So today’s my thirteenth wedding anniversary. And what did my lovely wife buy me as a present?

Yes, a Klein bottle coffee mug.
Does she know me well, or what?

My father died on sunday.

To some degree, I’m still in shock. Even though we knew it was coming, when something like this happens, no amount of preparation really helps. He’d been sick with an antibiotic resistant infection since November, and on thursday, refused to let them give him a feeding tube. So we really knew, almost to the day, when he was going to die. And yet, when it finally happened, it was still a shock.

We buried him yesterday. I didn’t speak at the funeral, because I couldn’t. Every time I try to talk about him, my voice just shuts down. But my fingers don’t. So if you’ll bear with me, I want to say a little bit about my father.

If you enjoy reading this blog, you owe him. He’s the person who got me interested in math, and who taught me how to teach. To give you an example that I remember particularly vividly: when I was in fourth grade, he was doing work on semiconductor manufacturing. He
had brought home a ream of test data from a manufacturing run, and was sitting at our dining room table, paper spread out around him, doing an analysis of the data. I walked in, and asked what he was doing. He stopped working, and proceeded to explain to me what he was doing. That evening, he taught me about bell curves, linear regression, and standard deviation. He was able to make all of that understandable – both how to do it, and why you do it – to a fourth grader.

Until I went to college, I pretty much didn’t learn math in school. He taught me. I learned algebra, geometry, and calculus from my father, not from my math teachers. He bought me my first book on programming.

He was a soldier in World War two. He dropped out of high school, and lied about his age in order to be allowed to enlist. As far as I know, that was one of the only times in
his life that he lied about something important. But to him, doing his part to defend his country was more important than the rule about how old he had to be to enlist. He didn’t end up fighting; his unit didn’t get deployed to the front. He would up spending his time in the army in India.

After coming home, he went to college on the GI bill, and became a physicist. But calling him a physicist is a little deceptive: he was a very hands on person. He wound up
doing work that most people would call electrical engineering. He worked on semiconductors mainly for satellites and military applications. During his career, he worked on things ranging from communication satellites, to the Trident and MX missiles, to the power system for the Galileo space probe. I had my disagreements with him over working on the missiles; he believed very strongly in the whole idea of deterrence, that his work would not be used to harm people, but would prevent another war. And it does appear that he was right about that. But I was always prouder of his work on Galileo.

Music was an incredibly important thing to him. He made all three of his kids learn
music. Back when my brother and I were in high school, he used to spend something around 12
hours a week driving to music lessons or rehearsals. And he never missed a concert that one
of his kids played in – from the time we started playing instruments in elementary school,
all the way until he was hospitalized last november. My brother and sister both ended up going into music: my brother majored in music performance and composition in college; my sister in music education. Musically, I’m the black sheep of the family.

He was a survivor of cancer. 20 years ago, he developed an aggressive muscular cancer in his leg. Being incredibly lucky, even though he stalled for months after noticing a lump in his leg, it was operable, and between surgery and radiation therapy, he survived it. A year later, there appeared to be a recurrence; it turned out to just be scar tissue, but in the surgery where they discovered that, they needed to do an arterial graft, which caused intermittent trouble for the rest of his life.

Since high school, I called him “Fink”. I don’t even remember why. But he bore it with pride. When I had kids, he wanted them to call him grandfink.

He died of an antibiotic resistant infection. As long as I live, I’ll never be able to forgive the Doctors who took care of him. The illness that killed him started with an infection in his little toe. Due to a spectacularly stupid series of errors – where basically repeated infections with antibiotic resistant bacteria were not treated properly – he developed antibiotic resistant pneumonia, which is what ended up killing him.

He was 80 years old. He was an amazing person. And he will be missed.

One more bit of personal blogging, and then it’ll be back to the math. You may have noticed
that I haven’t been as active in the discussions on my posts for the last few weeks as I
would normally be. There are two reasons for that; one I’ve mentioned before – my father’s illness.
The other is actually something good.

As of today, I’m unemployed. Briefly.

After 11 years at IBM Research, I decided to change jobs. Today was my last day working for IBM. One week from monday, I’ll be starting work for Google, as a Software Engineer at their New York lab. Nothing against IBM – it was just time for a change. Over the last few weeks, the process of interviewing, and then wrapping up my work at IBM has been taking up a lot of time. Things should be nicely mellow for the next week, and then a bit crazy for a while as learn the ropes at my new job.

In general, I haven’t talked much about personal stuff on the blog, unless it related to
something else that I was already talking about. This post is going to be an exception to that.

There’s a bit of a scienceblogs flamewar that started up, with Rob Knop, a new SBer on one
side, and a bunch of atheistic SBers on the other. I pretty much think arguments like this are a
total waste of time: Rob isn’t going to convince PZ that he’s not a delusional idiot for being
religious; PZ isn’t going to convince Rob that he is a delusional idiot. It’s all just
ranting.

But as part of it, PZ made a statement in one of his posts that bugged me. It’s one he’s made before, and which I’m sure he’ll make again; but it’s an example of a kind of thinking that has always bothered me. The statement, from the title of his post, is “Spirituality? Another word for lies and empty noise”.

Continue reading →

PZ, Bora, Orac, John, and others have all put up posts about a list of the 50 most significant Science Fiction and Fantasy works of the last fifty years. As the reigning Geek-Lord of ScienceBlogs, I figured that I had to weigh in as well. Here’s the list: the one’s that I’ve read are bold-faced.

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Today, the ACM announced the winner of the Turing award. For those who don’t know, the Turing award is the greatest award in computer science – the CS equivalent of the Nobel prize, or the Fields medal.

