I have many titles. Gentleman scientist. Consultant. Husband. Dad. Some are self-applied (the advantage of being my own boss), and some are earned. One that I am proud of, and take seriously, is the title of “writer”. Writing well is not easy, and I have the somewhat old-fashioned idea that I should only write if I have something worthwhile to say. So when I do write something, be it a blog post or a textbook, I take some pride in it.

But what if, in today’s world of high performance computing and Jeopardy-winning algorithms, a computer could be taught to do what I am doing now – to write? Simpler than the full-blown Turing Test, a writing computer certainly seems possible. But could a computer catch my interest? Inform me and intrigue me? Keep me reading? What might the result be like?

Based on empirical evidence, I know the answer.

Crap.

Computers can’t write worth crap.

Granted, this is my opinion, and I suspect that Dr. Philip M. Parker would disagree.

Professor Parker is an economist who describes himself as a pioneer in “automated authoring processes”. His work on computer authoring has resulted in one patent (US Patent #7,266,767, Method and apparatus for automated authoring and marketing) and over 200,000 book titles (more than 100,000 of which are available on Amazon). He says he has authored hundreds of thousands of poems using graph theory (I don’t even want to know what that means). Many of his titles use the “Webster” name to give it an imprint of authority, though the Webster name is in the public domain and in fact means nothing.

The basic idea is simple: create an application-specific template, fill it in with web-searched data, then apply some automated copy-editing rules. Combine this with print-on-demand, and viola. A hundred thousand books on Amazon (a large portion of which, I suspect, have never been read by a human).

I ran across this interesting and bizarre idea while searching on Amazon recently and coming across a title that intrigued me: Microlithography: Webster’s Timeline History, 1975-2007. The title sounded great, but the author was unfamiliar to me. What could it be? Since I have a lithography timeline of sorts on my website (http://www.lithoguru.com/scientist/lithohistory.html), I wanted to know. It cost me $28.95 to find out, and I am now on a mission to make sure that no one else will have to waste their time and money the way I did.

I’m not sure what I thought a “Timeline History” was, but in Dr. Parker’s automated hands it is simply an ordered list of publications containing the keyword (Microlithography, in this case). And not a very good list, either. The formatting varies from entry to entry, with each item largely unidentified (Is it a book? A journal article? A Master’s Thesis? A conference proceedings?) and often with insufficient information to actually find the item without Google’s help. To get a feeling for what is there, here are some stats.

The book has 347 entries, of which 22 are duplicates. The majority of the unique entries are patents (325, 70%), most of which include abstracts but none of which include patent numbers. Without these entries, the book would only be a few pages long. The rest are books, journals and conference proceedings (67, 20%), technical reports found on webpages (15, 5%), MS and PhD theses (10, 3%), individual peer-reviewed articles (5, 1.5%), and an encyclopedia entry (1, 0.3%).

What am I to make of these numbers? Are there really only 5 peer-reviewed articles on microlithography between 1975 and 2007? Only 10 MS and PhD theses? I have in my office far more than 67 books, conference proceedings and journals on microlithography. And what about the patents?

While patents make up the majority of the entries, 325 is closer to the number of microlithography patents issued in a few months, rather than over a 32 year period. A quick search of patents issued between 1975 and 2007 (using Google Patents) with the keyword “microlithography” turned up 7,300 patents. There are 2,860 patents with microlithography in the title. If you add “photolithography” to the keyword search, there are 29,900 hits, rising to 33,100 when “optical lithography” is added to the keywords. I’m not sure what value the 325 patents (less than 1% of the total) contained in this little book might provide a reader.

The bottom line is this: Microlithography: Webster’s Timeline History is a waste of time, a waste of money, and a waste of print-on-demand paper. I suspect that the full range of Philip M. Parker’s computer-generated books have equal value.

But hey, I got a blog post out of it. And it was entirely human-written.

Today is pi day (3/14 – get it?), the not-exactly-official day to celebrate the mysteries of a circle’s circumference over its diameter. When this most famous numerical expression of irrationality is closely combined with the second most famous irrational number –Euler’s constant, e – the result is a common mode of celebration today: eating pie. Enthusiasts pride themselves on memorizing pi’s non-repeating digits out to 100 places, or they put the first one million digits on their webpage. Algorithms for calculating pi abound (my favorite requires a random number generator), with new ones regularly revealed.

But to use pi in a calculation (which anyone who performs scientific or engineering calculations almost certainly will do), one must necessarily approximate by truncating pi to a certain number of digits. One of the earliest truncations leads to just one digit: the Bible equates pi with 3 in two verses.

1 Kings 7:23, New International Version: “He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it.” (2 Chronicles 4:2 says essentially the same thing.)

