I’m visiting my wife’s hometown for a few days as a part of the requisite “show off the baby” tour. While here, we went to Leslie Grove Park, drove past the local high school emblazoned with its mascot “the Bombers” and a mushroom cloud logo, and visited the Atomic Ale brewpub, where the Atomic Ale is middling, Plutonium Porter is good, and Oppenheimer Oatmeal Stout is memorable. So what kind of town is this?

This is Richland, Washington – a small town on the Columbian river whose basin would look like the desert it is if it weren’t for massive irrigation. Richland would be just one of many small agricultural towns in this area but for the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Established during World War II, Hanford generated the plutonium used in the second and last nuclear weapon used in war and much of the plutonium found in the US nuclear arsenal today. With the likely exception of Los Alamos, there are probably more nuclear physicists per capita in this town than anywhere else in the world, though most of them are now involved in cleaning up the mess made from 50 years of cold war productivity. Suffice it to say, this is not your typical American small town.

By the way, the high school got its name, the Bombers, after the entire town donated one day’s pay during World War II to buy a bomber to help with the war effort. The attachment of the mushroom cloud logo occurred much later in a misguided show of pride in Hanford’s cold war mission. I think the town should be more proud of how it originally earned that moniker, but what do I know? I’m just a tourist on baby duty, enjoying an Oppenheimer Stout.

My wife gave me “locals directions” today. It’s not the kind of thing she would normally do – but visiting the town you grew up in has a tendency to dull the brain.

Locals directions are directions that only locals would understand. I was sent out to buy socks for our daughter, and midway through the directions she said “turn left where the Pay Less used to be.” Let’s skip the fact that she hasn’t lived here for 20 years and she can still remember where the Pay less used to be, let alone that turning left there sent you to a source for baby socks. Despite these obvious signs of superior intelligence, it only took two days for her brain to settle into the familiar small-town pattern of her childhood, with all of its comfortable limits and easy neglect. Kind of nice, actually. At least when you’re on vacation.

I found the socks without much problem. It seems that small towns don’t have too many corners that could have once held a Pay Less.

Bless me readers, for I have sinned. It’s been five weeks since my last blog.

In the world of blogging, that’s an eternity, and the sin is unforgivable. After all, the purpose of blogging is the capture, and retain, somebody’s (anybody’s) attention. And nobody’s attention span lasts five weeks. “But what if I don’t have anything to say,” you ask. Posh. That’s not the point. Blogging is about reducing the barrier between what you think and what you say. And everyone has something to think. Even me.

And yet I’m old school. I have trouble writing something I wouldn’t want to read myself. I have just not been motivated lately to put any effort into it. What’s wrong with me? Am I just lazy? Actually, I think I’m sick. I have diagnosed myself with motivational deficiency disorder (MoDeD). You probably think I just made that up. No! I didn’t make it up – scientists made it up. It’s in the April 1 issue of the British Medical Journal (http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/extract/332/7544/745-a). According to neuroscientist and lead researcher Leth Argos, the disease is characterized by “overwhelming and debilitating apathy” and can, in severe cases, be fatal. Sounds like me, doesn’t it?

But I’ve got program to help cure myself. I’m undergoing motivational rehabilitation, using tools and techniques available at www.despair.com. I think I’m making progress, but don’t count on frequent blogs. After all, relapses are extremely common for suffers of MoDeD.

Forget the price of tea in China. I want useful information – what is the price of beer in Singapore? One can only answer with a question: What time is it?

I have to admit to a very bad habit. I often buy things without looking at the price. It’s certainly laziness on my part, but also an assumption that the prices of certain standard items don’t vary much from place to place, and the differences in price are small enough to fall into the “don’t care” range. I found out in Singapore how wrong that assumption can be.

