “somewhere” so much lately as we are simply at home looking at a takeout menu online—we try it. Oftentimes it’s an accompaniment with Friday fish fry, sometimes it’s just a soup option with another entree.
It’s fun to note the variations across different restaurants: some add corn and some don’t, some use a little dill to season it and others use a lot. And, of course, some places offer a clam chowder and others a seafood chowder that might include fish, clams and perhaps even bits of lobster. Chowder is one of our very favorite items to have from a restaurant and we are rarely disappointed.
Except when we’re in New England. There, it seems, they don’t like a thick, hearty stew filled with the rich flavors of cream and potatoes and butter and bacon to go with the seafood. They seem to prefer a watery broth that might have a little flavor imparted by a wedge of lemon on the side to accompany the subtle notes of fresh ocean-caught fish. They require an inordinate amount of salt and pepper to be added at the table. And perhaps they believe that the cute little packet of oyster crackers will somehow transform the bowl of thin liquid into something with the proper consistency: a viscous phase of matter almost between a liquid and a solid, like ivory lava, flowing with fat and flavor.
We are looking forward to a day when we can safely travel to New England again and try all sorts of seafood dishes that are best consumed by the sea that produced them, but chowders may no longer be among them. I don’t know how New England Chowder got it’s name, because it’s only made properly in the Midwest.
Transitions
The other day on a walk, we saw a muskrat swimming along the banks of a creek as we walked over the bridge. We’d never seen a muskrat there before and stopped to watch it for a while. It swam under the bridge we stood on and then pulled up to the bank and started nosing around, looking for… something? It wasn’t obvious.
Anyway, Cody (a fantastic name supplied by my wife) slipped back into the water and swam upstream a bit more, then back onto the bank, then back into the water and toward us again. Cody seemed equally at home in the water and on land. There was no hesitation or preparatory movements for making the transitions, even though it naturally required a change in posture and head tilt to go between swimming and walking. The forces on her legs and body are very different in the two environments (if they are in fact distinct) as are the movements themselves. But Cody gave no indication that anything changed—she simply entered and exited the water with the same ease with which we walked from the bike path onto the bridge.
After a while, Cody found and decisively nibbled a tall plant into shorter lengths, discarding the stem sections and taking the longest, leafiest part with her back downstream and onto another part of the bank where we couldn’t see her any longer. The leaves could have been for dinner or a house project. It wasn’t obvious.
Light and Heat
The subject of the relationship between light and heat came up a few weeks ago, and I was lucky enough to be let in on a summary of the discussion:
“Light equals heat”
“Nope.”
“Well then, explain the Sun.”
I can’t possibly improve any further on this sophisticated exchange, but it did eventually bring to mind the fact that light is sometimes described by its “temperature”. Certainly you’ve heard the phrase “red hot” or “white hot” and you might even associate it with iron work or forging steel. Where it gets a little nerdy is when you assign a temperature to “red” or “white”.
Firstly, the Fahrenheit scale isn’t used and neither is the Celsius scale. No, for this we use another scale called Kelvin. This is the temperature scale that physicists and astronomers like because 0 Kelvin is also known as “absolute zero” or “penguin butt cold”. Nothing in the universe can get any colder than 0 Kelvin; that’s it.
For a little context, “room temperature” is generally taken to be:
77 Fahrenheit (F) = 25 Celsius (C) = 298.15 Kelvin (K)
This should also neatly explain why no one uses the Kelvin scale to discuss any kind of normal temperature. (Can you imagine: “Boy, it’s a hot one; feels like 303 Kelvin!”) Mercifully, a change in temperature of 1 Kelvin is the same as a change of 1 Celsius, so it’s not completely silly. But Kelvins are useful to discuss things that are very, very cold and also very, very hot: like stuff that’s so hot that it glows.
So, if you’ll notice on the LED light bulbs that you see in the stores, they typically have some number on it like 3500K, which is its color temperature. The temperature corresponds to a nerdy physics concept (a “black-body radiator”) that you can think of as follows: an ideal material of this type emits light that goes from red to orange to yellow to white to bluish-white as it gets hotter and hotter. Incandescent bulbs behave mostly like this. (FYI: we recently discovered that dimmable LED bulbs do not look more yellow/orange as you dim them. Regrettably, they stay exactly the same color.) And it is incandescent bulbs and how they respond to heat that make this relatively simple concept absurdly difficult to keep straight.
