Items that do not fit in other categories
On Tuesday I become officially old – 65 years old. Besides the joy of senior discounts, the best benefit of turning 65 was happy hour with my friends at my favorite brewpub, Hold Out. Here is a picture with one of those friends, Grant Willson.
I have done a lot of public speaking in my life. I taught at UT for 25 years, so I’ve got much experience with the “sage on a stage” model of speaking. I’ve also given over 100 talks at conferences, sometimes to a room with 10 people, and sometimes to a room of 1,000. I like public speaking. Is it bad to admit that I like all of the attention focused on me? But it wasn’t always like this. In fact, my first public speaking experience was a complete, unmitigated disaster. I was in the 5th grade.
Between the ages of about 10 to 13 my dad moved our family many times for his work – he was a construction supervisor. We moved enough that I developed a clear theory of the best time of year to move. Parents generally believe that summers are the best time to move, so as not to disrupt the school year. Parents believe this because they never talk to their kids. Any kid who has moved enough knows that this is the worst time of year to move. Moving in the summer means you have no friends in your new town and are unlikely to meet kids your own age until school starts. So you spend the summer bored. But if you move in the middle of the school year, its gives instant opportunities for making friends.
In the middle of my 5th grade, we moved from Michigan to Carrolton, Georgia, just a few miles from the Alabama border. School in Georgia was quite different from Michigan, with the biggest difference that you could wear shorts to school. I liked that. Despite the culture shock, I made friends quickly and even started to integrate into the social fabric of the school. I joined the math club. I even became the president of the 5th grade math club. I don’t remember there being many members, and our faculty advisor liked me. I was doing great – this move had been a successful one. At the end of the school year, the math advisor asked me to deliver a speech at the all-school assembly on the last day of classes. I had never done anything like that before, but I was proud to have been asked; proud and nervous. I worked hard on my two-minute speech, with the goal to recruit more kids to the math club next year. I had my note cards written out, and on the last day of school I came wearing my Sunday best, something that would have been social suicide on any other day of the year. When the assembly started, I was too nervous to even review my note cards; I just sat in my folding chair with those cards on my lap and my fists stuffed in my pockets, waiting. And then my name was called.
I started climbing the steps to the stage, and I heard a few titters. As I walked across the stage there were giggles. When I reached the microphone there was laughter. As I started to read my speech, flipping through my notecards and extolling the virtues of the math club, the laughter became so loud no one could hear me talk. I was stunned and confused as I walked off the stage and back to my seat. I sat down in shock. After a few moments, I leaned over to the kid sitting next to me and asked why everyone was laughing. He grinned and pointed – “Your fly is down.”
And so it was. My nervous fists in my pockets had worked that zipper all the way down. I was the laughing stock of the school, and I don’t think I was very helpful in recruiting new members to the math club. I knew what was in store for me – no self-respecting 11 year old would give up such an obvious opportunity for teasing, and I would be teased mercilessly. The only saving grace was that it was the last day of school. There was a whole summer for everyone to forget.
And then, we moved that summer to a different town on the other side of the state. This was the exception that proved the rule – for once I was glad to have moved during the middle of the summer.
Robert (Bob) Dennard, inventor of the DRAM and Dennard scaling, died on April 23, 2024. I never met Bob, but heard many stories from his IBM colleagues who said he was universally loved and admired. The comment that sticks with me from several people who worked with him: every time you saw Bob Dennard he always had a smile on his face.
Here is his obituary: https://www.lohud.com/obituaries/pnys0809210
I started my career in the semiconductor industry in 1983, so last year marked my 40th anniversary. Round numbers make me nostalgic, so I decided to create a talk summarizing the twists and turns of my random walk though the semiconductor industry and an important lesson learned. In case you are interested, here is a link to that talk.
https://youtu.be/k6z8RfvTxDg
My dog Minion is a barker. He barks all the time, so much that I have gotten to know his barks. There’s the “saw a squirrel” bark, the “UPS man on the front porch and I’m going to kill him” bark, and the “what, you’re leaving the house without me, don’t you know the world is a dangerous place” bark. So when I was awoken by my dog barking at 5am one Saturday morning, I was not surprised.
