Yesterday I ran in the Austin 3M Half Marathon and set a personal record (not hard to do considering this was only my second race). My time for the 13.1 miles was 1:56:25 (h:m:s – and yes, I worry about the seconds), for a pace of 8:53 per mile. My goal was to beat 9 minutes per mile, so I’m happy with the result. I’m also happy to say that the morning after the second race is not nearly as painful as the morning after the first race was. Thanks to Dave Gerold for cheering me on at mile ten as I ran through his neighborhood.

Ten years ago this week I turned in my dissertation and received a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. Entitled Modeling Solvent Effects in Optical Lithography, the thesis is available for download on my website. There is a good chance, however, that it has remained unread now for one decade, since I doubt that many people are motivated to wade through the dense details of my modeling of solvent diffusion through polymers.

So, in honor of this anniversary, and to make the topic of this work more accessible to the average time-constrained scientist/engineer, I have rendered my thesis as a Haiku. I hope you will enjoy it.

When heat is applied
Solvent flows through polymer.
Your model is wrong.

For pretty much my entire life, I never understood the appeal of running. Sure, I ran when I played soccer or tennis, or to catch a bus or my deceptively fast three-year-old daughter, but running for its own sake? Why bother. Boring and painful – a combination that could only appeal to the masochistic (or possibly to those for whom an immensely dreary and marginally painful activity would be an improvement over the alternatives in their life). But then, a funny thing happened to me this year…

I’ve always enjoyed staying active, but I have to admit that by the time my second child was born last year I had quit going to the gym and playing sports. And it was beginning to show. My wife, on the other hand, had gotten hooked on triathlons as a way to recover from the physical trauma of pregnancy. She trained hard and began to compete. I dutifully loaded up the kids and some lawn chairs and showed up to her races to watch. After her third race this summer I began to feel less than athletically adequate. All these people, no different from me except for motivation, were working and sweating and accomplishing goals (arbitrary goals, I know, but not worthless ones). I, on the other hand, had become a couch potato. Something had to change.

I knew I wasn’t up for triathlons yet, so I picked one sport to start with – running. My wife suggested training for a half-marathon. A half-marathon? Thirteen point one miles? It was obvious that all of her training and physical activity had affected her powers of reasoning (or at least her sense of distance). But, by this time my physical ego was so downtrodden that I agreed rather than admit that such a goal seemed to me both unrealistic and unreasonable. She found a training program for me, and a new runner was born.

It was July (not the best time to start running in Austin), and after two weeks of sweating on my own I could meet the three-mile minimum requirement for the Galloway training program. I then discovered something very interesting. Running is not boring when you run with a group. It can be fun. And as I watched my endurance improve (and my weight drop), I actually came to like it. I also saw my heart rate decrease for the same level of activity (I run with a heart-rate monitor), convincing me even further of the long-term benefits. And since I had specifically joined a training program that emphasized injury avoidance (don’t overtrain!), I was beginning to feel like a half-marathon might be possible.

And so yesterday I ran the San Antonio Rock ‘n’ Roll Half-Marathon. Not only did I accomplish my primary goal (cross the finish line vertically), but I also accomplished my secondary goal of running it in under 2 hours. My time was 1:59:36 (no need to over do it), which amazingly put me in the top 1/3 of male finishers (there were a total of 33,000 participants in both the marathon and the half-marathon, with over 17,000 half-marathon finishers). And this from someone who had never run as a sport until this past July. It was great running with my coach, Bob, who pushed me at the end when I was ready, willing and able to slow down (“We didn’t train to give up at the end!”).

Oh, and if it makes any difference, I’m 48. If I can do it, anyone can.

As even a cursory look at the posts will show, this blog is anything but political in nature. But after a long, long campaign and an election that everyone describes as historic, let me just say this:

Woooohoooo!!!!

Last week my next-door neighbor, Carroll, had a birthday. He turned 99 years old. He is an absolute inspiration. When I asked him what it felt like to turn 99, he said “It’s better than the alternative”. His goal is to break the age reacord in his family (102).

Carroll has lived in his house with his wife, Martha (age 94), since 1942. They still live independently (with a little help from friends a family) and enjoy the good life. I’m looking forward to the party next year.

Today I have two anniversaries to think about. First, it is one year ago today that my second daughter was born, Anna Sophia Mack. She is complete joy – exceptionally beautiful, and she even looks like me (I know, it is an enigma). This last year has gone by so fast, just like the cliché that every parent I’ve ever met has told me.

But today is also another one-year anniversary. On the evening of that same day, my good friend Jeff Byers was in a car accident. After two months in a coma, Jeff died. These two events will always be linked for me, but that’s not such a bad thing. I am happy to be reminded of Jeff. As I sit at my desk writing this, I’m remembering of a good Jeff story.