If you see light from a low-powered incandescent bulb that has a nice warm glow—yellowish orange, let’s say—it probably has a color temperature around 2500K. If you see a high-powered incandescent bulb, it looks cool—very white with only a slight yellowish tinge—it might have a color temperature around 6000K, which is a much higher temperature.
Yes, this feels like some kind of joke: a red-hot fireplace poker emits “warm” light on the low end of the temperature scale and a white-hot flare emits “cool” light at the high end of the temperature scale. I wish I could blame this on some buffoon from the 1700’s who didn’t understand heat but it kinda comes down to our association of “warm” with orange and “cool” with bluish-white. And besides, it would feel weird to talk about color temperatures that went from “warm” to “really, really hot”.
In any case, light may not quite equal heat: there’s a conversion you have to do to the temperature first and I’m pretty sure you have to divide the color of the light by heat. Go figure.
Touch Play
We’ve been watching The Queen’s Gambit and it’s reminded me of the “touch move” rule: if you touch a piece you’re obligated to use your turn to move it. It discourages a lot of fiddling around with the pieces, trying out moves before committing to one. The game is perhaps more elegant and disciplined as a result.
What I think is most interesting is the effect that even just touching a piece can have. A player might have visualized—incompletely or inaccurately—a set of consequences and side-effects, but the act of simply reaching and grasping a piece can lead to a sudden realization of how the intended move actually impacts the rest of the board. And how the game could play out differently as a result.
Writing feels like this over and over again. I certainly don’t see the words on the page before I write them. I might hear some of them in my head, but it’s not the same as seeing and feeling them play out onto the page or bubble up onto the screen. Often, even if I have a particular outcome in mind, it simply changes as I write it. Sometimes I’m surprised at what ends up on the page after a “move”.
I’m not sure that chess and writing actually have that much in common. But both require touch in order to discover the outcome and the entire game can change after the first move.
All the Words
What if I knew “all” the words of the English language? For each and every subject and occasion, I could rummage around in my mind to craft exactly the right phrase: horses for courses.
But if I knew all the words, wouldn’t there be some that I would probably never need? After all, I manage alright knowing only some of them now.
Would I stop to consider those infrequently-used objects once in a while? Would I look at them like the glass jars on my workbench filled with miscellaneous screws and nails and nameless pieces of metal—specialized solutions waiting indefinitely for improbable problems to arise? Would I weigh throwing them out? Or would I be tempted to press them into service, even if they weren’t quite the right selection, or it wasn’t quite the right occasion?
Would this post be improved by better words or better thinking?
Menus
A menu isn’t just a list of things you can get at a restaurant. The menu can be thought of as a highly favorable review; at once both comprehensive and succinct. It’s also a chance to tell the story of the restaurant, to give it a sense of time and place as well as taste.
Even before we set foot inside, the menu can tell us what to expect and why.
Deep Dive
Somehow SCUBA diving came up in a conversation a long, long time ago. I was in the Netherlands for work and the client was kind enough to spend an evening entertaining me during my visit there. He told me that apart from the obvious dangers of being underwater and surfacing too quickly from too great a depth, SCUBA diving had a more subtle danger: hypothermia. Since I don’t do diving of any kind (SCUBA, sky- , platform, spring-board or dumpster) this was new information.
But first, a diving joke:
Q: What’s the difference between SCUBA diving and skydiving?
A: If you’re SCUBA diving and you run out of air, there are some strategies and techniques you can use to help you survive. If you’re skydiving and you run out of air—you’re simply out of air.
Hypothermia made some sense, since being in very cold water can certainly be a serious hazard, but a lot of people dive in warm water, wearing wetsuits or drysuits. Heat loss through contact with the water is still happening, though. Consider that if you dive for work, say, doing underwater construction, you probably have to wear a heated suit and mask to keep from getting too cold. A further complication is that when you get out of the water and you sit in the boat with a wetsuit on, the evaporating water removes an enormous amount of heat from your body.
But the really difficult issue is that you’re breathing cool, compressed air or, if you’re diving deep, a compressed mixture of oxygen and another gas like nitrogen or helium. In any case, it’s already cold (since it’s in the water) and when it comes out of the SCUBA tank, it expands and as it does so its temperature drops even more. (This is described by Boyle’s Law, well-known by chemistry students everywhere.) You’re losing heat through your lungs with each breath.
