Independent/Scientist/Entrepreneur @independentscience-blog - Tumblr Blog

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Biotech ain't easy. Boer explains how Sonify is fighting melanoma — and why starting a company is like “signing up to eat a giant shit sandwich.”

Someone asked me questions, so I provided answers.

Transmissions & stories.

My favorite stories have just enough reality to be relatable and grounded before launching into the improbable, fanciful, or impossible. The transition from fact to embroidered truth to wholesale fantasy is an art. When done well, you can’t help but think, “What if…?” even when firmly in the fantastical. Terry Pratchett is a master of it. His Discworld series is a broad satire of humanity and human history. With characters ranging from humans to trolls to anthropomorphic personifications of Death, etc. the stories skew silly, peppered with hilarious tangential footnotes, yet Pratchett delves into very human predicaments, past and present.

Similarly, I love songs that that do the same thing. Pratchett used entire books to weave his tales, but a song? You’ve got 3-4 minutes, give or take, to carry a listener into your world. This past weekend I had a chance to sit down and listen to Frank Turner’s most recent album, Positive Songs for Negative People. I was excited for the album but I was reluctant to listen to the track he wrote about the astronaut Christa McAuliffe, who died in the Challenger explosion, entitled Silent Key.

I was 3 when the Challenger blew up. Can 3-year-olds have memories? I have an image of sitting on my parents’ bed with my mom, surrounded by their gigantic down comforter in its thinning cotton pinkish cover, watching the launch on tv. As the shuttle took off, exploded, and split the blue sky with arcing white trails of debris, I remember fear, panic, and a very clear understanding of the finality of death. Death, like how plants die in the winter, but with people there’s no little bulb tucked away in the earth under the snow - there’s no spring for them. I remember the futile hope that someone would’ve defied the laws of physics, and there’d be a survivor in the water after the Challenger’s passenger compartment fell into the ocean. I don’t know if this is a real memory or something that grew up with me based on my parents’ stories.

Silent Key, however, is absolutely fucking beautiful. Who even writes songs about o-rings failing? No one. No one sings about technical disasters or engineering hubris unravelling, never mind imagining what a teacher-astronaut hurtling to her death might have thought on her way back to earth, which could be presumptive in the hands of another. But the equally simple and horribly complex conclusion Turner-as-McAuliffe reaches with the able help of both Esme Patterson’s vocals and the Sleeping Souls’ musical accompaniment, is an artistically and technically perfect match with the rest of the song.

So I’ve been going around all gratified and uplifted in a heartbroken kind of way, since that’s where paying close attention to the lyrics of a Frank Turner album will get you. And then I couldn’t help but ask, “What if…?” While irrefutably fictional, how far can we push the truth of Silent Key’s narrative? Given that people can and do communicate with the International Space Station via ham radio from the comfort of their own homes, where is that point in Silent Key when fact is forced into embroidered truth? When does it become fiction? Is there a nonzero physical possibility that this narrative could have occurred?

(Science ALWAYS helps. Also, greatest tshirt ever. Available here.)

I don’t know that much about ham radio, but let’s start with the geographical information we know from history and what FT (Frank Turner) divulged lyrically:

- The Challenger took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

- The apex of the crew cabin’s trajectory was 65,000 ft, or 19.812 km (somewhat morbid NASA source).

- The ham radio in the song was in Hampshire, England.

- Distance between launch and the radio was “four thousand nautical miles, as the crow flies.”

Nautical miles aren’t easily convertible to SI units. Google says 4000 nautical miles = 7408 km. Google maps says the distance between Cape Canaveral and Hampshire is 6873.51 km.

(Convert to km at your leisure.)

You won’t convince me that “six thousand eight hundred seventy three point five one kilometers” is more lyrically compelling than “nautical miles as the crow flies,” because art. That said, I’m going to use the google result, because science.

First, let’s consider the direct distance between the apex of the crew’s cabin and Hampshire. Intuition tells us that almost 20 vertical km is not a significant change from the distance between Cape Canaveral and Hampshire, but for completeness’ sake, let’s holla at our boy Pythagorus:

Intuition verified. Vertical distance of the Challenger cabin increases the distance between itself and Hampshire by a negligible few hundredths of a km.

The next question is can you get a radio signal to cover that much distance over the horizon? Yes. Yes, you can. It is physically possible at relatively low frequencies to have ground wave transmission - radio waves that follow the curvature of the Earth’s surface and can travel long distances beyond the horizon. However, those frequencies are only available for military and commercial purposes. Amateur (ham) radio is authorized to operate at higher frequencies, in which long distance ground waves aren’t physically possible, and let’s assume that hypothetical 4-year-old FT wasn’t engaging in illegal radio operation.

(This is a portion of the US Navy Cutler VLF (very low frequency) Array in Maine. This is what you need to operate a radio at those frequencies. No idea what FT’s family did/does, but I’m going to guess they didn’t have casual access to something like this. Sidenote - Doesn’t this picture remind you of Whistler’s Nocturne: Blue and Gold - Old Battersea Bridge?)

But at certain higher frequencies, radio signals can bounce off the ionosphere and the Earth’s surface, a process called hopping, which can increase signal transmission distance by thousands of kilometers. The ionosphere is a portion of Earth’s atmosphere containing ionized particles. They can act like small antennae to help pass a signal along. But in order to hop, an astronaut reaching Hampshire from Cape Canaveral would have to broadcast a frequency no greater than the maximum usable frequency. The maximum usable frequency is the frequency at which a transmission will bounce off the ionosphere, and this is how you calculate it:

(This very cool old paper from the 1930s from the NIST library is the source. Should you ever find yourself in Gaithursburg, MD, you can go to the NIST library and see a descendent of Newton’s apple tree.)

