I haven’t been to the Austin City Limits Festival since its second year (2003), thanks to having kids. But now that they are a little older, it was time to go again. While some things are the same, many things have changed in nine years. Here are some of the things I learned by attending ACL Fest last weekend.

Best Rule: ACL Fest is a non-smoking event (except for pot).
Best band I’d never heard of: Ben Howard.
Band that was good but didn’t quite do it for me: Florence and the Machine.
Band that exceeded my (already high) expectations: Rufus Wainwright.
Biggest Surprise: It wasn’t the fact that putting my daughter Sarah on my shoulders during the Rufus Wainwright show resulted in a camera focusing on her and projecting her onto the jumbo screens to either side of the stage. After all, she is really cute, and she was the only person up on shoulders. It’s that seeing herself on the big screen prompted her to flash a peace sign, which caused the entire crowd to applaud. That was really cool.
Lesson in obviousness: When you take an event that works for 50,000 people/day and let 75,00 people in, it is too crowded.
Next lesson in obviousness: When an event is sponsored by Bud Light, don’t expect the beer to be good.
Obvious truths that are not always true: Even though there were 20 massive beer stands spread throughout the park selling nothing but AB InBev pizzel, there was one small “craft brew” stand tucked away in a corner that sold one or two decent brews (Red Hook IPA, Kona Porter). Thank goodness for small favors.
Best way to meet up at the festival: Forget it. You can’t do it – there are too many people. Unless, of course, you carry a 20 foot pole with a bizarre flag on top. There were hundreds of poles with flags.
Band that is as good as everyone says: The Avett Brothers.
Highest energy performance: The Avett Brothers.
Show where mere attendance will get you high: Red Hot Chili Peppers (see “Best Rule” above).

In all, a great time (it helps that the festival is two miles from my house, so I don’t have to worry about driving or parking). I can’t wait for next year.

I have now owned my new Nissan Leaf electric vehicle (EV) for exactly one month. Assuming one month’s data is enough to make a reasonable estimate of the costs (and savings) that I am incurring, I am pleasantly surprised at how cheap it is to own an EV.

To begin, I sold my seven-year-old (completely paid-for) Volvo station wagon before getting the Leaf, so my basic economic analysis will compare getting the Leaf to keeping the Volvo. Also, I chose to lease the Leaf for 39 months, so I’m only going to make the calculations for that case.

Cash Up Front: I sold the Volvo for $7,000, so that was my working capital. The down payment, tax, tags, and license for the Leaf was $5,350. I am also in the processes of installing a 220V charger (the Leaf comes with a 110V charger, which has been working just fine, but I want the faster charging) at an estimated cost of $2,000. Thus my estimated out-of-pocket cost is about $350.

Cost of Driving the Volvo: I had been averaging about 16 – 18 mpg for my normal (mostly city) driving with the Volvo. At the current pump price of $3.60/gallon (I buy low-octane gas), this gives $0.20 – $0.22/mile operating cost. Maintenance costs are hard to estimate, but assuming nothing major were to happen with the Volvo over the coming three years, I’d probably spend $250/year on just the standard maintenance (oil changes and filters and the like). This adds another $0.025/mile, so I’ll just say $0.235/mile as my working figure. Obviously, I’m purposely ignoring the reliability difference between a new car and a 7-year-old car here, since I really only want to compare a gas car to an EV, not an old car to a new one. Another way to look at it: I doubt the residual value of the Volvo after driving it for another 39 months would equal the major maintenance costs I would likely incur during that time.

Cost of Driving the Leaf: In my first month, I drove 790 miles, and averaged 3.5 miles/kWh. In Austin, the cost of electricity is currently $0.129/kWh. This makes the electricity cost per mile = $0.036/mi. There are no maintenance costs on the Leaf until the 36 month scheduled maintenance, and in particular there are no oil changes.

Cost Savings: Comparing the per mile costs, I am saving about 20¢/mile driving the Leaf over the Volvo. For my 790 mile month, that translates into $158 (money that I am not spending at the gas pump and for oil changes).

Net Cost of the Leaf: My 39 month lease has a monthly payment of $291. Subtracting the net $158 savings, my actual cost of switching to a brand new EV is $133/month. Thus, my total net costs are:

Frankly, I’m shocked at how cheap that is. I can’t think of many new cars I could buy/lease for that price. Now add this to the fact that driving the Leaf is really, really cool and really, really fun. It has been a very good choice for me.

