After two months in New Zealand (and an inadvertent week in Australia), I’m back in Austin. Just in time to watch my home town break the previous record of 69 days above 100F (set in 1925). We will be way past that mark this year – the forecast calls for 110F on Saturday. But, as all of my friends here remind me, I am not allowed to complain (especially after emailing them pictures of snow last month). So I won’t.

I’ve always been suspicious when one’s ideology matches perfectly with one’s self interest. Do you really think in such a case that this ideology won out fairly in the great battle of ideas? More likely there was no battle at all. I have no respect for the Me Party, with their shouts of my rights and your responsibilities. So when I see someone promoting responsibility and fairness over self-interest, I take notice of such an increasingly rare event. Thus, with his recent New York Times editorial, I have one more reason to respect Warren Buffett.

It is one week before I head back to Austin after a two-month stay in New Zealand. While Texas is experiencing record heat and drought, Christchurch is having its second snow day this winter. Heavy snow falls here only about once every 10 years, so to have two big snow days three weeks apart is quite unusual. The University of Canterbury is closed today, but hopefully will be back to normal before my class on Wednesday. I expect major shock when I get off the plane in seven days.

New Zealand was supposed to be the end of that sentence. But thanks a volcanic explosion in Chile, the answer has become Sydney, Australia. While we don’t yet know how long we’ll be stranded here (my family and I), we do know that all Qantas flights to NZ have been canceled for another day. So, now it’s a vacation in Australia for at least one more day!

By the way, what is bringing us to New Zealand is a two month teaching gig at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, which begins in about a week.

For more details on our travails of travel, check out my wife’s blog on our New Zealand adventure:
http://smacknz.blogspot.com/

“It is possible to get an education at a university. It has been done; not often.”
– Lincoln Steffens, 1866-1936

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.