1200 words on Saturday, for a total of 20,650 since July 1.

Updates are likely to be a little sparse for the next week or so. I'm at an aikido retreat in Colorado that will be taking most of my time.

As a writer, copyright is what allows me to earn a living. I respect other people's copyrights, and expect them to respect mine. But the RIAA is trying to turn me into a criminal. Why?

Well, I'm listening to Mozart as I write this, but I'm not playing a CD and I don't have the radio on. A few months ago, I ripped several legally purchased CDs onto my laptop hard drive. I can listen while I travel, without lugging the physical CDs and a player for 5,000+ miles.

What I did is legal right now, as long as I don't distribute the MP3 files on the Internet or burn and sell copies of the CD. It would be illegal under the DMCA if I had to bypass copy protection in order to do it, which is why I'll never buy a copy protected CD. If the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act passes, what I did might still be legal, but it wouldn't matter because it would be illegal to sell hardware without embedded copy protection.

I've written about the CBDTPA before, but it's still out there and the entertainment industry is still pushing for it. This might be a good time to remind your Senator that you're still paying attention, too. It's Senate bill #2048.

If I know my audience, a few of you don't care about the legislation, but want to know what I'm listening to. When I started writing, it was the Mozart horn concertos: K447, K417, K495, and K412. Now it's Miles Davis's Kind of Blue. Good stuff.

1700 words since my last update, and 19,450 since July 1. Plugging along. Not where I'd like to be, but about where I expected to be given the travel.

I've been a good convention-goer, so today I took the afternoon off and went up to Sonoma to see In Smog and Thunder. It's a collection of artifacts--paintings, drawings, posters, models--from a fictional war between Northern and Southern California. The artist, Sandow Birk, has a great sense of humor. He captured the "military museum" ambience perfectly, complete with solemn quotes from war diaries, battle sound effects, and heroic portraits of generals. Highly recommended. If you go, do not miss the video.

Peter Clarke at Semiconductor Business News reports that a consensus is forming on high-k materials for future ICs. Funny, I was at the same panel, and I didn't get any such idea. Yes, current research is focused on hafnium-based high-k dielectrics, but half a dozen different compounds fit that description, and researchers can't even agree what their dielectric constants are. Clarke's article implies that it's "just" a matter of figuring out how to deposit the material, and the 65-nm node problems will be solved. Umm... not exactly.

I realized I haven't posted a word count in a while, for probably obvious reasons. I've logged about 3100 words since Friday, 17,750 since July 1. Go me!

Semicon West, for those readers who aren't involved in the semiconductor industry, is North America's largest tradeshow for semiconductor manufacturing equipment. It's the kind of event where a twenty minute walk to the hotel and back for more business cards turns into an hour and a half because you stop to talk to three different industry colleagues along the way. Invigorating and exhausting. As I said yesterday, I'll try to be a little more coherent later in the week.

Today, I found out that the SUNY-Albany partnership with Sematech will spend more than $400 million dollars and five years working on mask blanks for EUV. That's it. No lens elements, no light sources, just masks. I also found out that there are 20 different candidate materials for high dielectric constant (k) gate stacks, and no one knows which one will turn out to work. Or even if a single material solution is possible. And that integrating the new material, whatever it is, will make integration of copper and low-k dielectrics look easy.

The research and development bill for the 65 nm technology node is starting to get pretty steep. When does the economic model break down? Moore's Law says not only that transistor density doubles every 18 months, but that cost remains constant. (Or, alternatively, that cost is cut in half every 18 months at constant circuit density.) As the industry suffers through the worst downturn in thirty years, it's appropriate to ask where the billions of dollars needed for research are going to come from.

No one had a good answer for that one. I'm not sure I do, either.

Show traffic was again better than expected. People told me that it ebbed and flowed, with waves of people coming in and then dissipating. The quality of traffic seemed to satisfy people, too.

So far, FEI Company's juggler wins the award for best booth entertainment. I'll try to get pictures. I haven't seen Nikon's acrobats yet, either.