A Hypothetical Case: Suppose instead one were driving an SUV that got 13 mpg, and you drove a little more – 33 miles per day (1000 miles/month). Assuming all other numbers presented above were valid, you would actually SAVE $10/month by leasing the Leaf. Of course, if the price of gas goes up, the economics become even more compelling.

So there you have it. The Leaf makes a lot of sense. Of course, it assumes that you are a two-car family with a lot of short-hop city driving (where an EV excels). But that is probably a majority of car owners.

The Tesla Roadster is just about the coolest car on the planet. Starting with the body of a Lotus Elise, Tesla adds an electric engine and a bunch of laptop batteries to create fabulous style, amazing speed, and a perfectly green image. What more could a car buff want?

OK, one could hope for a slightly lower price. But I have a separate problem. I already own a Lotus Elise (since 2005, the first year it was available in the US), and I am attached to it. I still need a family car, since the kids aren’t old enough to ride in the Elise, and I am still a believer in electric vehicles as the future of personal transportation (with that future starting now).

As such, circumstances have created a workable compromise. Last week I bought a Nissan Leaf – an all-electric vehicle. I love it. And with the purchase I was able to derive the following equation:

1 Lotus Elise + 1 Nissan Leaf + $20K = 1 Tesla Roadster

The numbers don’t lie.

I can’t say that I am good at predicting the future. Then again, I don’t try to make a living off of it. Ray Kurzweil is a futurist who regular talks about how great technology will be in the 2020s by extrapolating trends like Moore’s Law (and, in fact, accelerating them). Will his predictions come true? Actually, we can make a prediction about that based in his past performance.

Here he is, in a 2005 TED talk:

“By 2010 computers will disappear. They’ll be so small, they’ll be embedded in our clothing, in our environment. Images will be written directly to our retina, providing full-immersion virtual reality, augmented real reality. We’ll be interacting with virtual personalities.”

I don’t know about you, but my computer has yet to disappear. And thankfully, I still interact with non-virtual personalities.

He was way off making a prediction five years into the future. I suspect he will only be further off in his further out predictions. Still, I bet if you ask Ray Kurzweil he’ll tell you he was dead on with this prediction. He always does:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/03/20/ray-kurzweils-predictions-for-2009-were-mostly-inaccurate/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/03/21/ray-kurzweil-defends-his-2009-predictions/

In pursuing a career in optical lithography, I’ve learned a lot about optics. When I graduated from college as an engineer I had the typical scant background in imaging, and I found the topic of partial coherence particularly opaque. Yes, all of the equations were in Born and Wolf, but that doesn’t mean I could understand them. That’s when I first discovered Doug Goodman, then working at IBM. He had developed a 2D optical imaging simulator and his papers on partial coherence approached the topic in a novel and enlightening way. I still had to read several other treatments before the ideas finally sunk in, but I instantly recognized that Doug Goodman had a unique way of explaining things. Taking a short course from him in the late 1980s cemented this opinion. When I needed to understand the impact of illumination aberrations on imaging about a decade later, I again turned to Doug’s papers to teach me.

I liked Doug because he was wicked smart, but also because he was quirky, with an odd and irreverent sense of humor that I always appreciated. He worked at IBM during the golden years of applied research, and was one of the extremely talented group of scientists and engineers working in lithography that so impressed me about IBM.

Doug loved to explain things on many different levels, especially using demonstrations. His classic 1995 paper “Optics demonstrations with an overhead projector” became a short course and then a book. Long after the tech world embraced Powerpoint and LCD projectors, Doug still gave talks with an overhead projector and hand-written transparencies, very much in a classic professorial style. The last paper I saw him give was at an SPIE lithography conference in 2004. The organizers had to dig up an overhead projector just for him. The topic was how to explain partial coherence. His talk included the use of a pyrex pan full of water.

Doug left IBM to work for Polaroid in 1993, and I saw him less frequently as he strayed from my field of lithography. I was glad to see him come back to lithography when he became a senior scientist at Corning Tropel in 2002. By then, the advance of his Parkinson’s disease was plain to see. He retired in 2007 and died on May 14, 2012 at the age of 65. Too young. He is missed.

