A few years ago, while we were drinking in a basement beer bar in Yokohama, some Japanese friends decided to figure out how to spell my last name in Kanji. Generally, a foreigner writing his name in Japanese would use the Katakana alphabet. But occasionally foreigners will “spell” their name in Kanji, the Chinese characters that Japanese use for many of their words. The goal is to match the sounds made by the characters to the name (for me, the two sounds are ma + ku). But since the Kanji have meaning as well as sound, and there are usually several Kanji with the same sound, one can also choose the Kanji to provide a meaning that in some way reminds you of the person. After some discussion (that I didn’t understand) and some beer (that I did), a final spelling was agreed upon. Here is my name in Kanji. I like it.

The other day my three-year-old daughter Anna saw an Apple iPad for the first time. After seeing if for just a few seconds, she looked at me and said “Why does he have that big iPhone?” While lots of people have talked about the proper way to think about the iPad in the spectrum of computing products, I think my daughter got it right at first glance. It is a big iPhone, only without the phone.

“Red is the color of love.”

– Anna Mack, my just-turned-three year old daughter, when asked what color sprinkles she wanted on her birthday cake.

I met Steve Thornton almost exactly 20 years ago, when I taught a lithography class at AMD in Austin. Shortly after that I moved to Austin, and Steve and I become good friends. He worked in litho at AMD/Spansion for something over 20 years. Steve and I wrote the first paper on “tuning” the lithography simulator PROLITH to match experimental data in 1996, an idea that eventually led to the development of the AutoTune product. I still look at that paper as one of the best that I wrote. Now, thanks to OPC, calibrating lithography simulators seems routine, but it was new and interesting stuff 15 years ago. But mostly the time I spent with Steve was spent drinking beer, fishing and floating on lake Travis, arguing politics, and complaining about the semiconductor industry. Usually doing all of these things simultaneously.

Steve died yesterday after a year-long struggle with cancer. He had not yet reached the age of 50. His daughter Kelly is 9 years old, and his wife Phuong still works at Spansion. I have trouble even trying to imagine what they are going through. My heart goes out to them, and to all of Steve’s family and friends that, like me, can’t yet feel what it will be like to miss him.

“History is full of examples of supernatural events, and unless we are saying that we’re somehow more intelligent and educated, better equipped to understand unexplained events today than we were five hundred years ago, then we must accept the explanations given to these events by those who witnessed them.”

Bobby Henderson, The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

From yesterdays New York Times, front page:

“We Have Met the Enemy, and He Is PowerPoint”

The corporatization of the US military has had an unintended consequence: the ubiquitous use of mind-numbing PowerPoint presentations in place of critical thinking. Soon, military analysts will be like most corporate managers and executives: unable to write a coherent sentence.

“When you’re looking at truth versus gossip, truth doesn’t stand a chance.”

– Barbara Mikkelson, cofounder (with her husband David) of Snopes.com
Quoted in the New York Times, April 5, 2010

For those of you who have followed my posts on running over the last year, you’ll know that I ran my first Marathon in November. You’ll also recall that it was a disaster – the temperature was 79F when I crossed the finish line (nearly five hours after I started), causing the closet thing I’ve come to a near-death experience. It was a very disappointing race because I know I could have done better (I walked most of the last six miles), but I just couldn’t beat the heat. So yesterday was my chance to redeem myself: the day of the Austin Marathon.

The Austin Marathon was definitely risky for me. The first half is difficult because it is full of hills. The second half is difficult because, well, it’s the second half of a Marathon. More experienced runners advised me to pick a flatter course to make my “comeback” easier. But it was just too hard to pass up a Marathon in my backyard. Redemption or Downfall – it was going to be one or the other.

And it was redemptive. My goal was to come out at a set pace (around 10 minutes/mile) and keep that pace for the whole race, finishing strong (in other words, the exact opposite of my first Marathon experience). And I accomplished that goal: I ran the first half at a pace of 9:40/mile and the second half at a pace of 9:50/mile. I finished in 4:18:30, better than my stretch goal of 4:20. But more importantly, I felt good crossing the finish line – heck, I even sprinted the last tenth of a mile. It was a success.

I also hoped that I might be able to make it into the “fast half” of the men, with a time less than the median finish time. And since I’m teaching an intro to statistics course at UT this semester, I dove into the statistics of the results when they were posted last night. Alas, I beat the mean, but not the median. The average finish time for men was 4:23:23, and the median finish time was 4:17:25. I was in the slow half, but just barely. I thought that maybe I would be in the fast half of my age group, but amazingly the M45 – 49 group was the fastest age group in the race. Go figure. It’s median finish time was 4:08:48, with a mean of 4:17:37. The next fastest group was 40 – 44, followed by 30 – 34, then 35 – 39, then 25 – 29 and 20 – 24. So much for the race belonging to the young. Interestingly, though, age 50 seems to be the point of decline. The 50 – 54 age group median was slower than 45 – 49 by 23 minutes. Since I turn 50 in less than 3 months, maybe my best running days are soon to be over. Or maybe I’ll have a narrow window of being one of the fast guys my age before I start to crumble and fall apart.