I seem to have started a mini-debate with Mike Sanders at Keep Trying about the role of egotism in blogging. In the latest round, he writes:

"If people reduced their egocentricity and arrogance, the Internet would be a place of compassion, sharing and love. I-world would be extremely beautiful."

I haven't seen very many psych wards, but S. L. Viehl has. Her ruminations on Thorazine-driven blogging are well worth the visit to her Star Lines blog.

My take is that I'm not convinced that ego and arrogance are necessarily bad things. The neurosurgeon whose ego drives him to be the best, most well-informed, and richest doctor on the planet is the guy I want holding the knife if I have to get my skull cut open. Arrogance is part of where people get the chutzpah to do things that are supposed to be impossible, and so arrogance has led to many of the breakthroughs that support modern medicine (not to mention the Internet).

Yes, I agree that rampant ego is unpleasant to be around, but I don't think you can evaluate a person in terms of that single trait. (Or any other single trait, for that matter.) Who is a better person? An arrogant healer, or a compassionate murderer?

Okay, so maybe that's a straw man. But consider that many great teachers--Jesus, Buddha, Socrates, and on and on--were extremely difficult to be around. They made people uncomfortable. They challenged authority and conventional wisdom. We don't call them arrogant now, but their contemporaries thought they were. They dared to presume that they might know something that other people didn't. (In our time, consider Mother Theresa, Gandhi, the Dalai Lama.)

Not many individual bloggers achieve Buddha-like compassion and wisdom. Still, what interests me about blogs is the highly individual world views that they represent. Blogs allow me to glimpse the vast range of human experience, in all its ugliness and all its glory. For me, the infinite variety of the human spirit is already beautiful, warts and all. In Mike's airbrushed "ideal" I find only anaesthetizing sameness.

By the way, this blog runs on US East Coast time, not local time for wherever I happen to be. Take all time stamps with appropriate grains of salt.

I'm at Semicon West in San Francisco this week, which means I have lots to write about, but not much time to actually do the writing and posting. Things should settle down later in the week and give me a chance to be a little more coherent.

Traffic on the first day of the show was better than anyone expected, with actual customers as well as exhibitors walking the floor. Reduced travel budgets seem to have kept everyone except the decision makers at home.

Topics of conversation include the million dollar mask set, and what those companies that can't afford one are likely to do; reconciling the slow ramp of 130 nm technology with foundry claims that leading edge utilization is quite high; and contemplating the bleak future of companies with small product lines that aren't able to support a global support infrastructure.

Product announcements seem heavily tilted toward improving the performance of existing products. I've seen lots of emphasis on productivity, yield, and process control, but very few major new platforms. It's only one day, so I'm not sure whether that represents the show as a whole, or simply the companies I've met with so far.

Contemporary literary fiction sometimes seems both ignorant and contemptuous of life outside the academy, which may be why very few people outside the academy actually read the stuff. Alex Good suggests that the problem lies with the Romantic ideal of the artist standing aloof from the world. The academy can teach technique, but perhaps aspiring writers need to look elsewhere for things to write about.

(Link by way of Metafilter.)

Updating Friday's entry, the Select Committee on Homeland Security has posted a summary of modifications to the President's proposal on its web page. Thanks to Keri's Brain Flotsam page for the additional information.

I got a lot of things done yesterday, but writing wasn't one of them. Just 450 words, for a total of 14,650 since July 1. Sigh...

I used to think John Ashcroft was well-intentioned but misguided in his willingness to ignore civil liberties and hold everyone who might have spoken to a Sept. 11 hijacker as a "material witness." But now we've got Operation TIPS, a "citizen informant" program so far-reaching that it makes the Nazi Gestapo, the Soviet KGB, and the East German Stasi look like amateurs.

The good news is that Ashcroft is so far out on the totalitarian limb on this one that he's given House Majority Leader Richard Armey a chance to look like a moderate. Armey's markup of the legislation to create the Homeland Security Department explicitly prohibits implementation of the program.

Intel chairman Andy Grove knows a thing or two about running a business. So I'm inclined to listen when he suggests that separation of powers will improve corporate accountability. For instance, the board of directors can't effectively supervise the CEO if the CEO is also chairman of the board.

(Link by way of Techdirt.)