So you’re in water that’s most certainly colder than your skin and the only “air” you have available is quite chilly: You’re getting colder from the outside-in and the inside-out.
Our bodies will begin to shiver involuntarily if we become cold, but this is a little tricky, too, because our skin is really only good at detecting relative changes in temperature. You can slowly get very cold without starting to shiver or even feeling very cold. And on the other hand, it can be very challenging to successfully re-warm a severe hypothermia victim: if they suddenly feel warm and cozy inside a rescue blanket, their body may actually stop shivering and subsequently freeze to death.
It’s strange to think that the obvious problem—breathing underwater—is in some ways rather straightforward to deal with, and that hypothermia is more serious. Some hazards are more dangerous simply because they can happen slowly, and some solutions are dangerous if they’re applied too hastily.
Soporific
Developing any skill requires feedback: information about how you’re doing, preferably while you’re in the act of doing it. Sleep does not work this way. With sleep, you lie very still and wait, and if everything goes well you wake up later and don’t remember much. It feels like the opposite of skill.
Sleep does seem to benefit from ritual and preparation—good “sleep hygiene”—like refraining from certain things just before bed: caffeine (a stimulant), alcohol (a depressant), eating a big meal (which makes you tired), exercise (which makes you very tired) and bright lights (which make you squint your eyes). So finding a ritual that makes you relaxed and “ready for sleep” is something that can be refined, as long as it doesn’t involve eating or drinking or doing anything. So at the end of the day (literally), a sleep ritual can be somewhat hit and miss, which occasionally leaves you in the dark (literally and metaphorically), wondering what to do next.
I’ll offer something that seems like technique but probably isn’t: observing and manipulating your breath. Look, you’re already lying still in the dark, so you’re like 85% of the way there—you just need to do the sleepy part now. The only other thing you can control is your breath: you can try to breathe like you do when you’re asleep. You can focus on the rising and falling of your chest and try to imagine or remember what the rhythm of your breath is when you’re very relaxed; and you can try to simulate it. With any luck, you can focus on trying to slow down and lengthen each breath so much that you eventually sink into that deeper level of relaxation and find yourself…
Near Misses
The kitchen is a place of excitement and danger. There are hot ovens, sharp knives, heavy pans which can also be quite hot: basically a lot of very hot, sharp metal things that may also be heavy. And, of course, food. And perhaps a little alcohol because, why not; we’re cooking.
Sometimes there are “near misses”: something hot or sharp or heavy comes very close to some part of you that you’d rather not have burned, cut or smooshed. Near misses aren’t quite accidents; they’re warnings.
They warn you of lack of attention, lack of control, lack of patience, lack of technique—anything you might be lacking except, perhaps, fiber. Near misses show you a glimpse of what could happen if you don’t address the area that is lacking.
They are gifts to be treasured.
Technology vs. Walking
For a long stretch of human existence, if you went for a walk it was “out of doors”. There just weren’t that many buildings big enough that you could even quicken your step into a run, much less spend time strolling in the same structure. There were castles and cathedrals: exceptions that prove the rule.
Over time, there were bigger and bigger buildings: factories, warehouses, theaters and airship hangars. And eventually department stores. The first indoor mall, Southdale Center Mall, was built in 1956 in Edina, Minnesota: an entire miniature downtown shopping area in a completely enclosed building: no bugs, no wind or rain or dark of night. Certainly no terrain.
To take this one step further, consider the absurdity of the treadmill: a device placed inside a building which helps you simulate the act of walking or running while remaining in place! Biologically, this creates a visuomotor paradox that approaches the grotesque: we’re used to the visual feedback and kinesthetic sensations that come with moving. A treadmill is essentially playing a biomechanical prank on our senses.
Humans are naturally quite well-equipped to walking outdoors, and have gone from having to traverse the landscape as we found it, punctuated with trees, streams, thickets and rocks, to walking along muddy streets and wooden sidewalks, to perfectly smooth, flat concrete and carpet nearly everywhere in a very short period of time, evolutionarily speaking. I think it would seem very odd to someone from the Victorian era that we have so many large buildings that we spend time in, but perhaps they would have thought it sounded very civilized.
Walking indoors is certainly better than not walking at all, but it’s a very recent development and it comes at a cost: it offers predictable comfort at the expense of feeling the wind on your face, seeing the sun and the clouds, feeling warm or chilled, or the chance of seeing wildlife. But mostly it diminishes a certain feeling of agency; of moving through a world that is, in fact, accommodating without being entirely convenient.
