Kate: All right, today I'm here with my dad at his cabin in Colorado, and we're sitting by a crackling fire, drinking coffee. For this interview, we're going to focus on my dad's life in math minus his career as a statistician at Marion Labs, because we're going to talk about that later. But all the other stuff we're going to talk about today. So, thank you for being here today, Dad.
Dad: Okay, it might be a lot of fun.
Kate: Okay. So, the first question I have is, do you think your gift for math was inherited and if so, who did you inherit it from?
Dad: Yeah, I believe it was probably inherited from my mother that when she was going to school, her best subjects were math and art, and so she was able to teach me quite a few things that helped me in school. She knew when we were trying to memorize how to add things up and multiply and divide and all that. She knew how to help me on those. So, I knew a few tricks like anything that's divisible by nine, the integers of it will add up to something that's divisible by nine, and usually that's nine itself. But a lot of times might be 18 or 27 or something. That was a trick that I knew, and other kids didn't have that. I don't know, I just liked it and so, it was easy for me to do that.
My dad and grandma at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa in the early 1980s. ©Mom.
Kate: And her dad was an architect, right?
Dad: Yeah, he probably taught her some stuff. Somehow, I would say that that my mom was his favorite, but he taught her his best things, which were math and art and how to draw and stuff, so mom knew all the all the tricks to teach us how to how to draw something that looked like it was three-dimensional as opposed to you know what normal kids would draw. We were all pretty good at that. Silvia became the artist in the family, whereas I became the mathematician.
Kate: It makes sense.
Dad: And I, Renee, I don't know what to say she became.
Kate: She's a gardener.
Dad: She did. She's a gardener.
Kate: She got that from your dad, I think.
Dad: She got all the cooking experience that my mom developed.
Kate: I know your whole family loves to play games like card games and chess. You learn that at an early age.
Dad: Well, I'm sure we most of us got how to do it sort of thing from my mom. I think she taught my dad how to play chess. What he knew how to do was play checkers. I learned that from him. And then I learned chess at an early age because they were playing that, and I would watch them and I just kind of learned what they were doing and developed that.
Later, when we lived in Muskogee, and I was probably 10 or 12 years old, my dad decided to have a chess club at the library. So, on Saturdays, we would meet there and play chess, and he would show everybody things about it.
He had the janitor make this big board that stood on legs. And it was a chessboard, and it had a hole in the middle of each square so that he could take these pieces that the janitor had put screws in the bottom and put them up on the board, and everyone could see. And so from that, it's kind of hard when you're trying to teach somebody how to play chess, you truly should start with just a few pieces and simple things that you can do. He would show a lot of those things where maybe you just have a pawn and two kings and how to get the pawn down to become a queen at the end, and what to do with that, or how to make a checkmate if you just have a rook and a king versus another king, and things like that. Once you know that kind of stuff, then it's good to memorize certain openings that are known to be really good for you and how that plays out. He would always have one or two things that he was going to show, and he'd do that.
Then we'd play against each other. For a long time, I was sort of the best player, but then all of a sudden, this guy, Ed King, came along and he really studied chess. All of sudden, after a long time with that, he became really the best player.
Kate: That's funny.
Dad: We had a thing where Tulsa also had a chess club of some sort like this. We had several matches where we would drive up to Tulsa with several cars. Then we'd set up, and we'd play typically a match is that each person plays one other, and then you score from that. Typically, it would be if you win, you get one point. If you lose, you don't get any. If it's a tie, you get each get a half, and then you add all that up for the team. I think we lost every time.
Kate: Okay. What about all the card games you played?
Dad: Yeah, Mom liked to play cards, so she taught me several little kids’ games, which I knew, and I could teach you guys at some point.
Kate: Yeah, we all learned those too.
Dad: But the best thing was that when I was four or five, we were living in this, I always remember that house a whole lot because I knew every corner of it and stuff, but we were living in this house where we had a card table that we could put in the living room and play bridge. But to play bridge, the main person they knew how to play was a cousin named Gerald. He would come over and there were only three of them. There's a way you can kind of play bridge with three people, but it's not very good. So, they taught me how to play bridge.
Kate: How old were you?
Dad: I was five, six, right in there. Now, I would always play with my mother, and she knew all this stuff that I would learn from her. She taught me how to play the cards well, and then how the bidding was supposed to go and all of that stuff. Another thing we would do is sometimes we'd get my grandmother to play with us. But my grandmother could just barely play, so I found myself teaching her how to do things.
Kate: Yeah, that’s funny.
Dad: But at any rate, that was the bridge thing and the chess. Those were the two best games. Later, when we were older, we started getting boxed games. I think Monopoly was my favorite, and we would play Monopoly with Joe and Bill Lunn and all three of us as kids, and it was just a nice game. Then from that in terms of games, I started realizing there were these war games you could get. I would play those with Joe, but also, I would play it against myself all the time trying to figure out the best way to do things.
Kate: Those are with the little soldiers?