(This is what the angle of incidence is. Big black dot is the source of the transmission, the little spots are representative of the ionosphere, solid arrow is the radio transmission, and the dotted line is perpendicular to Earth.)

The maximum usable frequency is calculated via the above relationship between the critical frequency and the angle at which it hits the ionosphere. If you use a higher frequency, it won’t reflect off the ionosphere, your signal goes into space, and no hops for you. The critical frequency, fc, is the maximum frequency at which a vertically transmitted signal (angle of incidence = 0) gets reflected by the ionosphere. This is influenced by electron density per cubic meter. Electron density is dependent on ultraviolet and other more energetic radiation coming from sources such as the sun (among other things). When exposed to high-energy radiation, electrons are separated from their molecules and atoms, thus ionizing them (now you know where the term “ionizing radiation” comes from). Those freed electrons? They're what we’re concerned with when we’re establishing the reflective properties of the ionosphere. Essentially, anything that affects the electron density, measured by the ionization levels of the gases in our atmosphere, will affect fc, maximum usable frequency, and the ability to hop a radio signal. Electron density in the ionosphere changes with the sun’s activity, seasonally, and even night to day.

So, yes! There is a nonzero probability, a physical possibility, that FT could have heard a transmission from the Challenger, if McAuliffe happened to be carrying a ham radio that worked in that ideal range. But this is where the truth acquires its [very lovely] embroidery and FT’s flight of fancy is cleared for takeoff.

While possible, it’s hard to say FT’s lyrical situation would be likely. The radios carried by astronauts on the International Space Station, for example, receive and transmit at frequencies intended to go entirely through the atmosphere. Even if McAuliffe or FT were using one of the OSCARs (small satellites intended to increase amateurs’ signal ranges), calculating Doppler shifts is a hell of an advanced undertaking for either a panicking adult or a 4 year old. Also - fair warning - this is where the physics ends, and biological limitations begin. According to NASA’s Challenger report (it’s here and is as tragic as you think), sudden decompression at nearly 20 km up was enough to knock the crew unconscious. Perhaps that was a more merciful end than being conscious for an impact more forceful than a plane crash.

All that said, it’s not a choice of what to believe; it’s not science versus fantasy. Facts exist and are true whether we believe in them or not. (In a nutshell, if you don’t “believe” in science? Great. Gravity gives exactly zero fucks.) But if someone finds the space to see through the facts to a deeper personal truth, and they share it via a departure from what is real as FT does so deftly, I’m there for that. It’s liberating, because we lie to ourselves all the time. As Terry Pratchett illustrates via a conversation between Death (all capitals) and Death’s (mostly) human granddaughter Susan, humanity is built on telling ourselves stories:

(From The Hogfather. Binky is Death’s horse. Just read the story. It’s very entertaining. It’s a quick read, kind of like brain candy, but made entirely of whole grains and with a lot of vitamins and minerals.)

That’s more or less why there needs to be stories and imagination; it’s why we all need to stretch and relax, and let our hearts be broken. Nature and the universe has had eons to play weighted games of probability with itself, but we get nothing more than a cosmic blip. We can’t afford to just slam bare facts together until something better happens. We have to push the facts as far as they’ll go and ask, “what if...?”

(Edit: As was pointed out, 4271 mi converts to 6873.51 km, NOT 68731.51 km as written. Turns out I used the correct value when I did the math, but wrote it incorrectly. It is literally a back-of-the-paper-bag calculation, and what’s an order of magnitude amongst friends...?)

Instacart: "The concept is not entirely new."

Grocery delivery services, specifically Instacart, are being awarded $2B valuations, and to that I say, "What the actual fuck." As per the above linked article, "The concept is not entirely new." No shit. There's not much I can add to that piece. Grocery delivery has resembled its most current incarnation since the 90s, it failed miserably then, and it remains a luxury service.

According to this article, not only is Instacart not yet profitable, but it's history repeating itself insomuch as ludicrous valuations on small-profit businesses are making this look a hell of a lot like the 90s, pre-dot-com bust. I can post a one-for-one list of articles that alternately argue for and against the premise that we're in a bubble, but $2B for a luxury delivery service in a sector with extremely tiny margins? Hey, California, it's time to put the drugs down and come in out of the sun.

Finally, things like Instacart do a pretty good job further stratifying our society and decreasing our social mobility, which lags behind many other developed countries'. US social mobility was higher in the 50s than it is now; it decreased in the 70s and hasn't changed much since. But while relative mobility has not changed, climbing the rungs of that ladder has become more difficult and heavily correlates with where you live. If you're in any way concerned with the combined issues of joblessness, poverty, and how they impact our society and nation as a whole, then you should give a shit about this stuff.

Instacart neither provides reliable salaries nor benefits to its workers. To even qualify, you need to own a reliable car and a smartphone. No one's talking about this, and it deeply pisses me off: you need to start at a certain level within society to even participate in the "sharing economy." Instacart excludes nearly half of all Americans who don't have a smartphone. (I'm not even going to touch Airbnb, but you see where I'm going with this.)

I'm not saying Instacart shouldn't exist; everyone should be free to spend their money how and where they want. But hailing Instacart as some hugely innovative monster with $2B worth of promise is - I'm going to say it - stupid, simply because it solves no pre-existing problems, exacerbates others, and we've seen this all before.

Is Instacart going to place tools in the hands of deeply impoverished people, enabling them to pull themselves out of their current socioeconomic stratus? (No. They can't participate - they do not benefit from the service, and they're excluded from employment.) Will Instacart do anything to eliminate food deserts that predominantly exist in deeply impoverished neighborhoods? (No. This is about selling groceries at a premium for convenience's sake, something many people can't afford.) No single aspect of Instacart is accessible to everyone in our society, and the people it leaves behind are the people who've been fucked over and left behind by every other aspect of American culture.