What did surprise me was the smell. An awful, putrid odor. By wife sat bolt upright – “what is that?” My first thought was a natural gas leak, but that wasn’t quite right. More like the sewer had backed up, but not quite that either. I was confused, and not just because I woke up at 5am. I began walking around the house to find the source, but the smell was everywhere – it couldn’t be localized. Could it be coming from outside? I quickly got dressed and went out the front door. It was even stronger outside. Then I saw my neighbor out in his front yard. He said the smell had woken him up and he had called 311. The fire department was on its way in case it really was a gas leak.
When the fire truck showed up, the first words out of the fireman’s mouth was “that’s a skunk”. Of course, I had smelled skunk before, but it was always the dead-skunk-in-the-middle-of-the-road variety. Fresh skunk smells different. I don’t know how to describe it. Fresher? They brought out a gas sniffer just in case, but a few minutes later a flashlight-toting fireman said he had found where the skunk had sprayed the back of my house. Sure enough, on the windows and wall of my house facing the back yard was a six-foot diameter spray pattern of dime-sized droplets, sticky and yellow. Did you know that skunk spray was yellow? Neither did I.
I learned a lot about skunks that day. For example, no double-paned window has yet been invented that can block that smell from getting into your house. From Google I found out that tomato juice might be good for use on sprayed humans and dogs, but for walls a bleach mixture was best. Indoors I boiled vinegar on the stove after opening the back door and windows to air out the house. By this time my kids were awake and they announced that they were not, under any circumstances, going back into that house until the smell was under control. My wife took them to Starbucks.
I learned that skunk spray is VERY hard to clean off. Even today some stains remain on my outside wall. Nonetheless, after several hours of work, the house started getting closer to normal. By this time it was late in the morning, and I was exhausted. I decided to relax up in my office, not coincidentally the farthest point in my house away from the source. A while later I heard my dog barking, loud and insistent. This was his “I’m stressed to the max and I will not be ignored” bark. I went downstairs to check it out, not thinking too much about it. After all, my dog is a barker.
I found him in the living room, tense, straight as an arrow, his nose pointing under a piece of furniture, barking like mad. Oh no. Please, no. I felt my shoulders stiffen and my throat tightening up. I slowly lowered my head to be able to see under the armoire and there it was: a mass of black fur with a white stripe. When I had left the back door open to air out the house, it never occurred to me that a skunk might wonder in. Just to be clear, I don’t live in the country. This is a neighborhood near downtown. These kinds of things don’t happen in the city, right? My heart started to race and a minor panic began, but my first worry was that my dog was about to get sprayed. I grabbed him and ran out the back door, shutting it behind me. I felt relieved that we had avoid a major catastrophe.
This is when I realized that there was a skunk, loose in my house. And I was trapped outside. I couldn’t go back in! There was a skunk loose in my house! He could be anywhere, and I certainly didn’t want to be sprayed. Fortunately, I had my phone in my pocket. I started dialing. I told my wife not to bother coming home. I called animal control – “there’s a skunk, loose in my house,” I said. They were not very helpful. Once they determined that no one had been bitten and so there was not a rabies risk, they said they could have someone out there in the next 48 hours. “But there’s a skunk loose in my house”, I repeated. They did not seem too concerned. I was concerned. I started running down the list of Austin pest removal companies that Google provided, getting one answering machine after another. I was beginning to get desperate – what was I going to do? Finally, at the end of the list, Urban Jungle Wildlife Specialists answered their phone. They could have someone out there in an hour.
When the technician arrived he gave off a strong sense of competence. He had a uniform, and a truck full of equipment. He had a cage, with a black cloth to through over it, and a long pole with a loop at the end. The pole with a loop at the end looked very official. And he had a gun – a pellet rifle. He had done this before, though he admitted that it was not common to have a skunk loose in your house. “Skunks are shy,” he explained. “If one is in your house, it’s probably sick or dying.” The risk of a rabid skunk was not small. The first order of business was finding it. As expected, he did not stay under the armoire. But 20 minutes later the technician came out. The good news was he had found the skunk. The bad news was the skunk could not be approached and coaxed into the cage. It had found its way into an unfinished storage space underneath the front stairs, backed tightly into a corner, low under that first stair. Extraction would not be easy. It would not go well for the skunk.
