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?

Of all the things I am proud of about myself, my vocabulary is not one of them. I’m constantly confronted by words that I don’t know, but strongly suspect that I should. When I stumble across such unfathomable verbum I usually just pick myself up and hope that no one noticed. But occasionally I reach for a dictionary in a fit of self-improvement. Today was that day, and the word was “prolixity”.

I know, dear reader. You probably learned this word in the third grade (along with its Latin roots and conjugations) and used in conversation with your mother this week. But I was forced to look it up. And when I did, something profound happened. I was deeply disappointed with the quality of the dictionary definition of this word. So disappointed, in fact, that I took the time to carefully construct what I think is a far superior definition. So without further ado, bother, or protest, I unveil now to the world my definition:

prolixity: 1) the tendency to say things in far more words than is necessary to effectively make a point or convey the essence of a thought; 2) wordiness

To all the lexicographers who read my blog, please feel free to make use of this superior definition. Credit, of course, would be appreciated.

Of course, to speak without fully considering the implications of what is said is a part of the human condition. One of my favorite phrase-types in this genre is “God Bless ____”, where the blank can be “America”, “Our Troops”, or just about anything. I’m sure the primary sentiment is one of support for the putative object of blessing, but it doesn’t take much reflection to realize there is more to it than that. “God Bless America” is really the first half of a full thought, with the unstated second half being “but not other countries”. I’ve never heard anyone say “God bless the world”, and I’m not sure what the point of a blessing would be if not to confer some benefit not available to the unblessed. Personally, I don’t want God to bless Americans to the exclusion of non-Americans, but I suppose there are many people in my country who do.

“God Bless Our Troops” is even more problematic, since its purpose is undoubtedly to ask God to take sides in a current or future armed conflict. A God that was willing to take our side in most of the wars that America has fought (thus ignoring the equally fervent prayers of the other side) is too petty for my liking.

Which brings me to a recent encounter with bumper sticker philosophy. The other day, driving the roads of Austin, Texas, I saw the following bumper sticker, which takes this archetype to a new level:

Apparently, not only do our military personnel deserve blessings to the exclusion of other country’s militaries, but within our own armed forces we should expect those trained to be snipers to get extra blessings. And what blessing should a sniper receive? To become a better shot?

I’m not sure that this bumper sticker’s owner has fully thought through all of the implications of the slogan on display. My fear is that he has.

This morning my daughter’s first grade class had a “poetry cafe”, with parents invited to listen to kids read their original poems. Here is one of the two poems that my six-year-old Sarah wrote and read:

The Dance Recital

The grass dances gracefully
to the beautiful music
of the wind.
And the Blue Bonnets
in their beautiful dresses
dance for the dirt
with nothing in it.

I can say with some certainty that she doesn’t get her artistic talents from me. She is already a better poet.

Last night, my four-year-old daughter Anna asked me this question: “What’s the number right before infinity?” Somebody (not me) had told her about infinity, and she has obviously been thinking about it. How would you answer that question? I thought about it and decided to just answer correctly: the number right before infinity is infinity. She did not like that answer one bit (and I can’t blame her). Her number sense comes almost completely from the number line (counting), and so she wanted to know where infinity was in the counting sequence. Makes sense, right? Some of the answers to her other questions were easier for her to digest (“what’s infinity plus infinity?”). In the end, though, she formulated an equation that made us both happy: Dad equals math.

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.