The winner: Fran Allen. The first woman ever to win the Turing award. And the first Turing award winner that I’ve personally known. Fran deserves it, and I’m absolutely overjoyed to see her getting the recognition she deserves. Among her many accomplishments, Fran helped design Fortran and create the worlds first optimizing compiler.

One of my fondest memories of work is from 8 years ago. My advisor, Lori Pollock, was up for tenure. Fran was picked as one of the outside reviewers for her tenure case. So in the course of doing the review, she read the papers that Lori and I wrote together – and liked them. The next time she was in my building, she came to my office to introduce herself and talk to me about the papers I’d written. I was absolutely stunned – Fran Allen came looking for me! to talk to me!

Since then, I’ve learned that that’s just the kind of person she is. Fran is a brilliant woman, one of the smartest people I’ve had to opportunity to meet: a person who has done amazing things in her career. And she’s also one of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet. She’s approachable and friendly, and has searched out many junior researchers to give them a bit of encouragement. She’s been a mentor to more people that I could hope to count. She’s just a thoroughly amazing person.

I can’t even begin to say how happy I am for her. She’s earned the greatest award that exists for computer science, and I’m thrilled to see that the ACM recognized that. And knowing Fran, I’m particularly happy that she’s the first woman recipient of the award, because she’s worked so hard in her career to help women overcome the biases of so many people in the mathematical sciences.

Congratulations, Fran!

This week’s “Ask a ScienceBlogger” is an interesting one, but *very* tricky to answer.
The question was proposed by fellow SBer [Dave Munger:][munger] **”What’s a time in your
career when you were criticized extremely harshly by someone you respect? Did it help you or
set your career back?”**
[munger]: http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/
I have to tread carefully while answering this one. It’s a good question, but it involves people who *could* be reading the blog.
Overall, I’ve been remarkably lucky in my career. For the most part, I’ve had excellent
mentors who’ve been kind and helpful, and I’ve done my best to listen to them, and not
screw things up badly enough for them to really tear into me. But no one in a research career can escape complete unscathed. So I’ve got my own war stories of the ways that I’ve been shredded. And the effect/outcome has varied enormously.

Continue reading →

Following in the footsteps of [orac](http://scienceblogs.com/insolence) and [PZ](http://www.scienceblogs.com/pharyngula) among others of my fellow SBers, I’ve taken the survey to find out which historical lunatic I am. And I must say, I’m pleased with the results!

Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.
I’ve actually had a fondness for Emperor Norton since I first learned of him by way of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic. He was a silly, nutty old guy, but remarkable for his good nature, humor, and general goofy eccentricity. Something about his particular kind of nuttiness actually made me feel an affinity for him.
So just call me the Math Geek Emperor of ScienceBlogs from now on!

One year ago on Thanksgiving day, my friend John Vlissides died.
I’m sure that many of you have heard of John. He was one of the so-called “Gang of Four” who wrote the “Design Patterns” book that set off a huge fad in software engineering (and quite typically for John, he always insisted on pointing out that the reason he was the *fourth* of the GoF was *not* alphabetical). John was also a major contributor to InterViews, one of the early object-oriented GUI frameworks; and a major influence on the recently demonstrated Jazz system from IBM.
John and I didn’t agree on much. He was a passionate political conservative, and I’m about as liberal as they come. He was a deeply religious christian, and I’m jewish. Even on work issues, we tended
to disagree on most things. John was an object-oriented purist, and am very much not. I remember arguing with him once about the addition of generic types to Java, back when they were still under discussion. I thought that they were an overdue addition; John thought that they shouldn’t be there at all. His idea was that if you need a list of “X”, you should probably be defining a domain specific type that has richer semantics than just `List`, and that putting generics into the language just encouraged people to be lazy. My opinion should be well-known from the stuff I’ve written here.
But you didn’t have to agree with John. He was a genuinely terrific guy. No matter how strongly he disagreed with you, he *never* got angry. Arguing with him was always an intellectual thing, not an emotional thing. Just because he argued with you, that didn’t mean that there was any hostility.
John was an *amazing* advocate for his ideas. I often thought that he didn’t always do the best job of *picking* the ideas that he advocated, but once he bought into an idea, he was into it heart and soul, and he was positively amazing at talking about the things he believed in, from politics to
software to education to just about anything.
The other very special thing about John was that he was a fantastic *mentor*, which is something we often lack in industrial research. John always found time to sit and talk about research ideas, especially with junior researchers. He could listen to an idea, and very quickly grasp it, and ask
*exactly* the right questions that you needed to think about to fully develop the idea. And it didn’t matter whether he *liked* the idea. Even if he didn’t, he’d *still* take the time to sit with you and talk, and ask deep questions to work through the idea – and generally, he’d either ask questions that homed in on the weaknesses of the idea, so that you’d come to agree with him that it wasn’t good; or he’d listen to the answers and see that his objection was wrong.
Around three years ago, John woke up one morning, and one of his legs was numb. Tests showed that it
was a very well developed, inoperable brain cancer. It was pretty much hopeless; there was no real chance of his surviving it. They treated him to try to slow it down, to give him as much good time as they could. He handled it with astonishing dignity and grace. Even while he was dying of cancer, he continued to be the same patient listener/debater that he’d always been. He was a thoroughly good person, and all of us who knew him miss him.
Before he died, he asked that in his memory, people give money to the children’s cancer center at the Westchester county hospital. One of John’s children, his daughter Helen, had been born with cancer several years ago, and died around her first birthday. If you knew John, or were influenced by his books, why not go find a children’s cancer center near you, and donate some money in his memory?