Reluctantly I gave permission for the use of deadly force. I have to admit, by this point in time I did not have much sympathy for that skunk. It was removed, but not before I paid the price of my decision: he sprayed inside my house. And I thought it was bad when had sprayed the outside of my house! The next few days was a blur of hotel rooms, attempts to get skunk smell out of our kids’ clothes so they could go to school, and me cleaning, gaging, bleaching, gaging, deodorizing, gaging, painting, gaging, rinse, repeat, and finally, after two exhausting days, deciding it was safe for the family to go home. It has now been 18 months since the great skunk disaster, and getting a whiff of that lingering odor happens only rarely now. I continue to be aware, though, of my dog’s expanded vocabulary. I will not soon forget the “there’s a skunk loose in my house” bark.
A recent query from a friend reminded me that some topics are both very easy and very hard to grasp at the same time. The key is often in the way we look at the it. He asked “Why does a mirror NOT invert images top-to-bottom?” Or better yet, why DOES a mirror invert images left-to-right? I used to ask this question to my undergraduate students in my Modern Optics class at UT when teaching them basic imaging equations. None of them ever answered the question correctly. But the answer, it turns out, is simple. Mirrors don’t invert anything. You do, and not with your brain.
Try this experiment. Go up to a mirror with an open book in your hand. Look at the printing – obviously it is perfectly readable. Now turn the book to face the mirror – you see that all of the writing in the mirror is inverted, going from right to left instead of left to right. What caused that? You did, when you TURNED the book. Don’t believe me? Repeat the experiment with an overhead transparency (yes, I am old enough to know what those are). Write a word on the overhead transparency and hold it up to the mirror. It is not inverted, when looking at it either directly or in the mirror. When you turn the transparency to face the mirror, the word is inverted when viewed both directly and in the mirror.
When you look at yourself in the mirror and wave your right hand, it looks like your mirror image is waving their left hand. But that is because we imagine ourselves turned around and facing the other way. Again, it the turning (or imaging that we turned) that does the inverting, not the mirror.
Mystery solved.
It is with great sadness that I report the death of my friend and colleague William (Bill) Arnold. He died this morning after a long battle with cancer.
I met Bill in 1986, when he was already an important figure in the field of lithography. At AMD he blended theoretical understanding of imaging with the practical know-how of getting things done in manufacturing. He went on to become Chief Scientist at ASML before retiring a couple of years ago. He was also President of SPIE in 2013, one of his many acts of giving back to the community that he loved.
But these and many other technical achievements, numerous and significant though they were, pale in comparison to the humanity and generosity that defined Bill’s personal impact throughout his career. He was wicked smart, clear and insightful, and always willing to discuss or explain a subtle point. He was honest and straightforward, someone you could trust to be forthright even when business was on the line or competitors were in the room. He cared deeply about his work, and the lithography community he spent so many years working within. He was greatly respected as a technologist, manager, colleague, and friend.
In short, he was the kind of person I admired and strived to be like. I will miss him.
Added note to my post: Here is the SPIE “In Memoriam” post for Bill.
In years past, the annual SPIE conference on photomask technology (referred to as BACUS by us old-timers) included an entertainment program with insider jokes and songs from industry folks (who called themselves “Bacchanalians”). The conference was all online this year, so some of the Bacchanalians made of few videos in the spirit of the BACUS entertainment. Thanks to Any Neureuther, Bryan Reese, and Tony Vacca for giving us something to smile about, and for reminding us of the long tradition of fun we had at the BACUS Entertainment.
Another day, another Zoom meeting. What can you do to relieve the boredom (not to mention the stress)? This is what I do – make a music video:
I hope it brings a smile, and feel free to share.
Like most people, I am at home this week. Where I am NOT is New Orleans, attending the 3-beams conference (EIPBN, the Electron, Ion, and Photon Beam Technology and Nanofabrication conference), which has been canceled this year. To see where I hope to be this time next year, this is how the conference chairs announced the venue for 2021: