Yesterday, Grant Willson and Jean Fréchet received the Japan Prize. (Grant must have travel to Japan quickly, since he was at a party at my house on Saturday night.) When I saw the reports this morning, I have to admit that my first question was “What’s the Japan Prize?” Willson and Fréchet have received many awards in their careers. Was this one any different?

In a word, “Yes!” First of all, Drs. Willson and Fréchet were handed their award by the Emperor of Japan. Second, the award comes with ¥50M (that’s about $650,000), split between the two of them. Either one of these would make one stand up and take note. Here is a description of the prize from the Japan Prize website:

“The Japan Prize is a prestigious international award presented to individuals whose original and outstanding achievements are not only scientifically impressive, but have also served to promote peace and prosperity for all mankind. The Prize is awarded by the Japan Prize Foundation. Since its inception in 1985, the Foundation has awarded 74 people from 13 countries. Each year the Foundation designates two fields for award presentation.”

Willson and Fréchet were honored for their invention of chemically amplified photoresists, a material instrumental in the manufacture of every state-of-the-art integrated circuit for the last 20 years. (A third collaborator, Hiroshi Ito, died in 2009.)

Congratulations to Grant and Jean – a prize well deserved!

Last night I went to see a performance at the Paramount Theater here in Austin. The Paramount is one of those gorgeous, old-style, 100 year-old theaters, a premier place to watch a show, with seating for 1,200. I’ve been to plays and Broadway shows there, and seen John Prine, Leo Kottke, Ottmar Liebert and a host of other great musicians. But yesterday’s show, at a ticket price of $50, may have been my most expensive. Who did I see? A physicist, Brian Greene. The author of The Elegant Universe talked about quantum mechanics, string theory, and the possibility of parallel universes.

Are you surprised that a lecture about physics would sell out a theater at $50/ticket? I am. And the crowd was enthusiastic! There were whistles when he walked on stage. After the 80 minute lecture, he spent 30 minutes answering questions from the audience – he finally had to call it quits with many hands still in the air. I was also surprised to see how diverse the crowd was: about 50% women (a great date-night event, no doubt), with ages from middle school to geriatric. I watched a mom drop off three cute, young high school girls outside the theater, replete with their spiral notebooks and pencil boxes.

In a world where Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan command outsized attention, yesterday restored a little faith in humanity for me. Rock on, physics!

Today, my oldest daughter stayed home sick with a cold. The younger one didn’t want to go to preschool when her sister was staying home. That pretty much ruined my plans for Christmas shopping today. I stayed home while my wife went grocery shopping. At 2 pm I took the younger daughter to a birthday party. Kid birthday parties can be fun, but this one was at Dave and Buster’s – only one small step better than the worst place to have a party, Chuck E. Cheese. Lights, noise – Las Vegas for kids. Still, I survived. Then, it was home and a quick clean-up of the house (two little girls = large increase in entropy). Some guests came over for dinner – mussels in white wine, plus a few glasses of La Fin du Monde beer. It was excellent. It’s nice being married to a great cook.

That’s pretty much how I spent my last day of the 5,125 year Mayan Long Count calendar, just before the global apocalypse.

At age 14, I thought Dave Brubeck was the coolest musician ever. Like so many people, I discovered the Dave Brubeck Quartet through their 1959 album Time Out, the first jazz record to sell over a million copies. The album is a magnificent exploration of meter, and I still find it amazing that they could create a 5/4 song (Take Five, written by their sax player Paul Desmond) so catchy that it gets stuck in your head.

One day I was listening to Brubeck once again in my bedroom when my mom walked by, poked her head in and asked, “Is that Dave Brubeck?” I was shocked that she even knew who Dave Brubeck was, let alone recognized his music. My dad loved Johnny Cash, that I knew, but as far as I could recall my mom had never expressed a musical preference in my presence. Not that I paid much attention – she was my mom, after all. “You know Dave Brubeck?” I replied with some trepidation. “Oh yes,” she said. “I went to see him in concert when I was in college.”

There are only a few times in one’s life when one receives information so out of line with your worldview that to grasp it requires every ounce of intellectual and emotional fortitude that can be mustered. At such moments the carefully constructed edifice of your mental interior can come crashing down around you. If this, this thing I believed so strongly and without question, is wrong, what else about my life has deceived me? What else have I viewed through this distorted lens? Everything becomes open to question. Your foundational beliefs. Your conception of yourself. It is a mental state so venerable and fraught with danger that many people simply don’t allow themselves to experience it.

I experienced my first worldview collapse at that moment. David Brubeck was cool. People who listened to Dave Brubeck were cool. People who went to see Dave Brubeck in concert were super cool. But cool, that was just a word I never thought to use with my mom. Now, my mom was a great mom and even during my teenage years I had no problems with her. But to a 14-year-old boy, “mom” was on the opposite side of the spectrum from “cool”. As I listened to Brubeck on his piano, as I imagined myself blowing a Paul Desmond riff on the saxophone, as I hoped one day to see the Dave Brubeck Quartet perform “Blue Rondo a La Turk” live, was I trying to be like my mother?

Since that moment, I’ve had to make major realignments of my relationship with reality only a couple of times more. While every time was hard, I was always extremely happy with the result – a life a little more grounded, a little more authentic, a little easier to be proud of.

Dave Brubeck died a few days ago, and while he continued to give concerts into his 90s, I never saw him perform live. I guess my mom will always be a little more cool than me.

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?