It’s True – I am a Wimp

After my last post (about snow in Indiana), my wife made it very clear: “You are a wimp,” she said. Ok, I admit it.

Last week was fall break at Notre Dame (like spring break, but in the fall – an idea that all institutions of higher learning should seriously consider). It snowed in South Bend the day before I left for a week back home in Austin. It snowed in South Bend the day after I got back this week. In Austin, during my fall break visit, it got up to 92F. I may be a weather wimp, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out which of those two weather patterns is the more desirable. I’m happy to leave six months of cold to those who are tougher and more fool-hardy than I.

Oktoberfest in Indiana, 25 Years Later

The year was 1981, the place a southern-Indiana Oktoberfest-like event, whose main characteristics were the oft repeated Chicken Dance, a lousy oompah-pah band, and vast quantities of bad beer in a bucket. There were many women present, but none paid any attention to me (I don’t remember this explicitly, but that was the default situation for me and I am quite confident it was true this night as well). It was the start of my senior year of college, and despite over three years of practice I couldn’t hold my liquor worth a darn (a deficiency I have since overcome). And yet in spite of all of these obvious reasons to feel dejected, I had a good time.

For reasons that defy logic, my friend (I’ll call him Z) asked me to retrieve his car at the end of the evening with another friend (nickname: Darth) in tow. The two of us walked the lonely mile through the parking lot and found the car, and my straightforward assignment was to drive it to the fairgrounds gate to pick up Z and whoever he might have picked up. It was a simple task – I had no premonition that things would go terribly wrong.

As we drove through the parking lot, somehow I found myself traveling at a slightly excessive speed. Maybe I was unused to the unbridled power rumbling beneath the hood of Z’s mother’s Dodge Charger. Maybe I subconsciously loathed myself and my excessive geek-prowess, hoping for self destruction. Maybe I was just drunk. In any case, the speed of the car coupled with a patch of wet grass to produce a fishtailing action from the rear half of the vehicle that was stopped only by the unwanted and massive intervention of a nearby tree.

As I mourned the damage and dreaded the undeniably justified reaction of the mighty Z, Darth went back to the fairgrounds to get the others. After what seemed an eternity (time slows for the guilty), a car pulled up with a spotlight shining blindingly in my face. Background note: at college Darth drove a previously-owned law enforcement vehicle for his daily commute, equipped with several of the special features that only cop cars have – a spotlight attached to the driver-side door being one of these. As this large, white towncar pulled up to me with a spotlight in my face, I was less than amused. My delicate psyche, already tormented by the evening’s unfortunate events, was in no mood for Darth’s tomfoolery. I grabbed the spotlight and angrily pushed it away, coincident with a few choice words expressing my extreme dismay and displeasure at Darth’s behavior.

You can imagine my consternation when a deep voice I didn’t recognize politely but firmly said “Sir, please let go of the light.” As my eyes adjusted to the darkness that I was sure would engulf me evermore, I noticed the uniform of the driver and the not-painted-over word POLICE on the side of the car. Damn.

In times of crises, a man acts on instinct. Millions of years of evolution have programmed our unconscious to respond to danger with natural impulses that hark back to our animal origins. I groveled. Much apologizing and promising that I would in no way be driving that night lead to the eventual departure of my blue-clad protector, just as the gang arrived and my real trial began.

That is my story, still fresh in my mind a quarter of a century later. Despite the bad ending, it was an important night for me – the lessons learned have never been forgotten. I have never since chanced driving while under the influence of the devil’s drink. However, twenty-five years of good driving and responsible drinking later, I still have no desire to go to another Indiana chicken-dancing, beer-bucketing, car-sliding Oktoberfest celebration. Call me strange.

My Indiana Honeymoon is Officially Over

When I moved to South Bend, Indiana from Austin in the middle of August, I couldn’t have been happier with the weather consequences. Escaping the brutal heat of an Austin summer for the cool nights and warm, sunny days of bucolic “Michiana” was pleasant, to say the least. But in the back of my mind, I knew that the joys of mild temperatures wouldn’t last.

My Indiana honeymoon of weather is now officially over, and much sooner than I expected. It snowed last night. A light dusting to be sure, but still on the ground when I awoke this morning. And it’s not even the middle of October! The novelty of it wore off about 30 seconds into the dog walk, and I remembered why I have been enduring 16 years of Texas summers without complaint (well, not much complaint anyway). At least my apartment has a garage – scraping the windshield with a credit card would have been too much for this Texan to bare.

