Yesterday I learned that my neighbor, Carroll McPherson, died. He was 101 and a half. When you are very young and very old, you get to count by half years. He died in his bed, surrounded by his family, in the home he has lived in since 1942. He was ready to die, at peace and waiting for death for the last year or so, though his body clung to the habit of life. I want to be like Carroll.

I’m sorry that I was not there to say the last goodbye, and to help his wife Martha and the rest of his family like our other neighbors did. I’m visiting my wife’s grandfather Ben in Washington to celebrate his 90th birthday. Like Carroll, Ben has lived a healthy and happy life, and just seems to keep on going. I want to be like Ben.

Tomorrow is the big birthday party, and when we are done toasting Ben, I’ll give a small toast to Carroll as well. The cycle of life can be beautiful even in death.

“Welcome to the fact-free zone.”

– Gail Collins, describing the current Texas legislative session in Austin. To read her full editorial in the New York Times, click here.

Fifty years ago today, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to leave Earth and enter space. (He was perfectly qualified for the job: he was short, and was willing to sit there and do nothing as he was hurled like a cannon ball into space.) If sputnik awoke the world to the technical possibilities of space, Gagarin awoke our sense of awe and adventure for space. I grew up in the sixties thinking that almost anything was possible, and that our future would be filled with bigger and better things. Flying into space implied that no barrier was too high to be surmounted by human ingenuity and effort.

But fifty years later the promise of space travel remains mostly promise. When I watched the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey in 2001 (didn’t we all), I was struck by how little of our early vision for space exploration had actually come about. There is a simple lesson here that is very easy to forget: scaling up is hard. To build a building twice as tall requires more than twice as much steel and concrete. Launching twice the payload into space requires more than twice the rocket power. The scaling is superlinear, and that doesn’t make for good economics (or good physics). In our gravity-constrained world, bigger is sometimes better, but it is always much, much harder.

At the same time that most of us earthlings were swooning over the first manned space flight, a handful of engineers at Fairchild Semiconductor were working out the kinks on a much smaller project – connecting four transistors together on one slab of silicon to make the first commercial integrated circuit. Not too many people noticed this innovation at the time, let alone appreciated its significance. There would be no ticker-tape parades (though there would eventually be quite of few millionaires among this talented group, and even a few billionaires). But something important had begun, and the promise of the silicon IC revolution has exceeded all expectations.

(It’s interesting to note that much of the early work on integrated circuits was funded by the Apollo program in its desire to miniaturize electronics destined for space.)

And so another simple lesson is learned: scaling down doesn’t behave like scaling up. Not to say that making something smaller is necessarily easier, but smaller mean less – less material, less energy, less space. The scaling works in our favor. Of course, there are limits, and those limits become something close to insurmountable when the dimensions of the device reach atomic scales. But the room between the macroscopic dimensions of our everyday objects and the microscopic dimensions of the atomic scale is something like 6 or 8 orders of magnitude. As Richard Feynman famously said, there’s plenty of room at the bottom. Semiconductor technology has been steadily mining this room at the bottom, shrinking features from 25 microns to 25 nanometers in the last 50 years.

Is there still room at the bottom? I think so. CMOS transistors may only last for another factor of two of shrinking (or less), but other devices will allow dimensions closer to one or a handful of nanometers. And we have not yet begun to think of all the possible things we can make with a vast toolbox of micro- and nanofabrication technologies. (Alas, the phenomenal success of the CMOS transistor has probably crowded out a wide range of other useful devices.) So while the way we have scaled in the past (think Moore’s law) may not last, there is still plenty of room for innovation at the bottom. I suspect that my young children will one day marvel at the progress in scaling down during their lives, while wondering whatever happened to the promise of space travel.

A real ad that ran in the Wall Street Journal in 1954, by Mar Samuel (a vicar of the Syrian Orthodox Church), who personally owned four of the dead sea scrolls (he bought them from a shoe maker and antiquities dealer from Bethlehem named Kando). Thanks to this ad, they were bought by the Hebrew University, through an intermediary; they already owned three scrolls. I have not heard how much they paid.

BTW, the dead sea scrolls were uncovered in various caves between 1948 and 1954 in (then) Jordanian-controlled parts of the West Bank. Their importance were not widely recognized until the mid 1950s, after Edmund Willson published his 1955 book “The Scrolls from the Dead Sea”.

I was talking last night to my five-year-old daughter Sarah about the difference between poetry and prose. I asked her to define poetry for me. I thought she would say “words that rhyme” and was wondering if I would have the courage to explain that much of it doesn’t (and was realizing that I didn’t know how to define poetry myself). Instead, this is what she said:

“Poetry is words that don’t make a whole lot of sense.”

You know, I think she got the gist of it. (Granted, most of her poetry experience comes from Dr. Seuss.)

By the way, Google gave me these definitions of poetry:

– literature in metrical form
– language exhibiting conscious attention to patterns
– language used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities
– language characterized by romantic imagery

I’m going with Sarah’s definition.