As always, this is a question of scale, and Instacart's valuation is a weird reflection of American investment values. With Sonify, I'm playing the same game, and I enjoy services like Airbnb. Furthermore, I can't possibly believe in pure socialism, because Sonify simply wouldn't exist in a socialist society. But I do believe in the social contract as described by David Simon, and I do believe in describing what I see in accurate terms: Instacart is a luxury service that further stratifies our society; it's wholly inaccessible to nearly half of all Americans, and of the people who can participate in this "sharing" economy, it mostly serves to further delineate a serving class that's compelled to use all its free time to hustle - because no one's producing anything truly innovative anymore, there's an ever-widening wealth gap that provides no tangible reason to feel like bettering oneself is possible without a constant hustle, and we're all behaving like everything is a zero-sum game - and a luxury class that can afford to pay a premium.

(Because this is my blog where I can ramble at length with terrible tangential run-on sentence structure, I align with neither Reaganomics nor Keynesian economics for the same reason; both are top-down approaches. Whether you believe the government or the financial institutions/rich people should wield the power is immaterial. History proves that both are in each other's pockets and will act primarily in favor of their own interests. The problem that exists now is that there's no correction. Raise taxes on the super rich? They'll find a place with lower taxes (see France). Lower taxes on the rich even more? Well, that's fewer services for those people who've already been economically left behind. Legislate? Well, things like this happen legally all the time. Relaxing taxes within the middle classes never lasts, which is in my opinion, probably what has to happen. At the very least, no one's really given it a hard test because we seem to spend all our time arguing about whether taxing or not taxing the super-wealthy is good/bad, which honestly feels like a distraction. As far as I can tell, the only way out is by doing the impossible from the bottom.)

Anyway, going back to Instacart, insane valuations, and the lack of real innovation, the whole thing is depressing. It feels like the emperor has no clothes.

Nerds, interrupted.

Reading the internet the past several days, couchbound with a particularly virulent cold, I came across this brilliant piece by Laurie Penny, On Nerd Entitlement. I didn't know what to expect when I started reading, but this part cut through the brain fog like an axe through chocolate pudding:

The whole piece is pretty great.

I followed the links in Penny's text and read Scott Aaronson's initial blog post and comment that sparked the response as well as his followup postings. It might've been at least in part due to my medium-grade fever, but I had a lot of feelings about all of this.

First of all, Aaronson is a badass in his field. My friends who study topics relating to his work have a huge amount of admiration for him. I know someone who was his student, and she greatly benefitted from and enjoyed the experience of studying with Aaronson. There's no doubt in my mind that he's eminently qualified for the job he has and deserves to be where he is. The fact that he can share his messy parts is also worth a mention, because in this time of Utilizing Social Media To Enhance Personal Branding, someone who's all, "Hey, I had some ugly moments here," is refreshing.

Also, like Laurie, I completely relate to parts of his experience. The fear of being "outed" for liking somebody? I remember being abjectly terrified through middle and high school that a crush would find out that I had these things - you might have heard of them before - called "feelings" and use them against me. To do what, I have no idea. Perhaps it was just the specter of potential teasing/rejection that loomed large, but I deeply resented that I could be so vulnerable, which I understood at the time as weak, and so human.

They were all fairly average height, had tame hair and small feet, and they all seemed to know what to do with their arms. My typical inner monologue looked something like this: SERIOUSLY WHY IS THERE SO MUCH ARM BETWEEN MY SHOULDERS AND FINGERS - WHAT DO I DO WITH IT MY ELBOWS LOOK WEIRD OH GOD OH GOD etc. So much embarrassment for one person!

Aaronson picked up Dworkin, and similarly, I picked up Ayn Rand. What do Dworkin and Rand have in common? Completely inflexible philosophies that leave no room for the complex diversity of humanity, yet carry a promise of redemption/superiority for the most strict adherents. Finding an extreme "religion" is a wonderful way to outsource shame management when you lack the resources to process it. It's also a handy thing to blame when your strict philosophy doesn't redeem as promised.

Scott Aaronson describes math as his escape, the thing he loved. As he says, he used his passion for and dedication to math to save himself from suicide. I'm going to guess that now, when he walks into a room and talks about math, people automatically assume he's competent. When he speaks on the subject in which he's so diligently worked to become an expert, he isn't ignored, which is as it should be.

Unfortunately, I don't always enjoy that kind of acceptance. The thing that I do for a living and love, where I've found my place, does not afford me that kind of (dare I say it?) privilege. Aaronson does cede the point on privilege with an I-want-this-to-go-away vibe, but I really wish more people actually understood it, so in the event that you, dear reader, don't fully get it, this is where I address male privilege in the tech startup world - welcome to questionable analogy time!

Let's say starting Sonify Biosciences is equivalent to slogging through a trench filled with 10 inches of fresh, steaming, bovine feces, with a ton of satisfaction at the other end. You've decided that you're going to walk through that trench, and you have a pair of knee-high galoshes. It's challenging but doable. Now imagine you've decided to walk through that trench, but your galoshes only come halfway up your calves. Walking the length of that trench in mid-calf-height galoshes is still doable, but you're going to be dealing with a lot more bullshit up close and personal.

Bullshit. So much bullshit.

Being a lady in the entrepreneurial STEM space is like having those mid-calf-height galoshes and never having access to knee-high ones. You can make it, and while it's not literally the worst thing, you're playing the same game everyone else is on a higher difficulty setting, and it can really, really suck.

How does it suck, specifically? Like this:

One of my cofounders who identifies as male and I decided to check out a local makerspace. We were identically attired - jeans, sneakers, tshirts, hoodies. We walked in, met some of the (all male) people there, who were friendly enough. They were talking about some of the work they do. Male cofounder joined in the conversation with an appropriate comment, his entry went very smoothly, conversation continued to roll. I joined in with an appropriate comment, conversation stopped, everyone stared, and surprise that I am in any way technically adept registered all around. Cue cross examination on my background and education (not my cofounder's).