I've been following Mike Sanders' Keep Trying blog for a few months now. Some of his thoughts on the meaning and importance of blogging have been interesting, but he completely lost me yesterday.

For starters, he seems to equate living a meaningful life with being a good person, and then delivers a prescription for a bland, inoffensive, politically correct life that I would find completely devoid of meaning. His goals include volunteering and giving to charity, but also such vague pablum as "making people feel good about themselves and others" or "encouraging people in their endeavors."

Was Einstein's life meaningful? Was Shakespeare's? Not by Mike's definition, I don't think.

The Blogging Community (whatever the heck that is) has a disturbing tendency
to wrap itself in the flag of personal expression, while at the same time
demanding the same sort of mind-numbing conformity that has chased so many
bloggers away from the mainstream media. Mike offers three points of advice
to bloggers that seem to me to be part of the same trend:

"So what's a blogger to do? Here are three short ideas:
- Introspection must ultimately be done in private
- A blogroll, link or complement on a blog are at the lower end of the giving spectrum
- Share your experiences, but be aware of self-centeredness"

Most of the blogs I read violate at least one of these principles, and several violate all of them. If every blog followed Mike's advice, the Internet would be like a steady diet of white bread: utterly lacking in taste, texture, or nutrition.

Update: The original link didn't work. Mike appears to have been victimized by the ongoing Blogger archive problem. I've now pointed to the home page, where you want the July 17 entry. Thanks to Robert for the heads-up.

Oh no, not another one... The Washington Post has been looking at AOL's revenue before its merger with Time Warner. It appears that AOL resorted to aggressive accounting measures to minimize the impact of the dot-com collapse on advertising revenues.

Silicon Magic, SEMI's video introduction to semiconductor manufacturing, is back in an updated second edition. It's a good overview, aimed at a non-technical audience. I've been recommending the first edition to colleagues for years.

975 words yesterday, but none the day before. So I'm still slipping. 14,200 since July 1.

Adding to the semiconductor industry's malaise in advance of Semicon West, Intel announced it will cut 4,000 jobs, mostly through attrition.

From the mailbag:
MKS Instruments announced a vacuum version of the company's PICO leak detector. The company also announced a battery-powered version of the sniffer-style PICO detector.

1725 words yesterday, including finishing up an essay that I've been working on. Total of 13,225 since July 1.

A researcher at Penn State found that nearly 25% of SEC filings are amended after review. That's bad news for anyone who expects the accounting cloud over Wall Street to lift any time soon.

Meanwhile, it's pretty clear that at least some companies committed outright fraud. The current administration is demanding more accountability from corporate executives, but the way to get it is to enforce existing laws, not pontificate about the need for new ones. Where is the high-profile Anti-Fraud Task Force? Why aren't federal marshals seizing accounting records all over the country? For that matter, why are there two empty seats on the SEC?

But then, we can't send major campaign contributors to jail, now can we?

The Guardian is taking on Stephen Wolfram. As they point out, writing about science for a general audience is fine, except that it becomes much easier to play fast and loose with the facts.

From the mailbag:
Tokyo Electron joined the parade of companies making wafer cleaning announcements in the run-up to Semicon West. Version 3 of the company's UW300Z system is now available in the US.

2450 words over the weekend, 11,500 since July 1. The weekly total is down a little from last week, but I finished strong after I got unstuck on a couple of projects. I'll take it.

1050 words yesterday, 9050 since July 1. Plugging along.

There. Just finished a bunch of long overdue updates to the other parts of the site. New news, new books, new web stuff. All accessible from the front page. Enjoy!

No words yesterday. 875 the day before, for a total of 8000 since July 1. That's about 2000 behind where I need to be. The situation isn't dire yet, but I do need to pick up the pace a little bit.

Environmental debates often focus on single species. Build a dam or save the snail darter? Log a forest or save the spotted owl? Even dedicated environmentalists have trouble explaining why human communities should be held hostage by a single, seemingly insignificant, species. New research on biological networks is starting to show why. Loss of a single species can have enormous, an unpredictable, ripple effects throughout the food chain. Humans, like it or not, are part of the food chain.