If you want to estimate pi to more than one digit, you must look to sources more authoritative than the Bible.

Modern politicians can be expected to do a bit better than a 2500-year-old religious text, but not by much. In 1897, Taylor I. Record introduced a bill into the Indiana state legislature, written by physician and amateur mathematician Edwin J. Goodwin, which defined pi to be 3.2 (not even an accurate rounding). The bill allowed Indiana schools to use Goodwin’s copyrighted proof of the squaring of the circle for free – schools from other states would have to pay a royalty. The resulting House Bill 246 passed unanimously, 67 to 0. Fortunately, the chair of Purdue University’s mathematics department, Professor Clarence Waldo, fought bravely against this injustice against enlightened thinking and empirical observation. By lobbying the state Senate, Waldo convinced the Senators to table the bill indefinitely. (For the complete story, see here.)

Alas, we still have too few scientists and engineers and mathematicians in elected office. And while redefining pi is unlikely to come up again in legislation, there are still too many attempts to legislate the results of science, from evolution to climate change. We will always need more Clarence Waldo’s preaching reason, and more legislators who will listen to them.

“You could easily inhale a thousand transistors and not know it.”

Jim Turley, The Essential Guide to Semiconductors, p. 5 (2003)

Ah, the beauty of the “pick and choose” school of theology.

I can’t even begin to count all the weddings I have been to that included a reading of what is probably the most popular wedding Bible verse ever: 1 Corinthians 13. In part, it reads

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud … Love never fails. … And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” (NIV)

I agree, the sentiments of this passage are quite beautiful. But I wonder how many soon-to-be-married couples have read all of 1 Corinthians and know of Paul’s opinions on marriage. Paul is not exactly the guy I would propose to give a toast at my wedding. For example, 1 Corinthians 7 says

“Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion. … Are you pledged to a woman? Do not seek to be released. Are you free from such a commitment? Do not look for a wife. But if you do marry, you have not sinned … But those who marry will face many troubles in this life, and I want to spare you this.”

You don’t hear that one read at too many weddings. I admit that I have faced a few troubles in this life, and the occasional passion did burn (when I was a bit younger). But all in all, I don’t look to Paul for advice in marriage. I think he could have benefited from a little therapy.

This morning my daughter Sarah said to me “‘Have’ is my favorite word.” Caught a bit off guard, but used to the non sequiturs that come with being six years old, I replied “Oh really, why is that?” “Well,” she answered, “it’s because ‘have’ breaks the rules.”

I’m so proud of my little girl.

I’m jealous. My friend Ben Woodard has decided to move from Austin back to his home state of California. Don’t get me wrong, I have no desire to leave Austin or move to California. I’m jealous of the way he has decided to go – in style. He is driving across the country, using no highways, in his DeLorean. With his friend Michael for company, the two of them are off on an adventure of unknown proportions. I’m looking forward to his modern version of On the Road, full of blog posts along the way, no doubt. Good luck, Ben!

In honor of Halloween, here is a fright for you: today is the day, according to one UN estimate, that the world population reached 7 billion. (Estimates vary – the US census bureau puts that date as next March). The population is growing by about a million people every five days. If current trends continue, we’ll see 8 billion people in 15 years and 9 billion people by 2043. That means that, if I am lucky enough to live that long, I will see a tripling of the world population in my lifetime (it was 3 billion in 1960 when I was born).

For this auspicious date I’ve updated my population essay and data spreadsheet with the latest numbers. Enjoy.

It has finally cooled down in Austin (it only got up to about 88F today), so it is probably safe to talk about the brutally hot summer that is now behind us. It was the hottest summer on record (using the Camp Mabry records, since 1897), and on September 29, we had our 90th day at or above 100F. Wow. For fun, I looked up some other statistics about the Austin summers:

Average number of 100 degree days each year in Austin: 12.3
Greatest number of 100 degree days in one year (before this year): 69 (1925). In 2009 we had 68.
Average date of the first 100 degree day: July 11th
Average date of the last 100 degree day: August 20th
Earliest 100 degree day: May 4th (1984)
Latest 100 degree day: October 2nd (1938)
Years without a 100 degree day: 10 (1987, 1979, 1975, 1973, 1968, 1919, 1908, 1907, 1906, 1904)
Highest temperature of record was 112 on September 5, 2000 and August 28, 2011

Of course, our big fear is that this year is the new normal. A scary thought.

“This world is a strange madhouse. Currently, every coachman and every waiter is debating whether relativity theory is correct. Belief in this matter depends on political party affiliation.”

– Albert Einstein (1920)

(Amazing how some things never change.)