Ok, ok, you've got me! I'm lying about everything! I bought my PhD. At Costco. Kirkland signature brand, in biochemistry.

Here's another anecdote:

In grad school, after 2 weeks of back-to-back blizzards over Christmas break in a region poorly equipped for snow removal, my back sore from repeatedly shoveling out my car, an elderly neighbor's, and helping stranded people push their vehicles out of snowbanks, I finally made it back into lab. Cue 2-sentence admonition from ex-advisor on how I should be spending more time in lab: "You need to spend more time here, in the lab, even if you're writing. I know you're dating someone now, and I know what you really want is to be at home, taking care of them, but you need to be in lab more."

Well... fine. I guess I'll put down the vacuum long enough to finish my thesis, but only if I can graduate in this.

You know what? Three's a charm:

I walk in with my male cofounder to meet potential investors, I get a once-over, and the first thing out of the potential investor's mouth is along the lines of, "You're really tall. Did you play volleyball?" On one occasion this was followed up with questions regarding my marital and dating status. Then he (it's always been a "he") turns to my cofounder and greets him like a normal human being.

My cells love it when I culture them in this outfit; that's actually the secret to my good data and Sonify's success!

Each time things like this happen, I just put it away in the moment and follow through on why I'm there, reacting to and processing it later. I'm proud to say that learning to handle those situations with professionalism and class yields positive outcomes, but I'd love it if I didn't have to wonder if every time I walked into a room, I'd be accepted as a knowledgable professional in my own field. So, what Laurie says on issues of male privilege in tech spaces? Yup, they're true.

As a self-identified feminist, Aaronson links to a piece by Scott Alexander that he describes as "rubies encrusted in gold." Diplomatically speaking, it's dependent upon wholly ignoring third wave feminism.

Not diplomatically speaking, Alexander is just straight-up trolling feminism, which is what made me want to write about all this in the first place. I was going to try to find a turd crusted in gold image, but I try to limit myself to one poop mention per post, because professionalism.

The endorsement confused me because highly inclusive third wave feminist principles - the very things driving feminism in here and now - make Alexander's very... er, pessimistic take on feminism (and Aaronson's endorsement of it) out-of-date and ill-informed. Modern third wave feminism is looking to dismantle gender binaries, the very thing that sits at the root of non-gender-conforming pain. Feminism is NOT about replacing the patriarchy with a matriarchy; it's about ditching them both in favor of a freer nonbinary system that lets you be you, whoever you are, however you define yourself. It's worth noting that feminism broadly acknowledges the shortcomings of the first and second waves. First and second wave feminism failed a huge number of people, and so it changed, morphing into the shape the people practicing it created. (Which is why it's still changing! Obviously.)

Ultimately, I want Scott Aaronson to feel like his life has a continuous narrative, without shame. I hope he finds some love for the conflicted-young-adult-Scott who used the resources he had to keep himself alive so he could grow, learn, and be a positive presence in a lot of lives. I think Penny, countless others, and I fully hear and empathize with that. I also hope Aaronson sorts through his anger and shame (because you don't support a post like Alexander's without a fair helping of both those things) and that Aaronson, along with the rest of us, keeps on learning and growing.

Because physics.

Following the whole uBeam thing has inspired me to revisit fundamental wave physics, and I'm really enjoying it. Besides, uBeam's response to the doubts cast upon its feasibility has done nothing to dispel my skepticism. What would, however, is taking the prototype from the demo, making the circuitry visible, and setting up something that simultaneously reports the current alongside the multimeter reading the volts, so we can clearly see both values at the same time (because power equals voltage times current, or P = IV). I'd also want info on the transducers, for completeness' sake.

Given their conviction, I'm not sure why they haven't done that because most scientists, when confronted with complete data that conflicts with theory, change both their minds and the theory. uBeam's manifesto, while certainly stirring, relies on Taylor Swiftian philosophy when a straightforward experiment would do more and honestly, be a lot less weird. But hey, not my circus, not my monkeys.

So, yeah, the physics of soundwaves! Cool useful stuff, and I love how it's kind of a thing now, but we really need to talk about linearity versus nonlinearity because people are throwing these words around in a way that makes my face hurt. In order to do it, though, we're going to have to revisit the physics of springs.

Why?

Because in traditional Newtonian mechanical physics, if you graph the force (F) of a spring as a function of the spring's displacement (x) with k, the spring constant, representing the spring's stiffness, you get a line: F = kx. (Displacement, x, is on the x-axis, and force, F, is on the y-axis.) It's a straight line, no need for exponents. Straight line = linear. Hence, "linearity."

So how does that relate to molecules in the air, being compressed by the mechanical force of sound waves?

Because the sonic wavefronts - the compression of air molecules that happen as sound energy passes through them - cause the molecules of ambient air to behave like springs. This is a spring:

(And it'll bounce and bounce, cycling between potential and kinetic energy, being smushed together and allowed to relax. There are both attractive and dispersive forces acting on any combination of molecules in the air that look a lot like this.)

Potential energy, U, is described mathematically as being equal to (kx^2)/2, where x is displacement and k is the spring constant, as described above. If you remember your high school math, any equation of the form y = x^2 will describe a parabola (more about parabolas here than you'll ever want to know), and this is no exception.

Now you know that when people are all, "Sound is traveling through the air in a linear fashion," that means that the molecules are behaving like ideal springs, moving with each compression and expansion that accompanies each sonic wavefront.

(Well. Sort of.)

