Point of View

I’m wondering if my co-workers have noticed that I smell faintly of women’s perfume today.  Could be embarrassing if they knew the full story.  I know my wife is disappointed and saddened. 

It turns out that my wife’s perfume bottle has a superb atomizer and on a whim I realized that if I spritz a shot of perfume at a aromatherapy candle in our bedroom it makes a most satisfying whoosh-like ball of  flame – sort of a mini special effects explosion on our dresser.  The perfume is evocative, mysterious, haunting, provocative (their words), and mostly alcohol (my hypothesis – presumably correct).  My wife was bemused on so many levels and finally stepped in to point out that my experiments were both dangerous and fairly expensive.

It got me wondering what percentage of mankind’s scientific advances were catalyzed by someone just messin’ around to see what happens.   

I will never forget the expression of total glee on my father’s face many years ago when he guessed (correctly) that our brand new family microwave was most likely operating at the same frequency necessary to illuminate a common fluorescent bulb.  He immediately disassembled my mom’s bathroom vanity mirror, wedged the bulb into our new kitchen appliance, gathered the family and turned the dial. Sparks were ricocheting off the metal bulb bases and the device was making a frightening zapping/sizzling noise but he still fairly danced with delight as the bulb began to glow – a cool spectacle and wireless miracle for us.

Apparently the apple does not fall far from the tree. 

The “what-if” gene can have tragic consequences – think of Marie Curie, pioneer in the field of radioactivity and winner of two Nobel prizes who most certainly died of radiation poisoning resulting from her experiments.  The damaging effects of ionizing radiation were not then known, and much of her work had been carried out in a shed, without taking any safety measures. She had carried test tubes containing radioactive isotopes in her pocket and stored them in her desk drawer, remarking on the pretty blue-green light that the substances gave off in the dark.

You think dad would know better.

Of course today, a quick trip to Youtube can scratch your “what-if” gene from behind the safety of your computer monitor.   Want to start your BBQ with liquid oxygen?  Pepsi and Mentos?  Blend your iPhone?  Perhaps the cumulative effect of our exposure to everyone else’s what-ifs will bring a collective power to the age-old “let’s see what happens”.  I’m not sure.  Youtube doesn’t quite do justice to the sight of a modest mushroom cloud of flame rising over my wife’s jewelry box.  You’ve simply got to see that one first hand.

Because I was curious, I did the following quick math over the weekend.

This is NOT intended to trivialize the tragic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but rather to show just how tremendously fragile our ecosystem is and how very careful we have to be to jealously guard and defend our planet.

The estimated volume of salt water in the Gulf of Mexico is 650 Quadrillion Gallons (650,000,000,000,000,000 gallons)
The BP oil spill has dumped approximately 180 million gallons of crude oil (neglecting anything that has been skimmed or recovered).

This means the Gulf is now 0.000000028% oil.
This is the equivalent of dropping 10 drops of crude oil out of an eyedropper into an Olympic sized swimming pool.

Yikes!

Notes:
Olympic sized swimming pool = 2,500,000 liters
Average drop from an eyedropper is .07cm^3

Q: What does Lady Gaga have to do with the Wayans Brothers?

A friend of mine sent me the following interesting article on an effort to take a more scientific/analytical approach to the design and fabrication of wood baseball bats. Weirdly enough, one of the strangest elements of this article for me wasn’t the attempt to bring science and technology to bear on this problem. I actually think that’s inevitable. Rather it was the contention in this article that bats should be struck on the flat-grain instead of the end grain. WHAT???  When I was a kid we would regularly taunt kids who hit a bat held this way. Everyone knew that the bat would most likely shatter killing everyone within miles. Is nothing sacred? But I digress. Back to the wooden bat versus technology smack-down.

In general I find this sort of thing really fascinating – it speaks to the uneasy intersection that occasionally occurs between long-held traditions and emerging technical understanding. And it’s another example when technology is only one of many considerations in the specification of a product.

These intersections can really grate on the engineers. In the instance of Baseball’s major leagues alone – as those of you who are fans know – there is the delicious bedevilment that the bats must be made of wood. It’s a decision made with almost complete deference to the aesthetics, and tradition of the game (not withstanding some concern that composite bats used at the lower levels would actually be dangerous in the hands of free swinging MLBers). In a head-to-head comparison including ease of manufacture, durability, performance, cost and general safety wood would lose (say that three times quick).

Given their choice and absent rules and tradition to the contrary I suspect few if any few modern day engineers would elect to use wood in this application- a notoriously quirky and fundamentally unpredictable material.

In point of fact, with a few exceptions engineers have generally been successful in eradicating wood from most non-building related designs (tennis rackets, car bodies, golf clubs, airplanes – even pencils are increasingly hedging towards composites). It’s not that wood is necessarily a BAD material. Quite the converse – wood’s strength to weight ratio is superb and when cost is factored in you often can’t beat wood. It’s fairly plentiful – if responsibly managed it’s fully sustainable and wood offers a plethora of ancillary technical benefits. Oh by the way – in general wood can be beautiful as well. The problem – from an engineer’s point of view – is that wood is not particularly repeatable, predicable or homogenous. A fancy way for saying that the way in which wood performs under stress depends on a whole bunch of factors not always easy to understand or anticipate. And engineers tend to really hate unpredictability.

Of course wood has a host of other aesthetic and evocative benefits – as any of you who’ve ever heard the sound a baseball makes off an aluminum bat can attest. And in my opinion, in the right application, these should weigh as importantly as the purely technical considerations. I offer up wooden boats, roller coasters and even the MLB baseball bat as products where I’m happy to let tradition trump technology. I guess it just gives the engineers a slightly different canvas to paint on. Game on.

The much anticipated iphone4 went on sale Thursday, June 24 after much anticipation from the techno-savvy. But as shoppers rush to be the first to discard their seemingly ancient iphone predecessors, buyers and reviewers are pointing to a persistent problem.

It seems reception for the iphone4 can be impaired depending on how you hold the phone. The problem is perhaps due to an internal antenna that is embedded along the edge of the phone, directly under a user’s grip. Apple, the quintessential hallmark of innovation, responded, “Just avoid holding it in that way.” “That way” being the intuitive, fairly standard way to hold a cell phone. And, in an upsell worthy of any telemarketer working today, they recommend buying the iphone4 cover to reduce the interference, among other ideas.

It may be the ultimate karmic twist that in addition to CNN’s report
on the matter, Gizmodo (who found the iphone4 prototype) and Engadget (who posted the prototype photo) are sharing what looks to be the original email from Apple CEO Steve Jobs offering the advice, as well as Apple’s follow up clarifications.

Based on Jobs initial response, there appears to be a fine line between reinventing the user experience and vaudeville. His advice bears a striking resemblance to the tired classic: A guy goes into a Dr.’s office saying, “It hurts when I do this.” To which the Dr. replies, “So don’t do that.” Perhaps Apple has an amazing sense of humor with regard to their products and this is all a misunderstanding. Surely they are joking if they believe there’s no problem with the design, just the user’s hand.

As for advice regarding iterations of other Apple products, maybe Jobs will continue in this vein and fall back on comedy staple, “a man, a parrot and donkey all set off in a boat …” Forget the Worldwide Developers Conference, Jobs should be at the Bellagio. No doubt seats would sell out early.