Device Register
Smart devices are starting to make good on the promise that we’ll be able to make nearly any request in the same way we would talk to a friend and that request will be fulfilled. But for now, it still feels vaguely awkward and we still get mixed results. Truly, it’s a wonder that I can ask anything from historical dates to the spelling of ‘necessary’ (which happens way more often that you’d think) to the weather conditions to the contents of my shopping list, but we’re just not quite there yet.
Anyway, what is that awkwardness? Partly it’s the anticipation of having to ask the question again if/when I don’t get the expected response. It seems to create a certain amount of hesitation—and not like the hesitation before your first kiss; more like the hesitation before you try to explain why something is broken. But the other part is that we’re actually attempting to speak a slightly different form of the language.
Much earlier in the development of speech recognition, I might have said that it was like having to speak pidgin English: a stripped-down version of English with a laser-focused vocabulary and non-existent grammar. But we’re happily beyond that now, so if it’s not a pidgin, what is it?
I think it’s actually an issue of register. A register is a specific way of using a language appropriate to the situation you are in—especially when talking to people with a higher or lower social status. Some languages have extremely elaborate registers that rely on entirely separate vocabularies. English is much less complicated and much more permissive, but still: there’s the way that we talk to our friends when we’re hanging out (casual register) that’s different than when we talk to the judge when we’re in traffic court (consultative register). We are affecting a register of sorts when we pretend to speak like Shakespeare: “Whither goest thou? Mayhaps thou hath partaken too much of thine cucumber sandwiches?”
When we’re giving instructions or asking questions of our smart devices, we hesitate in part because we’re trying to speak in a recently developed ‘device register’ that we haven’t learned growing up, so we don’t really know the rules or the limits—and it might change with the next firmware update. For now it seems to fall somewhere between talking with friends at a café, traffic court and asking HAL to open the pod bay doors. Repeatedly.
The Endurance of Symbols
Yup, cameras still look like this.
Cool: everybody who has a decent podcast has a microphone like that!
OK, I haven’t had a phone that looked like this in my house for decades, but I guess they’re still like that at work… (Remember going to work?)
Nobody who’s voting for the first time this year really knows what this is.
What is Subtlety For?
If you drink a glass of orange juice and it tastes like really good orange juice, you’ll be pleased. (If you just brushed your teeth, you will have ruined your day. Don’t.)
If you drink a glass of orange juice and it tastes really good, but you notice something else in the background, under the sweetness and the rounded acidity; a sharper flavor, but slightly spicy and earthy… cardamom?
An abundance of cardamom would loudly declare its presence and you would know it immediately. (“Who the hell put spices in my orange juice!?”) A little cardamom lets you consider the flavors and wonder—and then you recognize it.
That’s what subtlety is for: a chance to notice something small, something delicate in the background. Not for any particular reason, but perhaps to be “in on the joke” or as an homage to the effort that went into putting it there.
Feedback Revisited
Attention to feedback, to what your senses are telling you about what’s happening while you’re moving your arms and legs around, trying to get something done, is the difference between simply following a procedure and mindfully engaging with it.
Sometimes I just want to do the steps and be done. Sometimes I take more enjoyment in observing and feeling the process on the way to the desired result. I suppose with some things I don’t even care about the outcome, I just want to experience the feel of it. The sensations alone are enough.
In any case, the real effort doesn't seem to be in executing each step—it's in paying attention to the feedback and making adjustments as you go. There is real work in both concentrating on the incoming information, which may be quite subtle, and then adapting to it.
The Mother of Invention
Sometimes when you need to solve a problem of organization or material handling, looking at the items you can get in a grocery store or a big box store is helpful. I’ve already extolled the virtues of trays, but there are more!
Need something cheap to hold a lot of little parts in a single layer? Try a rimmed baking sheet. Need to make sure all those little parts don’t slide around everywhere? Put a silicone baking mat on top of the baking sheet. Food storage containers excel at keeping cables and partially disassembled assemblies in one place without losing anything. (And they usually stack!) Need to run some experiments on how various materials respond to certain solvents? Throw them in some canning jars. (Well, there were canning jars last year…)
(This goes both ways, of course: the line between scientific equipment and cookware is completely blurred now as well, with sous vide machines, vacuum sealers, dehydrators and other gadgets.)
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but hospitality and food service are its midwives.