In fact, you should watch Episode 5: Hiding in the Light of the newer Cosmos series, because (a) Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson is a boss, (b) the visualizations of what sonic wavefronts look like are roughly a gazillion times better than anything I can doodle, and (c) you'll learn some legit science. It's streamable on Netflix.

(Dr. NdGT; the man, the legend.)

From linearity, we move to nonlinearity, and here's where we hit the limitations of not including more than basic math in this blog. In order to express a nonlinearity, you have to use a Taylor expansion. You learn about them when you take calc II. In essence, Taylor expansions let you approximate an arbitrary function with a polynomial, and they're important because we know how to mathematically work with polynomials, whereas arbitrary functions? Not necessarily. That said, I'm not going into it due to the good amount of fairly abstract math.

Physically speaking, when you have a sonic beam - focused or not - there's a span of frequencies and amplitudes where air behaves linearly as discussed above. In fact, you can graph it:

(This a completely perfectly accurate potential energy graph of literally everything in the universe that I just freehanded on a piece of junk mail envelope.** You're welcome, world.)

U is potential energy, as a function of displacement, x. For that small portion delineated in blue, you can approximate the movement with the above equation (because parabola), but as you can see, it gets more complex when either displacement becomes very small or very large. Those extremes of displacement happen when you put a lot of energy, like ultrasound, through your medium, i.e., the molecules that make up ambient air.

The net result is that your sound wave will start moving at different speeds, producing harmonics, lower energy sound waves that travel in all different directions. You can focus them to an extent; check out this project done by some very precocious high schoolers (full disclosure: hah, that was NOT what I was up to in high school). Arrays work to focus sound, as theirs did.

However, regardless of whether your medium is behaving linearly or nonlinearly, regardless of what kind of array you use, (including parametric arrays), the primary concern is still the amount of energy exposure. A parametric array is a means of generating highly focused sound using ultrasound. This is a complex but beautiful paper that shows you can focus sound waves with a parametric array to very high accuracy, but in order to get in this case 500 Hz of sound interference, more than 110 dB SPL are required (exposure to >110 dB SPL results in physical damage).

Now that you have a feel for what parametric arrays and nonlinearity are, using them doesn't change the amount of energy an ultrasound transducer has to put out. Yes, you can focus it, but it's still there, and you have no way of knowing if you're crossing the beam as you walk around the theoretical room the theoretical device is in. And it's still, as far as anyone can tell, a highly inefficient way to transfer power to a battery.

(**Completely untrue.)

Ultrasound, thermodynamics, and robot overlords.

As some of you may know, I play with ultrasound for a living, and I study what certain modalities do to specific kinds of cells. A collaborator of mine wrote a blog post questioning the wisdom of investing $10M in uBeam, and wow, did it go beyond what either of us expected. It was blowing up twitter, tumblr, Y Combinator's Hacker News picked it up, and it even made it onto Business Insider. It's amazing how one small social critique can reach so far when it touches on such an apparently sensitive subject.

It's dismaying how the resultant conversation has – for the most part – split into two camps, the uBeam is Great No Matter What And All Dissenters Are Idiots camp and the Those Rich Fuckers Have It Coming; Take Them Down camp. That's indicative of yet another trend, the one where every issue becomes a deeply personal, almost religious, cause.

I'm not on either side of this. Why? Two main reasons:

- Meredith Perry should try whatever she wants to try.

- That said, she needs to acknowledge the parameters in which she needs to work.

Let's dive in and pick this apart.

Meredith Perry should try whatever she wants to try.

I firmly believe that if someone has a hunch that something might be possible, they should try it. Done. I will not change my mind on that. Even if others know it isn't possible, even if people have done and redone whatever it is, the person should absolutely be empowered to find a way to get their hands dirty and dive in.

Why?

Because school is currently crap for developing the explorer/scientist/artist/entrepreneur/boundary pushing tendencies we all have to varying degrees in assorted fields. We're doing things like teaching chemistry the exact same way it was taught in like 1950 and that tech class is somehow less valuable than math class, and that is complete bullshit. We're exclusively taught in school to do other people's work, to be a cog in a larger system, that there are right answers, that we should study to take the test (not learn the material), and that mistakes and being wrong are bad. This is not to say that people who enjoy working for larger organizations are somehow less than those of us who strike out on our own; I'm saying that for those of us who harbor strong out-of-the-box tendencies and the desire to learn with our hands, school can be torture.

Along similar lines, I resent how Perry's educational pedigree is held up as an absolute metric of whether she was qualified for uBeam in the first place. Regardless of what's on her resume, none of us have any idea about what she's done with the time she was given in her education and accessory programs unless we've sat down and picked her brains. We all have at least an inkling that this world is not a meritocracy. You can study for the test, or you can learn, and to be honest, learning seems to happen more outside of the classroom. I don't know what she's done. I don't know how she copes with stress, how she reacts to questions she doesn't know the answers to, or what her team looks/will look like. I don't care about her GPA; I'm more interested in whether she's the kind of person who understands what she knows and doesn't know, and surrounds herself with people possessing complementary skill sets who are in varying ways smarter than she is, or is she the kind of person who needs constant validation and reacts to the insecurity by only working with people with whom she can feel superior?

None of us know the answer to that question, except – hopefully – uBeam's investors.

That said, she needs to acknowledge the parameters in which she needs to work.

Let's settle this once and for all; is it physically possible to charge a phone with sound waves?

Yes.

This is an energy transfer; you're depositing ultrasound onto a device that can convert the mechanical energy of moving air molecules into electrical energy. And you could do it, even through the air, without vibrating the phone to pieces. (I say “even through the air” because air is a shit conducting medium for ultrasound, which is why they smear that gunk on pregnant folks' bellies for imaging.) So, in the stripped-down terms of energy transfer, this is physically possible. No one will disagree.