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore received the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House on Tuesday. The award, the nation's highest civilian honor, follows Moore's 1990 receipt of the National Medal of Technology.

1225 words yesterday. Things are starting to click on the Venice project, after being stalled for several weeks. 7125 words since July 1.

"While extraordinary measures may be beneficial at the moment, the example is nevertheless harmful, for if one forms the habit of breaking laws for a good reason, later on they can be broken for bad reasons under the same pretext of doing good." --Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Chapter XXXIV

The "slippery slope" that civil libertarians worry about is not new, and has nothing to do with "coddling terrorists" or other undesirables. A republic draws its legitimacy from the rule of law; eroding that rule erodes the foundation of the republic itself.

Learning good design by critiquing bad design is not only a time-honored technique, it's lots of fun. If occasionally stomach-churning. As Click To Add Title shows, few arenas are more appropriate for this technique than that business mainstay, the PowerPoint presentation.

(Link by way of Metafilter.)

Another 875 words yesterday, 5900 since July 1.

Another reasonably productive day yesterday. 875 words, for a total of 5025 since July 1.

A research group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has reached a shocking conclusion: Trees, grass, and water are better for people than buildings, streets, and sidewalks. I'm so glad they cleared that up before I paved over my lawn.

I'm not sure I can digest numbers this big. TRW claims it has developed a 4,000-watt laser source module for EUV lithography. By connecting three of them together, the company believes it can produce 50 watts of EUV power. Since lasers are less than 5% efficient to begin with, that's more than 240 kilowatts of input power, per stepper. Put 20 of those in a fab, and you're consuming 4.8 megawatts for EUV lightsources alone.

Huh. How'd I manage that? 1400 words tonight, 4150 since July 1. I'm mulling over a potential essay topic, and I guess I had more to say about it than I thought. Or maybe it's really two essays. I'm not sure yet.

Did much better than I expected yesterday. 1225 words, all of it fiction. Total of 2750 since July 1. And the heat wave broke last night, so my productivity should improve greatly.

Too hot to write much yesterday or the day before. Only 525 words done, for a total of 1525 since July 1. Heat wave is supposed to break today, though.

800 words today, wrapped around the second and third (final) drafts of my latest article for Semiconductor Magazine. This one was interesting. It's about IC design, and how smaller transistors force designers (or their software) to deal with more and more subtle interactions. As always, it will appear on the publications page when it's published.

I realized this month that I've developed a pretty standard routine for writing these articles. Once I've done all the interviews, I read through my notes and ruminate about how I want to structure the material. Then I sit down and write the first draft more or less straight through without looking at my notes. On the second draft, I make sure everything hangs together in a logical way, and that all the important details got in. Second draft revisions sometimes add 50% or more to the total word count; this one went much more smoothly. The third draft is where I check for sentence structure, make sure I spelled everyone's name right and gave the right quotes to the right people. and similar fine tuning.

If the first draft is especially horrendous, I may need two "second" drafts, for a total of four. That hasn't happened in a while, fortunately. When it does, it's usually because I tried to skip the rumination step and started writing before I'd fully digested the topic.

The above post is 230 words, so I'll round my total for the day off at 1,000 down, 61,000 to go.

The Forward Motion writing community is off on another round of extreme writing. I have once again signed up, never mind that I fell way behind last time and had to drop out. This time I'm targeting 1000 words/day, average, between now and the end of August. Wish me luck!

(The community is currently changing hosts, so the link may be a little unreliable.)

Elsewhere, I also signed up for Project Dolphin's random web silliness. They count keystrokes for individuals and teams, reporting enough statistics to make a baseball statistician happy. Team Forward Motion has surged to #116 on the overall list, proving that writers type even more than programmers do.

Altavista produced a baffling set of pointers to this site again last week. People found the site using the search terms:

• generative or tireless or elevator or noteworthy or find


• multiplicands or occupying or circling or thin or pith


• trustful or inalienable or resultants or succumbed or thin

"Noteworthy" is the name of one of my sections, and "thin" is of course part of the name of the site. Still, I'm pretty sure these people weren't looking for any of my content. I'm starting to understand why Altavista is losing the search engine war.