Some links to obituaries for Doug:
http://spie.org/x87302.xml
http://www.osa.org/About_Osa/Newsroom/Obituaries/Goodman-Douglas.aspx
http://www.optics.arizona.edu/News/2012Newsletters/2012goodman-douglas-s.htm
http://hosting-25262.tributes.com/show/Douglas-S.-Goodman-93849644

Have you heard of power bands? The most popular brand is Power Balance, a company which “blend[s] the powers of Eastern Philosophy and Western Science with Innovative Technologies to deliver products that improve and enhance people’s lives.” Sounds impressive, eh? A power band (described by Power Balance as a “sports performance wristband”) is a silicone bracelet with holograms that “resonate with and respond to the natural energy field of the body.” [Unless you buy one from Lifestrength, a competing company whose identical-looking bracelets create “negative ions”.] According to numerous athletes paid to endorse the product, it really works.

There is only one problem. They cost $30. That’s a lot of money, even if it is virtually guaranteed to improve my life. That why I decided to buy a Placebo Band. It works in exactly the same way as the Power Balance band, with exactly the same results. But it only costs $4! What a deal! I couldn’t pass it up. Now I wear the power of belief around my wrist wherever I go. Shouldn’t you?

Of all the things I am proud of about myself, my vocabulary is not one of them. I’m constantly confronted by words that I don’t know, but strongly suspect that I should. When I stumble across such unfathomable verbum I usually just pick myself up and hope that no one noticed. But occasionally I reach for a dictionary in a fit of self-improvement. Today was that day, and the word was “prolixity”.

I know, dear reader. You probably learned this word in the third grade (along with its Latin roots and conjugations) and used in conversation with your mother this week. But I was forced to look it up. And when I did, something profound happened. I was deeply disappointed with the quality of the dictionary definition of this word. So disappointed, in fact, that I took the time to carefully construct what I think is a far superior definition. So without further ado, bother, or protest, I unveil now to the world my definition:

prolixity: 1) the tendency to say things in far more words than is necessary to effectively make a point or convey the essence of a thought; 2) wordiness

To all the lexicographers who read my blog, please feel free to make use of this superior definition. Credit, of course, would be appreciated.

Of course, to speak without fully considering the implications of what is said is a part of the human condition. One of my favorite phrase-types in this genre is “God Bless ____”, where the blank can be “America”, “Our Troops”, or just about anything. I’m sure the primary sentiment is one of support for the putative object of blessing, but it doesn’t take much reflection to realize there is more to it than that. “God Bless America” is really the first half of a full thought, with the unstated second half being “but not other countries”. I’ve never heard anyone say “God bless the world”, and I’m not sure what the point of a blessing would be if not to confer some benefit not available to the unblessed. Personally, I don’t want God to bless Americans to the exclusion of non-Americans, but I suppose there are many people in my country who do.

“God Bless Our Troops” is even more problematic, since its purpose is undoubtedly to ask God to take sides in a current or future armed conflict. A God that was willing to take our side in most of the wars that America has fought (thus ignoring the equally fervent prayers of the other side) is too petty for my liking.

Which brings me to a recent encounter with bumper sticker philosophy. The other day, driving the roads of Austin, Texas, I saw the following bumper sticker, which takes this archetype to a new level:

Apparently, not only do our military personnel deserve blessings to the exclusion of other country’s militaries, but within our own armed forces we should expect those trained to be snipers to get extra blessings. And what blessing should a sniper receive? To become a better shot?

I’m not sure that this bumper sticker’s owner has fully thought through all of the implications of the slogan on display. My fear is that he has.

This morning my daughter’s first grade class had a “poetry cafe”, with parents invited to listen to kids read their original poems. Here is one of the two poems that my six-year-old Sarah wrote and read:

The Dance Recital

The grass dances gracefully
to the beautiful music
of the wind.
And the Blue Bonnets
in their beautiful dresses
dance for the dirt
with nothing in it.

I can say with some certainty that she doesn’t get her artistic talents from me. She is already a better poet.

Last night, my four-year-old daughter Anna asked me this question: “What’s the number right before infinity?” Somebody (not me) had told her about infinity, and she has obviously been thinking about it. How would you answer that question? I thought about it and decided to just answer correctly: the number right before infinity is infinity. She did not like that answer one bit (and I can’t blame her). Her number sense comes almost completely from the number line (counting), and so she wanted to know where infinity was in the counting sequence. Makes sense, right? Some of the answers to her other questions were easier for her to digest (“what’s infinity plus infinity?”). In the end, though, she formulated an equation that made us both happy: Dad equals math.