I was ordering a beer during my third or fourth visit to a brewpub on the Clarke Quay when I finally looked at the prices. I couldn’t believe it. The price of a beer varied by almost a factor of 4 depending on the time of day! From noon till 3pm, a beer costs $2.25 (US). It rises to $4 till 6pm, then $5.50 until 8pm. From 8pm till close, a beer costs $8.00! Variable demand-based pricing. Charge more when the bar is most crowded. Of course, we’ve seen happy-hour pricing before, but this raises the bar (and the price) on how to fine-tune charges to cope with demand.

Is this the future of consumer pricing? I can see what’s next. An automated counter looks at the number of patrons in the bar (coupled with constantly updated current and historical buying data) and adjusts the price of a beer in real time. A stock market-like ticker displays the current price on various walls of the place for all to see. Astute drinkers may notice a trend towards bigger crowds and higher prices and order several beers now in anticipation of higher prices momentarily (a strategy hampered only by the inevitable beer-warming factor). Of course, the better brews, with higher demand, will cost more. Novices will watch the moves of veteran buyers hoping to pick up on the latest beer-tips. It’s brilliant! A Harvard MBA’s dream come true. Except for one thing. I didn’t come to the bar to buy beer. I came to relax. And there is nothing relaxing about being constantly on guard against the latest business theory of how best to empty my wallet. Ah well. There is bar just down the street run by a dinosaur of the business world – he has only one price for beer. I think I’ll go there.

I was walking down a long, straight road in Singapore when I found myself behind a young couple. They were probably returning home from some errand, packages were in hand. I was close enough to hear their silence. My mind almost began its usual random wonder when I noticed her hand. It was talking. As she strode in silence alongside her companion the outer calm was disturbed by an inner conversation, played out by her hand. First, the palm went out, her arm twisting forward, looking for empathy. “Do you understand? Do you see what I’m saying?” A pause. Then two flicks of the wrist and the fingers spread – she had made her point. The fingers curled back up into a loose fist. Within a few steps the arm began a slow back-and-forth rotation, palm forward and then backward with fingers down as she weighed the imagined response. Truth was not manifest, making the process of conversational discovery all the more important.

Suddenly, he said something to her. Imminently practical, no doubt. “How was your day?”, or “What should we fix for dinner?” Her hand went limp by her side as she turned to him and re-entered his world.

I spent all day Sunday deriving in Singapore.

No, not driving. There’s no way I would drive here. It’s not that they drive on the wrong side of the road – I’ve done that before. Uncomfortable but manageable. And it’s not that the country is full of crazy, aggressive drivers like China or Taiwan – in fact just the opposite. They are too obedient here, and there are too many rules to obey. Unlike the US, where you basically do whatever you want unless there is a sign telling you that you can’t (no left turn, no parking, no U-turn), in Singapore you can’t do anything unless there is a sign telling you that you can. If I drove here I would stick out like the truculent American that I am – I don’t need the demerit points.

No, I was deriving. It rained all day on Sunday so I stayed in my hotel room and worked on equations. Am I weird? I had a blast! I’m looking for analytical solutions to the Euler-Lagrange equation of photoresist development – a particular nettlesome equation that prefers numerical solutions. Certainly the most common lithographic cases all must be solved with the aid of a computer, and those computer solutions are convenient and useful. But there is just something special about an analytical solution. An exact result in the form of a simple equation. Some results have elegance and, I have to say, true beauty. And it was beauty I was after.

I found two special cases that have analytical solutions. Hopeful these case will prove useful for some problem or another, but if not I’ll still enjoy their beauty and the pleasure that their derivation brought me.

Thanks to the frosty setting of my room’s air conditioner, I am slowly drying out. According to my web sources, the rainy season here ends by the end of March. Apparently the weather is less well informed than the average American tourist.

Today (Friday) was a free day for me, so I took off on foot to explore Singapore. When it began to rain, I managed to find a nice bar to duck into. (Some would call it luck that I so quickly found a dry haven to wait out the weather’s harsh rebuke – I call it preparedness, a legacy of my youthful Boy Scout training.) Little did I realize that this particular bar would be so rich in historical context.