We’re Still Not Safe

That was the headline I saw on the front page of a newspaper on Sunday, part of the build-up to the five year anniversary of 9/11. Reading the article, I realized that I don’t know what it means to be ‘safe’, as in the thing we are still not. Does it mean zero risk? If so, we have never been and never will be safe. Does it mean we still don’t ‘feel’ safe? That’s an interesting question for a therapist, but given the irrationality of most people’s fears I don’t think it has a whole lot to do with actually being safe. So what does it mean to be safe, and in particular safe from terrorism?

I thought about this question a lot a couple of years ago when I was traveling frequently to Israel. People would ask me if it was ‘safe’ to go there, given the suicide bombings and such. My response was always the same: have you ever seen the way Israelis drive? The probability of dying in a car accident over there is far, far greater than the chance of being the victim of a terrorist. Interestingly, that would almost always calm my worried friends down. It seems that traffic deaths are, well, too pedestrian to get all worked up about.

So let’s try out the same tactic on America. In the last five years about 3,000 Americans were killed by terrorists. And if you believe our President, the chances of another terrorist attack like 9/11 are lower today than five years ago. Now during that same five year period, over 200,000 Americans died in car accidents. A simple analysis of these statistics shows that the average American is about 100 times more likely to die in a car accident than a terrorist attack.

So are we safe? No, but terrorism is way down on the list of things we are not safe from. If saving American lives was the real issue, we’d be focusing on car safety rather than car bombs. But the anti-terrorism campaign has never been about saving American lives. It’s about trying to eliminate one class of US fatality – death by terrorist. I guess it really is about feeling safe rather than being safe after all.

Those who can’t…

Those who can’t do, teach. I’ve never liked that old saying, mostly because I like to teach (and flatter myself that I’m pretty good at it). I’m teaching now at Notre Dame, but am also immersed in finishing my textbook, Fundamental Principles of Optical Lithography. I guess a corollary to that old saying might be “those who can’t do, write.” I guess I don’t like that saying much either, but a slightly changed version is most certainly true: “Those who write can’t do.” I can attest to the truth of this statement for one simple reason – writing a book is all consuming. If you really pour yourself into writing, you just don’t have anything much left over to do anything. At least that is the way it is for me. I hope to be finished by the end of the year (already 5 months past my deadline!), so until then I doubt I will get much done, including all the interesting articles I am planning for my web page. Ah well.

BTW, for all the lithographers out there who are reading this, what do you want most out of a lithography textbook? Give me a shout.

The Drive to Indiana

I am slowly settling in the South Bend, Indiana – classes at Notre Dame start on Tuesday. While driving up with my dog (my wife and daughter flew up a few days later), I learned a few lessons about cross-country trips – something I hadn’t done since my college days.
* Cell phone coverage in Arkansas sucks – avoid long phone calls while driving there
* The price of gas in Illinois is 5% higher than in neighboring states (why?)
* Never name your dog anything that rhymes with “no” (a lesson taught to me by my friend in Pana, Ill whose disobedient dog is named Mo)
* The only place in America where you can’t get a Starbucks coffee is Pana, Illinois
* Lowell, Indiana is a very beautiful little town
* Even an old guy like me can do a long road trip – provided he has a comfortable seat, cruise control, and a long audio book (thanks, William)

Some cool sites

Here are a couple of cool site that I have enjoyed for a while or just discovered.

When I was in college, my favorite reading was the Journal of Improbable Research. While this magazine went through several iterations, editors and sponsors, it is now called the Annals of Improbable Research (AIR). While the journal is not on-line, they do have a website with some really interesting stuff, including information on the Ig Nobel prize. www.improbable.com.

One of my regular blog readers sent me this (I guess I’m assuming that I have more than one regular reader, though I have no proof). It’s a site dedicated to the mid-seventeenth century Jesuit polymath named Athanasius Kircher, a guy who studied everything and wrote down everything he learned in massive encyclopedic works. His life’s work was “chronology”, creating a complete list of human events throughout the entire history of the world. The current blog on their site describes the world’s longest running experiments. Cool stuff. www.kirchersociety.org/blog.

Belgian Independence Day

Today is Belgian Independence Day, and I stand and toast my friends in Belgium, inventors of French Fries and fruit beer, with a glass of Chimay White in my hands. Cheers! Salut! Proost!