The main environmental issue of our day can be easily summarized as the unsustainable conversion of natural resources into waste. The consumption of natural resources is problematic on two counts: 1) all resources are limited, and we can reasonably expect resource depletion to be painful, and 2) the extraction of those resources can itself be harmful to the environment (think strip mining, deforestation, etc.). The generation of waste is a further problem whenever that waste is toxic or otherwise harmful to our environment (contamination of air, water, soil, and wildlife, for example).

This view of environmental damage as the conversion of resources into waste leads naturally to a simple but useful approach to limiting this damage, known mnemonically as the three Rs: reduce, reuse, recycle. Reduce means reduce the consumption of natural resources directly, that is, consume less stuff. Reuse means that once a natural resource has been converted into a consumable product, use and reuse that product for as long as possible. And finally, when the product is no longer needed, recycle it, turning the product into the starting material for the next cycle of consumption. The order of the three Rs is important – we should first look to reduce, then reuse, and only as a last resort recycle. We must never use recycling as an excuse to increase consumption – something that frequently happens when the first two Rs are ignored.

The three Rs have long been a mantra at my house (and in my life), though I admit that I sometimes fall victim to the fallacious, preeminently American concept that success is best measured by the quantity of one’s consumption. Nonetheless, I can say with some certainty that by thinking about and applying the three Rs I have measurably reduced the environmental impact of my life over the last several years.

All of this is just background for the following story. I took my kids for the first time to Disney World this week. It was a blast, both because my two girls had a great time indulging in the fantasies that are Disney’s specialty, but also because going there gives me permission to become child-like in my attitude and behavior for a few days. After two days at the Magic Kingdom, our final day in Orlando was spent at one of Disney’s newest theme parks, Animal Kingdom. While of course the explicit purpose of the park is to entertain, much of the peripheral messaging of Animal Kingdom promotes protecting the environment, especially wildlife. For example, the Conservation Station section of the park provides various suggestions for how we can protect wildlife and the environment at home.

It was within Conservation Station that I saw a large display promoting the two Rs: reuse and recycle. That’s right, the Disney version had only two Rs – reducing the consumption of natural resources was nowhere to be found. It seems that Disney takes environmentalism only so far – so far as it doesn’t conflict with its core corporate mission of increasing the consumption of Disney products. In hindsight, the lesson learned seems obvious. While corporate goals and environmental goals will occasionally be aligned, the conflicting goals of increasing versus decreasing consumption will never be cooperatively resolved. Environmental degradation through increased consumption of resources is an unavoidable consequence of fully successful capitalism.

For those not on my Christmas card mailing list:

I’m a sucker for big, round-number anniversaries. It’s a great excuse to look back and think longer term and bigger picture (and to put off thinking about losing weight or cleaning out the garage). Since I turned 50 this year, I have all the excuse I need to look back at what has changed in this world since 1960. Here is a very brief collection of factoids about what was new in 1960, and what has changed in the last 50 years.

Some major events of 1960:
– John F. Kennedy elected US President
– Gary Powers shot down over Russia while flying a U2 spy plane
– US launches the first communications satellite, the first weather satellite, the first navigation satellite, and the first spy satellite
– First Teflon non-stick cookware goes on sale
– First CERN particle accelerator becomes operational in Geneva
– France tests its first atomic bomb in the Sahara desert
– Timothy Leary begins experimenting with LSD
– Mossad agents abduct Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires (he is tried and executed in Israel)
– The 50-star US flag makes its debut
– Numerous former African colonies become independent nations as the era of European colonialism finally comes to a close
– The Beatles perform in public for the first time
– To Kill a Mockingbird and Green Eggs and Ham are published
– The birth control pill is put on the market in the US
– The Laser is invented (and first demonstrated by Theodore Maiman)
– Moore’s Law begins its climb with an integrated circuit of two components

Half Century of Growth: In the last 50 years, the global population has grown from 3 billion to nearly 7 billion people. The rate of fossil fuel consumption has increased by more than 4X, and the rate of food and fresh water consumption has increased by more than 3X.

The electronics revolution has been so incredible that the even the most grandiose hyperbole pales compared to reality. In the last 50 years the cost of a bit of electronic memory has decreased by about a factor of 100 billion. Today’s kitchen appliances boast more computing power than the supercomputers of 1960. And the rate at which transistors are made today exceeds ___________ (fill in whatever big number you can think of, like the rate of raindrops falling on the earth, or the number of grains of sand that stuck in my swimsuit last summer).

I’m not a fan of futurism (making predictions beyond a few years out is not much different from science fiction writing), but I know this: the next 50 years will be another wild ride.

Science vs. Engineering:

“Science is about understanding the origins, nature, and behavior of the universe and all it contains; engineering is about solving problems by rearranging the stuff of the world to make new things.”
– Henry Petroski, IEEE Spectrum, December 2010

BGO – blinding glimpse of the obvious

(From a meeting today, where I heard approximately 50 acronyms of unknown meaning.)