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.

I was befuddled (rank: 53,829) by my recent experience with wordcount.org (see my previous post). It seems that the word ‘lithography’ is ranked appallingly low in frequency of use, relegating me and my life’s work to the denizens of the perennially unpopular. But something smelled funny. I began to think that WordCount was not very good at counting. Since I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to measure things over the years, I decided to do what I always do when I see a data point I don’t like: blame the measurement.

I began by looking into the website’s counting method. From the wordcount.org site:

“WordCount™ is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonness… WordCount data currently comes from the British National Corpus, a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent an accurate cross-section of current English usage.”

So WordCount is an art project. I suppose that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be accurate, though I suspect that accuracy is low on the list of success criteria for most artists. But what is the British National Corpus? I found the official BNC website, and this is what they said:

“The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of current British English, both spoken and written.”

British English! That explains a lot. I thought the word count would relate to real English. But since lithography was a European invention, and was certainly practiced in England, I’m not sure that this could explain lithography’s unexpected lack of popularity. True, England doesn’t have a semiconductor industry to speak of, so talk of semiconductor lithography over dinner is probably unlikely. But still, the frequency of use seemed too low, especially compared to ‘sciorto’.

I did a little more digging. Of the 100 million words in the collection, the word ‘lithography’ is used 47 times. That’s a pretty small count, even if the sample appears to be large. 100 million words is obviously not enough if you want good statistics at the tail of the distribution. The other words near ‘lithography’ on the list – luqa, calculi, tiverton, kaysone, sciorto, and bullingdon – were all tied with lithography. Digging further in the BNC website, I could even find the sources for those 47 word uses. This is where the fun begins.

Yes, Sciorto is an Italian family name, but Count Roman di Sciorto is a character from a romance novel called Calypso’s Island, the source of all 47 occurrences in the BNC. Talk about skewing the sample. Here is one example: “How ludicrous, after all, to have imagined that the great Count Romano de Sciorto, of Casa Sciorto, of the Città Notabile, the Noble City, could fall seriously in love with her.” Riveting. Tiverton, while certainly a city in England, is also a character from another romance novel, Hidden Flame, from which 19 of its 47 word-use references came. It seems that romance novels make up a fair part of the 100 million word collection. Almost every use of Bullingdon occurred on television news and refered to the prison of that name in Oxfordshire, England. What we have here is a phenomenon called ‘the sampling sucks’, caused by the lumpiness of an abysmally low sample size for these words. 100 million words seems large, but when you think about all of the words that are written and spoken in English each day, that number starts looking very small.

The bottom line is this: WordCount is art, and while it definitely has words, it doesn’t do a very good job of counting. You shouldn’t expect artists to count – that’s what nerds are for.

By the way, ‘recount’ is number 29,409 on the list. I think the wordcount.org folks need to move it a little higher up.

II discovered an interesting website recently: wordcount.org. The site claims to have taken the 86,800 most common words in the English language and ordered them by frequency of use. It’s no surprise that the top ten words are, in order, ‘the’, ‘of’, ‘and’, ‘to’, ‘a’, ‘in’, ‘that’, ‘it’, ‘is’, ‘was’. Overcome by curiosity, I began typing in words to see how they ranked. ‘Mack’ is number 26,453. ‘Beer’ is 2,927. ‘Wine’ is more common at 1,634 (though I would have thought beer, the common man’s drink, would be more popular).

Then I typed in ‘lithography’ (the subject of my profession). I was shocked at the result: #42,832. There are 42,831 words in English that are more commonly used than ‘lithography’! Obviously, that is not true in my household, but could I be so out of touch with the rest of the world that I didn’t realize that lithography is in the bottom half of word popularity?

I decided to look at the few words just above ‘lithography’ on the list. Here they are.

42,826 luqa
42,827 calculi
42,828 tiverton
42,829 kaysone
42,830 sciorto
42,831 bullingdon
42,832 lithography

Are they kidding me? A word with a ‘q’ not followed by a ‘u’ is more popular than ‘lithography’? The only word I even remotely recognize from this list is the plural of calculus, and I can truthfully say that I believe that one calculus is enough. Is my field of study and work, the field that I have devoted the last 25 years of my life to, really this obscure? I guess so.

By the way, Luqa is a small village in Malta. Tiverton is an English town in Devon (as well as a New English town in Rhode Island). Kaysone is the first name of Kaysone Phomvihane, a former prime minister of Loas. Sciorto is an Italian family name. Bullingdon is an area of land in Oxfordshire, England, known as a “hundred”. The Bullingdon Club (or Bullingdon Dining Club) is a top-secret Oxford student drinking club for the super-rich. (Thank you, Google.) I look forward to using these words in conversation soon. I suspect there are a lot of words above ‘lithography’ on the list that I’ll need to learn.

But wait, there is more on this subject that must be told. Could there have been a measurement error? Stay tuned…