Like most Americans, I am woefully ignorant of any independence day other than my own country’s. So after some quick internet research, here’s the story behind the birth of Belgium. After the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, Europe was carved up by the victors with the goal of containing French imperialistic ambitions. What is now Belgium was given to the Netherlands. The French-speaking Catholic population chafed under the rule of the Dutch-speaking protestant king, and simmering tensions came to a boil in the Brussels Opera Riot of August 25, 1830. I’ve never seen an opera that made me want to riot (at least not outside of the theater), but apparently this particularly jingoistic performance excited its crowd to such a point that they left the theater shouting patriotic slogans and quickly took over several government buildings. The Dutch sent in the troops but after several bloody days of fighting in the streets of Brussels were unable to route the revolutionaries. The provisional government declared independence on October 4.

So independence day in Belgium is October 4, right? Well, sort of. The new Belgian government needed a king (don’t all European countries need a king?), and offered the job to one Leopold I, a typical European royal of the day: son of a German duke and a Russian countess, general in the Russian army fighting against Napoleon, etc. Leopold had just turned down an offer to be king of Greece the year before, but apparently the climate or the benefits (or maybe the beer) was better in Belgium. He ascended the throne on July 21, 1831. (Two weeks later the Dutch invaded again in an attempt to regain their runaway province. The French army came to the support of the new Belgians and the Dutch went back home after ten days, averting what could have been the shortest royal reign in history.)

So there are two Belgian independence days. Or one independence day and one national day. Or something like that – I’m not really sure. In any case, it is a good day to drink a fine Belgian beer, and there are many to choose from. And on October the 4th, I’ll do it again. The sacrifices one must make in the name of international solidarity…

The Symposium

It is Wednesday night, so I must be feeling fine. The certainty with which I can predict this mood comes from the regularity of my Wednesday afternoons: from 4 – 6pm each Wednesday I attend an important Symposium.

The word ‘symposium’ comes from the Greek symposion, “a convivial gathering of the educated” and the Latin symposium, “a drinking party”. It’s meaning comes mostly from the title of one of Plato’s dialogs, where a bunch of guys without anything better to do sit around and drink while talking philosophically.

I’ve attended a lot of symposia over the years, including the SPIE Microlithography Symposium for the last 22 years. Most of these meetings have forgotten the true essence of what a symposium means (though I have been know to wax philosophic at some of the hospitality suites at the Microlithography Symposium over the years). My regular Wednesday commitment, however, remains true to it’s Greco-Roman symposia roots. About five to ten people meet at one of my favorite Austin pubs, drink beer, and with no set agenda have fascinating and valuable conversations. The perfect combination of taste bud and brain stimulation. What could be better?

So if you want to catch me in a good mood, get in touch with me on Wednesday night. But if you want to see me on Wednesday afternoon, you had better be attending the Symposium – otherwise you’ll miss me.

Sharing a Mid-Life Crisis

David Pan, a friend of mine and professor at UT Austin, told me recently “Moore’s Law isn’t dead – it’s just having a mid-life crisis.” Although I wrote an article a few years ago provocatively titled “The End of the Semiconductor Industry as We Know It”, I think David is right – our industry is in mid-life crisis. I can relate.

Gordon Moore penned his famous law in 1965, observing a doubling of the number of the transistors on a chip since the birth of the integrated circuit in 1960. Now it just so happens that I was born in 1960. I certainly don’t claim any cosmic connection to continuous semiconductor improvement due to this coincidence of birth dates, but it does mean that me and the technology driver of the Information Age share at least one thing – we are both getting old.

Now I certainly don’t feel ‘old’, or that my useful days are behind me, but I’m not young either. I can’t pull all-nighters anymore, they way I used to when I could start and finish a conference paper 12 hours before I gave it. I’m unwilling to put my life on hold when a customer calls and says he needs something yesterday. I can’t work in the fab – that’s a young person’s job. And yes, the cries of “mid-life crisis” could be heard from all of my friends when I bought that Lotus sports car last year. I’m definitely older, but I like to think that I’m wiser too, and that this wisdom is more than enough to make up for a little slowness in step. But is the same thing true of the IC industry? It better be, or things will get pretty ugly fast. Working harder and faster because we have to keep with Moore’s Law is not good enough any more. The IC industry took off because the early pioneers took the science of semiconductors and turned it into technology. For that technology to keep going, we’ll have to bring in a whole bunch of new science. Most of that science will come from the universities, unlike in the past when most innovations came from the IC companies. Increased support for univeristy research is needed now, and hopeful it is not already too late.

Moore’s Law is getting old – let’s hope it gets wise as well.

Musings of a Gentleman Scientist