Before I launch into some serious sciencing, I have to address the demo. It's been dissected by people on Hacker News, and as was pointed out there, it's missing half the information. The only parameter Perry mentions is the voltage. Electrical power (P), typically measured in Watts (W) is equal to the voltage (V) times the current (I). Without a current measurement, there is no way to understand how much power is being transmitted, and Watts are the fundamental way in which electrical power is measured. Depending upon how much of your high school physics you remember, Watts are Joules per second, Joules being the unit of energy required to move a Coulomb of charge through 1 Volt of potential. We need to know how many Coulombs of charge are moving through Volts of potential per second (which is where Amperes of current come in; they're Coulombs per second) in order to understand exactly what the power output is. Your standard Apple iPhone charger delivers 5 W. Telling us the voltage? Not that meaningful because I can't compare it to the device I use. I wouldn't have anything to say about this if there was a demo that showed the whole thing. But there isn't, and so I'm going to. Show us one that demonstrates all of these things beyond a reasonable doubt, and I will be on board with uBeam's effort.

What happens when you add living organisms to the equation? You know, the users and their pets? You leave the relatively clear and mathematical world of pure physics/engineering and end up in my field, exploring the effects of ultrasound on the unpredictably murky corner of biology, physics, and chemistry. Your federal health and safety agencies set the limits on the maximal safe levels of sonic exposure for humans, because bad things start to happen to biological tissue when exposed to high amounts of energy, sound included.

First of all, there is a sonic spectrum. Sound waves are pressure waves, or oscillating mechanical compressions of the matter through which they travel. For sonic waves to radiate, they need matter to travel through, which is why sound can't travel through a vacuum (and why spaceships don't actually make noise). We have highly evolved organs, our ears and brain, that can detect and process sound waves in a narrow portion of the full sonic spectrum. Some creatures (bats and cetaceans like whales, dolphins, etc.) can use ultrasonic frequencies for echolocation. Cats and dogs and other small mammals can hear in the ultrasonic range, too. We use certain frequencies and strengths for medical imaging and sonar. Other modalities, like high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU), are used to burn away carefully selected portions of tissue without having to cut the body open. Still other frequencies and intensities of ultrasound are used to mechanically clean tools and jewelry, cause temporary male infertility, and speed up bone fracture healing. Essentially, from surgery sans scalpel (HIFU) to manipulating genetic expression (fracture healing), this simple mechanical stimulus of propagating pressure waves interacts with biology in intensely interesting myriad ways. At Sonify, for example, we're using ultrasound to treat early-stage melanoma.

If we take this chunk of knowledge and relate it back to uBeam, uBeam's existing patents mention using ultrasound in the 20-120 kHz range, at a strength up to 155 dB SIL, which is the maximum amount of ultrasound to which people are legally able to be exposed.

Problem # 1.

Cats and dogs can hear up to 64 kHz and 44 kHz, respectively, and rats and mice can hear up to 76 kHz and 91 kHz respectively. PETA won't be thrilled if the frequencies used are in that range.

(Potential fix: Go above those frequencies or, er... manufacture pet earwear?)

Problem #2.

I know from firsthand experience that at 27 kHz and 0.3 W/cm2 or 154.7 dB SIL according to the units converter found here, human keratinocytes become damaged in a way that's incompatible with life in a matter of minutes due to mechanical stress.

You should care about this because keratinocytes are the most plentiful type of cell in your skin, and they produce keratin, a structural protein that helps hold all your insides together. They're strong little bastards, and if they're hurt by ultrasound, you can bet that less structurally focused cells will suffer too. Mechanical damage... think of a scrape, just larger. Like large swaths of your skin. I don't want to even contemplate eyeball damage.

(Potential fix: Um... one of these for everyone?)

Problem #3.

Basing this on my own lab experience, I know that for my cells to receive that much ultrasound, the transducer was so loud, I could only use it after normal business hours, with a 24 hour advance email warning to everyone on the floor, putting signs on the lab doors, making foam earplugs available to everyone in my lab area, and making sure that no one was doing small animal work at the times when it would be on (see Problem #1).

(Potential fix: MHz ultrasound transducers quiet down, but they affect cells in all kinds of incredibly interesting ways, like acting as a temporary male contraceptive by temporarily knocking out spermatogenesis. Totally not joking here; this was a big deal.)

Problem #4.

What Danny calculated; the fact that even if uBeam's people start at the absolute upper limits of federally allowable ultrasonic energy, outside the audible range of small mammals, AND we assume that those upper frequencies somehow magically don't utterly destroy biological tissue (which I strongly, strongly doubt, but best case scenario and all that) charging a phone via ultrasound will take at least 100 times longer to charge than if you plugged it into a wall. That maximum? 155 dB SPL? Regardless of how you reach it, whether by focusing an array of transducers or not, that is the fundamental constraint of this problem. We're talking about a basic energy transfer, from sonic to electrical, and the rate at which that can be done in terms of the limitations set by the human body.

(Potential fix: Break literally all of thermodynamics. I will happily accept my technological overlords and joyously look forward to perpetual motion machines and alternate explanations for quantum physics should this happen, but considering all the exceptions that exist for every other set of physical laws, thermodynamics has exactly zero exceptions, so I'm inclined to believe the absolute truth of it. What's that? You don't understand thermodynamics? Pick up a copy of McQuarrie, and learn some serious shit about how the universe works. I hate/love that book.)

(This dude could probably could break the laws of thermo.)

Problem #5.

Related to Problem #3 and Problem #4, the conversation about this has been peppered with people throwing around words the meanings of which I'm not sure they understand, like "nonlinear."