Since I started running a year and a half ago, every race has resulted in a PR – a person record. It’s pretty easy to do, given that the first time you do anything is always your best try to-date. Yesterday I had my first chance to break my PR streak – I finally ran a race for the second time. Last year I ran the 3M half marathon with a result I was very happy with, 1:56 (1 hour, 56 minutes). Would I be able to beat that time this year?

Circumstances were not optimal. I’m training for the Austin Marathon, and so went on a 26 mile training run one week before the half marathon race. It takes more than one week to fully recover from a 26 mile run. On race day yesterday, the temperature was almost perfect, but it was very windy. So windy, in fact, that road barricades were blown over and the police delayed the start of the race by one hour to get them put back up. Standing at the start line for over an hour just waiting is not a great way to start. Still, I thought I was in better shape than a year ago and so I was hoping for a good run.

And it was good. I finished at 1:49:45 – seven minutes faster than last year (woohoo!) and an earned PR. Given the circumstances, I think there is still room for improvement. I’m not retiring yet.

By the way, I was not the only Austin lithographer to run the 3M. Paul Zimmerman, an Intel assignee to Sematech, ran the race as well. He is what we call an “elite” runner, given a spot at the front of the pack so that no weaving around us slow folks is required. And he earned his title. Paul runs in the Masters category (40 years and older) and finished second at 1:09:47, just one second behind the winner (who, by the way, was nine years younger than Paul). That’s a full 40 minutes faster than me! Whew! Way to go, Paul!

February of this year marked the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. As part of the many ways this date was marked, celebrated, reviled and exploited, Gallup conducted a poll to ask Americans if they “believe in evolution”.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/114544/darwin-birthday-believe-evolution.aspx

The exact question was “Do you, personally, believe in the theory of evolution, do you not believe in evolution, or don’t you have an opinion either way?”

Unfortunately, like many such polls, interpretation of the results of the poll is fatally marred by the nature of the question.

The word “believe” has different meanings in different contexts (and for different people). For example, if I say that I believe in God, that means I have made a choice, based on faith, to believe in something that I have no way of proving or confirming. If I say that I believe it will rain tomorrow, it means that my best guess, given evidence available to me, is that it will rain. These are two very different meanings. Which sense is being used in this question?

Does it even make sense to ask the question “do you believe in evolution”? What if I asked “do you believe in relativity?” Or quantum mechanics? It sounds a little silly. These aren’t things that we normally associate “belief” with. I don’t think that a poll question asking about my “belief” in a scientific theory is an accurate way of judging my science literacy. Or is the question designed to discover something else besides science literacy? If so, what?

Given the discussion above, what does it mean to say I “believe” in evolution? Let’s assume that I am not trained as a professional evolutionary biologist and am not capable of independently evaluating the evidence for this scientific theory (that is the target audience for the question, after all). Then I suggest that the statement “I believe in evolution” means three things: 1) I believe in science and the scientific method as a means for developing descriptions of nature that are increasingly more accurate and useful; 2) I’m familiar enough with the basics of the theory and evidence to support it to know that virtually all scientists working in this field accept evolution; and 3) I believe that the experts that have been working as a community on evolutionary science for the last 150 years are not part of a vast conspiracy to pull the wool over my eyes.

When people don’t “believe” in evolution, then they disagree with one or more of the statements above. Some of the most extreme creationists are certainly conspiracy nuts as well, believing that scientists are working towards their evil plan to promote atheism. And certainly science literacy in the U.S. is none too great, so it is possible that some people would disagree with #2. But I suspect that the majority of the evolution “non-believers” disagree only with statement #1 – they are unwilling to give up the idea that science is, and always should be, the handmaiden of religion. The culture war over evolution is in fact a power struggle: who has the power to describe how the world works, the scientist or the theologian? I’m a firm believer in the disjointed domains of science and theology (Stephen Jay Gould called them “Nonoverlapping Magisteria”), but many others long for the simpler days of a powerful and autocratic religious structure to make sense of the world for them.

So, if the poll below indicates a lack of science literacy, that is an indictment of our educational system (and a not very surprising one). But to the extent that the poll results show an unwillingness to accept science as the best approach for understanding nature, then ignorance is not the worst thing to fear.

And what were the results of the poll? 39% of respondents “believe” in evolution, 25% do not, and 36% have no opinion (95% confidence interval = +/- 3%).