I discovered from a talkative and thirsty Englishman who was drinking his lunch at the same establishment that our current digs were previously quite popular with a once obscure but now infamous stock trader by the name of Nick Leeson. Does the name ring a bell? In 1995, using a convenient category in his employer Barings’ accounting software called ‘Error Account 88888’, Leeson hid over US$1B in trading losses – approximately equal to the total assets of the veritable English bank. The bankrupted Barings was eventually sold for £1 and Leeson served about 4 years in a Singapore prison. (By all accounts he was treated well – harsher punishments like caning are reserved for juvenile vandals who spray-paint graffiti on an otherwise pristine country.)

After three beers, the weather seemed to be letting up and my fear of drowning overcame my fear of getting wet. I only got a few blocks before the rain began again and I reached my current soaked state. [The inquisitive reader may well wonder, “In a place as humid as Singapore, where walking 100m in fine weather inevitably results in a state of being completely soaked, how can one actually tell that it is raining?” An excellent question. The practice of careful observation is needed. If the sky turns dark and the temperature drops 10 degrees and one still finds that a short walk down the street completely dampens the clothes, chances are it is raining.] I’m sure I’ll dry out shortly. When I do, it will be just in time to chance the weather again for dinner. Chili crab, here I come.

My hotel is near the Singapore River – my favorite part of town. It’s at Robertson Quay (pronounced “key”, though I spent years wrongly saying “kay”), a swank high-rent district next to the ultra-hip restaurants of Clarke Quay (hey, they even have a Hooters!) and the more traditional (and thus my favorite) Boat Quay. The Boat Quay is a line of 100+ year-old buildings along the south bank of the river full of bars and restaurants. But what is so intriguing is that the backdrop to these three-story, brightly stuccoed shops are the massive steel and glass skyscrapers of the financial district – a beautiful juxtaposition of the modern and traditional that is so common in this city/state.

I’ve eaten at the Boat Quay every night I’ve been here so far. Which explains one of the reasons why I love Singapore – the food. The country is essentially a mix of four cultures – Malaysian, Indian, Chinese, and English. The English came here during their bad-old colonial days, turning this little Malay-infused island into a shipping way station. They also imported Indian and Chinese labor until those populations become very significant. Now the English-influenced style forms a pervasive backdrop to an extraordinarily wide range of multicultural traditions. And the food from every one of these traditions and more can be found on the Boat Quay. Mmmmmmm.

Walking back from the Boat Quay each night I pass through the Clarke Quay, so how can I help myself? I have to stop in at one of Singapore’s only brewpubs – the Brewerkz. Although there is not anything very “Singaporian” about the place (it could just as easily be at home in San Diego or Seattle), the beer is good. It certainly beats the bland local stuff – Tiger Beer. But it is not too hard to find a good English pub to cool off in – like the Penny Black on Boat Quay.

So what is the weather like in Singapore this time of year? The same as every time of year – 90F and 90% humidity. We’re on the equator – you can tell the seasons only from the changing displays of the chic designer shops along Orchard road. But, being from Austin, I feel right at home with the heat.

It only took 30 hours to get here from Austin, but I’m back in Singapore after an absence of about 4 years. I’m here to give a three-day training class on lithography to one of the local semiconductor companies. But since they want every litho engineer in the compay to take it, I’ll be staying next week to repeat the course as well (half is all the company can spare from the factory at any one time). It’s a long time to be away from home (until now the longest I’ve been away from my baby daughter has been two days), but I love to teach, so I think it will be worth it.

So if the jet lag doesn’t stop me, I might do a little blogging about this city/state/island over the next 10 days.

I am not a jigsaw puzzle addict, but I do like to dabble in puzzling, especially when around family. I guess it reminds me of my childhood, where puzzling (along with Monopoly) filled the gap now occupied by video games for most kids. In any case, I revisited my jigsaw past over the weekend with an interesting result – philosophical thoughts about science. You can read a short essay on the topic called Puzzling Over Science.