Let's clear this up. If you're in a room with a focused ultrasound beam, and that beam is strong enough, the medium through which it's traveling (air in uBeam's case) becomes nonlinear, the oscillations of which causes beams of widely ranging frequencies to be generated, and because they have different wave propagation speeds due to dispersion, they don't focus, and instead propagate in all different directions. Air becomes a dispersive medium at frequencies greater than 28 kHz thanks to the presence of CO2. These propagating beams are hard to predict and control, and given that they're going to be at lower frequencies than the original beam (because physics), they will probably drop into the audible human range (upper bound is around 23 kHz) and will be at the very least annoying as hell. Factors that influence this phenomenon is air temperature, pressure, altitude, CO2 concentration... controlling this is well-nigh impossible.

(Potential fix: You got me. No breathing?)

(Or spacesuits. But then, farts.)

So, look; you can't build a charge-anywhere phone charger without your users, and your users are people, so you have to abide by the limitations humans and their pets pose. As such, your energy transfer rate has an upper limit, and it's really inefficient and slow. I kind of wonder what is the energy loss from an efficiency standpoint when comparing ultrasound charging to plugging the phone into the wall.

Personally, I see a rock-solid project here, a wonderful opportunity to learn, but it's a student project. Sonify completed proof-of-concept work on a melanoma treatment that required biosafety level II (bsl-II) facilities, built previously nonexistent lab equipment, generated results that outperformed commonly used chemotherapeutics, and submitted three patents in a year with less than $80k. $10M for an undergrad or bare bones master's level project... I don't understand it. I'm always jealous of how in engineering, you can sit down and crunch the numbers to get a 99.9% accurate prediction of how your device will perform. As such, I'm not sure why the uBeam people don't have a meaningful rebuttal to “a random person on tumblr,” to paraphrase Marc Andreesson, and are instead blowing the whole thing off. It makes them look like they've been caught with their pants down.

Thermodynamics is not subjective, it's not magic, it exists whether you believe in it or not, there are no exceptions to it, and it's not personal. It doesn't matter whose hands this project is in, the same parameters exist. I find it very odd that the reaction is to reiterate that it's not about the ways in which it won't work but rather it's about the ways that it will work, and yet there's an actual calculation that counterindicates its success that no one from uBeam is directly addressing.

So what?

I don't know. It depresses me to see what could have been an honest simple project blown into an artificially loud PR campaign that looks like it can't answer a high school physics question, even with all its patents filed. It doesn't make me happy to think of uBeam failing. The whole thing is sad and generally shitty, not least of all because if uBeam isn't much beyond an elaborate PR job, it's just going to make it harder for the public to trust science and for investors to trust other ventures. So, Meredith Perry, you better pull it out of the bag and your product better work, because we sure as hell don't need more shit stacked against Sonify and the rest of the innovators in and out of the ultrasound community if this field becomes associated with a Silicon Valley investment boondoggle.

Creativity. What the hell.

Recently, someone commented on how having an idea happens in reference to what I'm doing and how I think of things. It was a little weird, I felt really self-conscious, embarrassed, and then of course Malcolm Gladwell came up. The idea of this person having only Gladwell's trite explanations for technical creativity as their primary reference pissed me off so much, I actually sat down and thought about how it works in my head.

The last couple of times, I saw an insufficiency in the world that became a massive injustice in my head (which in reality was not the case). First, I got indignant about the lack of a better solution, and then I could NOT stop thinking about it. Short of running an electric current through me or dropping me off a very high place, I couldn't stop. Then I alternately read obsessively about it and not thought about it at all. There's no pattern there. Mostly, though, I couldn't stop thinking about it, and during the reading, thinking, and learning, the questions start coming. I can hold it all off long enough to have a relationship, friends, bathe regularly, cook, sleep, etc. but it all tends to happen in one big, tangential, avalanching mess. In retrospect, most of the thoughts are absolutely nuts.

But here's where I think the key is; if you really can't explain away a question about your initial query, then you have to follow it to its logical conclusion. I'm not a linear-planning-tell-it-to-your-moleskine kind of person. Binging on information with a bazillion tabs open in my browser helps keep a lot of things in my head at once, and then it can all settle down and sort itself out later. After the binge, I can't look at any of it until everything aligns itself in my head, which it always does, sooner or later. (It's been dawning on me that the reason I wasn't a stellar student may have been because this feels much more natural to me than the steady plod required of you by the educational system, but that's another topic for another day.)

It's just... don't discount anything you think because it's "too crazy." Find a logical conclusion to the crazy thought. If you end up with an open question and a potential solution that no one's tried before, boom. That's where you start! Then you have to reign in the obsessive (yet oddly unfocused?) binge-y chaos, crank that discipline to 11, get all technical and self-critical, chart your experimental course, and get in the lab and do it.

So, yeah.

I don't like Malcolm Gladwell very much.

Feet on the ground, head in the clouds.

As I took my first steps as an entrepreneur, I started out absolutely hating academia. I maintain that I have very valid reasons to do so, but cultivating that rage accomplishes nothing for anyone in the long-term.

My good days in grad school were the days when my advisor and most of the professors around me pretended I didn't exist. Recovering from all the bad days is still a work in progress, but over the last few months, it's mostly faded into shadowy events that happened once upon a time. As terrible as things were on a day-to-day basis in grad school, I eventually managed to place a lot of trust in a few select professors to help me graduate. Their help was priceless; it not only got me out with my degree, but it also gave me a tiny peek into what grad school would have been like (and is like for the lucky ones) with a great advisor.

I remember how it felt to first talk to the professor who eventually took control of my committee and steered the other members towards my graduation. Telling him what was happening forced me to relive every single event as coherent thoughts somehow formed from phrases tossed out of the roiling anger. I remember consciously moderating my tone so I'd sound matter-of-fact, and the overall effect, when paired with what I was describing, was in retrospect probably pretty ghastly. I focused on an original Calder he probably still has hanging in his office behind his desk, managed to keep my shit together, and at the end of our discussion, he told me that he wished his grad students were more like me. The praise was alien enough at the time that the words didn't immediately parse, but as I left, despite shaking icy hands, nausea, and a clammy sheen of nervous sweat, I was hopeful for the first time in 4 years. His manner and approach were so foreign, talking to him felt like a glimpse down an alternate reality in another dimension.