Six years ago I started remodeling my house. On the third floor was a very small bedroom that I knew would make the perfect wood-paneled office that I had always dreamed of having. In fact, I had already bought the prefect desk, one of those giant walnut monsters that oozes class and substance. A quick check, however, showed that the desk was too big to make it up the stairs and into the soon-to-be office. Talking with my contractor, we decided to get a crane to lift the thing in as we added a gabled roof.

Telling Jeff this story, he was appalled by the inelegance of my brute-force solution to the oversized desk problem. Quickly, he organized a contest at work to see who could come up with a better (or at least more imaginative) way of getting my desk into my office. When the deadline for entries arrived, over a dozen solutions were submitted, involving things like operas, dolphins, weather balloons, and leaf-cutting ants. My personal favorite had Susan (now my wife, but then my girlfriend) convincing me that it was more manly to leave the desk downstairs (I’m quite sure that one would have worked). Jeff judged the entries, with winners paid in beer.

In the end, the process of remodeling the room into an office removed a few walls and opened the stairs sufficiently to allow the desk to go up them after all. The office was finished around the desk, so that it is now a permanent part of the room.

Thanks for that memory, Jeff. We all still miss you.

Warren and his wife April were good friends of Susan and I. He will be greatly missed.

Dr. Warren D. Grobman, who died on Wednesday July 9, 2008, had a distinguished career as an x-ray spectroscopist and a semiconductor physicist. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1942, received his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1964, and his PhD from Princeton University in 1967. He worked for many years at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York, notably as the founder of the x-ray lithography program, before relocating with his wife, April to Texas where he worked at SEMATECH and Motorola Semiconductor. He made many contributions, both as a research scientist and in product development and design, and was a fellow of both the American Physical Society and of IEEE. He also found time to pursue his love of admiring and creating art. He was thoroughly enjoying his retirement with his beloved wife, April, traveling, music, food and wine, computers, and time with the rest of their family, along with expanding his work as an artist. Warren had a rare combination of a keen intellect and an irreverent sense of humor and fun, coupled with a gift for caring, working with and teaching others. He was as likely to be taking a reflective walk with April, building a computer or a robot just for fun, admiring or creating art, studying physics lectors and following the progress of the Large Hadron Collider or sitting on the floor playing and giggling with his grandchildren. He leaves a legacy to his family and friends of love and caring for others and of love of knowledge, enjoyment of life, honesty, integrity and hard work. He was a wonderful husband, father; grandfather, brother, uncle and friend.

He is survived by his loving wife, April Schweighart; sons and daughters-in-law, Jeffrey and Norma Grobman and Steven and Ashlyn Grobman; grandchildren, Tyler and Lauren Grobman; sister and niece, Rita Grobman Howard and Rachel Howard; brother-in-law and sister-in-law, Charles and Cindy Schweighart and their daughters, Allison and Elizabeth Schweighart; and father-in-law, Ed Schweighart.

I just ran across a random tidbit of information that got me thinking. Proctor and Gamble has a product called FreBreze. People spray this chemical around their house to make it seem as if a fresh breeze had been blowing through (because, of course, we would never want to actually open our windows). This is a product that absolutely no one needs. It’s sold in the classic way – through massive advertising guided by people with PhDs in psychology. So here is the tidbit: annual sales of FreBreze were greater than $800M last year. Here is some perspective: according the World Bank, there are twenty countries with 2007 GDPs less than this amount. This is what I call inconspicuous consumption – the little things we spend our money on that we hardly notice – and if we didn’t spend it, we would hardly notice that, too.

Yesterday, my 10 month old daughter became an “infant scientist”. At least, that what they called her at the University of Texas Infant Cognition Laboratory. In fact, she was the subject of an experiment (though I refuse the lab rat comparison). We volunteered Anna for the test, which took about 45 minutes, just as we had volunteered her older sister Sarah for a different experiment two years ago. The experiment was quite interesting. Anna was outfitted with an electrode-laden cap so that brain activity could be monitored. Then she was shown pictures of female faces of varying degrees of beauty (the faces had been rated for their attractiveness earlier by adults). The question was, is the baby brain hardwired to recognize beauty? Anna’s left brain definitely lit up more when pretty faces were shown to her. Interesting.

I’ve been doing some work lately as an expert witness, so I found the following factoid quite interesting. The most commonly quoted song lyric in judicial opinions is from Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” How do I know this? The law professor Alex B. Long is described as the leading expert on music citations in judicial opinions, and his analysis can be found in an article in yesterday’s New York Times. Couple this with Arthur C. Clarke’s fourth law (“For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert”) and we see that, especially in a court of law, two expert weathermen will generally tell you the wind is blowing in opposite directions.