Carver Mead and faint praise

Flashback -- when Liesl and Cindy came to the ACM Black Tie ceremony last month, it was reminiscent of the night eleven years earlier at the National Academy, when the Smithsonian sponsored the "200 Wizards" event around a book. Something like 120 of the 200 assembled, also a Black Tie event, and I was privileged to take the lecturn to give the Allan Newell Award from ACM to Carver Mead. I made a short speech re 'knowing hin longer than anyone in the room' and his role in inventing the Cochlear implant. Vint Cerf and his wife were in the front row, and I told the story about him calling her from the White House re his Nat'l Technology Award -- one of the first telephone calls she ever heard. She was in tears, so was Vint, and Carver came forward and accepted the award graciously. I was "off the hook"

Carver is semi-famous, could have been more so since he created "Moore's Law" for which Gordon (co-founder of Intel) gave the talk that coined the name of the famous law about how fast semiconductor capability would develop.

After dinner, Carver was to give a talk at this soiree. My three daughters -- Sharon, Cindy, and Liesl -- were all there, along with Jenny; we all sat in the second row, expectantly. I didn't expect, though, to hear Carver start by saying that he had been thinking about the Newell award on the plane ride to D.C. The Newell Award is for fantastic teaching. Carver said that he tho't about how many PhD students a professor will have in a lifetime -- maximum, 400. He said that it was easy to recall the Best Ten. They knew the book cold, they could give the lecture better than the professor, they had no problems with calculations or the issues.

He went on, to say he could also easily remember the Worst Ten. The audience murmured, YES they could too! He said the Worst Ten didn't know there was a book, or they argued with it, or they never came to class, or ... The room was atitter. And then he looked at me, and said: "and one of them just introduced me"

I was stunned. My daughters all turned in unison to me, and screamed "DAD!" And what seemed like minutes went by, in kind of a daze.

And then Carver went on to say: "and the pictures in this book, and on these walls, I have found out in the past forty years, are from those in the second group, not the first. Whew!