When you come from this, it's really easy to be a cynic. Cynicism can give you a sense of control over an otherwise terrifying unpredictable environment, but once you leave that place, it can cloud every opportunity with infinite potential failures. You need to watch out for that; that's when you run the risk of freezing up out of fear and doing nothing. It's especially difficult in science research, because you need a hefty dose of skepticism to do quality experimental work, but you also have to be able to let yourself go, creatively speaking. I think of it as a feet on the ground, head in the clouds approach. I strive to achieve that balance.

I have my days when I rage about all that and want a revolution, but the best revolutions happen quietly, when you get past the anger, acknowledge the good people, and have a go at fixing the shortcomings so everyone wins, rendering the old harmful way obsolete. Despite my largely negative experiences in academia, here's why I see a mutually beneficial future in what I like to think of as friends-with-benefits academic/startup relationships:

From the startup perspective:

Connecting with professors gives you access to relatively cheap labor (graduate students) advised by some of the best in their fields. Also, you need a new employee? Well, here's your look-in on the rising talent.

From the professor's perspective:

Having a startup pay part of a grad student salary eases the financial burden on the university/professor. Everyone's broke these days.

From the student's perspective:

Not to oversimplify, but as I've mentioned before, publications and therefore thesis projects can happen even if the work results in a patent, as long as the patent gets filed first. (Obviously, publications and graduated students are beneficial to the PI, too.) Also, the student gets to see firsthand how research can happen outside of academia.

To quote The Brothers Bloom, this seems to set up everyone involved to get just the thing they want, at least in theory. If things keep going for me the way they've been going, do stay tuned to see how this turns out in practice.

Love in the 90s is paranoid...

You know what's the greatest? Being able to access some of the best legal guidance remotely via free conference call services. Further evidence that you do not have to live in an expensive biotech "hotspot" to take advantage of the talent that clusters around them.

Instead, I live in a city where I can make my way to the bar with a Victorian porter on cask tonight called "Modern Life is Rubbish," perfect after this week of binging on the 90s.

Happy Thursday? Happy Thursday! Have some sarcastic dancey Blur-y fun:

Patenting, part 2.

I resent the implication that everyone who files patents is an evil hoarding bastard singularly motivated by profit. The argument doesn't make sense from the perspective of a one-person startup, because even if my only motive was profit...

...Wait, let's back it up here a minute. If my only motive was to get filthy rich, then why bother with science? I definitely would not have gone to graduate school. And there's no way on earth that I would continue to pursue science research and generally continue to be a somewhat offbeat, creative, yet technical type after finishing grad school. I'd've gone into finance, I would have cultivated a far more mainstream persona, and I definitely would not be writing crazy shit on the internet.

For the sake of argument, though, let's ignore that and just assume my only motive is profit. Then, as a one-person startup, I sure as hell wouldn't waste my time collecting patents and then doing nothing with them. I can't sell people nothing. Also, I need to feed myself, and furthermore, bathtubs full of gold coins don't fill themselves.

But profit is in fact not my only motive.

I started a company because I was beyond angry and feeling betrayed. Among other things, I was harassed - generically and sexually - for 5 years of grad school, and no one could do anything to stop it. I stuck it out because I didn't know how else to get a PhD in biochemistry. And as far as I could tell, I needed it to communicate my ability to learn almost anything and use the knowledge to solve problems. So, when I graduated, I decided I didn't want to spend my life begging a bunch of egomaniacal self-appointed gatekeepers for the chance to try to create something of intrinsic value for society.

Hence my startup, which exists to explore a novel cancer treatment.

I'm not a special snowflake. There are a million other people out there just like me who can do what I do and probably do it better, and I wish they would. The reality of my situation is I can't possibly convince people to give me money for nothing, which is why patents are necessary. I need to be able to show investors a real possibility for future gain, and when I say future gain, you're damn right I mean money because (a) there will be no sexual favors, (b) I'm not such a sparkling personality that I can even pretend for a moment that someone would pay me for just being me (so no scientific patronage), and (c) "the greater good" rings hollow to most people after a while (I'm going to leave crowdfunding to others).

That's why I'm patenting my work. And it's exciting! It's the first official mark of progress. It enables me to say, "I've done enough work to create this valuable patent, and if you give me money now to do this next chunk of necessary research, the odds are good that I will have a really useful product to meet the demands of these specific cancer patients." And there're no plans to hoard them. If they're useful, it's in everyone's best interests to turn out a good treatment as fast and as efficiently as possible, so patients, doctors, investors, and inventors all win.

Meetings.

Investor meeting today. They're the nicest meetings I've ever been to. Every time I go, I subconsciously expect the other shoe to drop. I don't even know what the other shoe dropping would be. The meetings are never bad, really helpful, and always cordial.

But I'm always exhausted afterwards. Weird. This must be the emotional roller coaster of entrepreneurship everyone told me about.

Patenting, academic and otherwise.

There's an Al Jazeera article making the rounds on twitter discussing the evils of patenting academic results.

I'm not a fan of pop science reporting, and the language used here is laughably inflammatory, but the author just doesn't get the other option: leave Big Pharma, leave academia, forget the government, and do your own research. Patenting isn't evil in and of itself. In fact, it's as vital to the independent science movement as copyright is to artists. If I don't lock down my IP, I ain't gonna eat.

And of course, let's recall the not-so-secret secret that over 50% of results published by academic labs are purely fictional, anyway.

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