Dad: Well, the war games were with just a map, and they would put this hexagonal pattern on it so you could move from one hexagon to another.
Kate: Oh, okay.
Dad: It would just be a little square of, here's a cavalry unit, and it is worth two points in strength, and it can move six of those, or you might have an infantry unit, and it can move, say, three. Then you might have an artillery unit, and it could move two, but it could hurt somebody from a distance. To find out how much you hurt somebody, you would roll the dice. If you rolled something like a six, then that was terrific, and you would get the maximum hurt on the other side to try to reduce their unit to nothing. If you rolled a one, that was no good, stuff like that.
So any rate, the first game I got was Waterloo, and it was probably the most interesting game of any to begin with because it had the French under Napoleon, and the first army he bumps into are the Prussians. You would have that fight, and then the British would start arriving, and then you'd have to fight the British and that whole setup of how that worked. I worked at that a long time trying to figure out what was the way that the French could win this thing because they were outnumbered. Ultimately, I finally decided if the British and the Prussians were smart, you just couldn't beat them. But I must have played that a zillion times.
Then, the next game after that was Stalingrad. This was the thing of World War II.
Kate: Cold War era or World War II.
Dad: And the Germans and the Russians and working that out. That one, the Germans had the best army for sure, and they would start on the attack. But then, the Russians started getting reinforcements and training, new soldiers and stuff. They would ultimately have the real powerful army, so the Germans had to win rapidly, or they would lose out.
Then there became other games that came along, but I don't think any of them were quite as good. Like there was Gettysburg, and I forget, several others. But any rate, that gaming thing got really pretty good there, and so ultimately you know that that kind of gaming shows up on a computer. People are playing that sort of stuff there.
Kate: Let's go back to when you were in elementary school. What do you remember about math there besides your mom helped you a lot, I guess, probably with that?
Dad: I don't know.
Kate: You don't remember that too much?
Dad: I don't remember at grade school a whole lot. It seemed like so much of it was memory, and knowing what you were doing with that, how to add and multiply large numbers. In fact, I still find myself doing that when I'm working one of these little logic puzzles in the morning. Some of them involve multiplying numbers or adding them or something, and I still have, go back to square one, how I used to do it, as opposed to getting out the calculator and using it.
Kate: Well, what about high school? I know there was some influential math teachers.
Dad: Yeah, in high school. Well, all along I had some teachers that were the math teachers. I remember in third grade, the teacher I had there liked math a whole lot, and she got me going. But when I got into high school, the first math class you took was geometry in, I guess it was 10th grade. I absolutely love that because all of a sudden, it wasn't so much just numbers as it was logic that we had to spend an enormous amount, most of our time knowing what the axioms were and then what the logic was that would enable you to prove something from the axioms and all of that. I just love that. We got to where we did more and more with that.
I was telling you the other day that the teacher at the end of the year had these things for us to try to prove that were really, really hard. The one I remember was that if you have any four points, you were supposed to draw a square through them so that each point was on one of the sides of the square. And I just, I always had that problem in the back of my head, and then I finally had a teacher when I was in college that when I told him about that problem, he went over and got this book and showed me the solution, which was really hard. It isn’t something I can remember how to do.
But at any rate, that was Mr. Rivers. Most of the people, for I don't know what reason, they just hated geometry. But for me, that was really the best math class I ever had in high school. But then the next year, we did algebra, and the year after that it was kind of like what we call second-year algebra.
Kate: Like trigonometry or something? Or that comes later?
Dad: Yeah, I think maybe we had some trigonometry in that too. Trigonometry was just kind of onward with geometry.
Kate: So, you went to college at OU in Norman, and I know you didn't think about majoring in math initially, right? You were kind of interested in.
Dad: Well, yeah.
Kate: You did? Okay.
Dad: I think the thing was, to get into college, everybody had to take these exams. I've forgotten what they were called now.
Kate: Like SAT? Or ACT?
Dad: Yeah. So, there was, there were two that most universities had started out using one of them. And then the really good one started in with, I think it was the SAT. You took these tests to get into college. When I took it, I would always score almost perfect on the math side, but the other side, I was just sort of normal. I thought I could get into some college like Harvard or Rice was a really good one, and so on. But they wouldn't take me because of my lousy word.
Kate: Like the English part?
Dad: The English part, yeah. So, I didn't make that. I went to University of Oklahoma. Any rate, that was pretty easy for me to get into, and so when I got there, I wasn't totally sure what I wanted to major in. I knew there were three subjects I liked, that's math, history, and philosophy. I always made sure that I plenty of those classes so that I could go on into a master's program from that.
But there were several teachers that were really good in math. I've forgotten their names. One just, he didn't really have a PhD, but he was real close to getting it. He taught a lot of our classes, and he was just so clear in explaining everything that it was easy to learn from him. Then there was this other guy that everybody liked tremendously because he was sort of funny, and I don't know that he was that good in math, but he kept your attention just because there might be a joke here.
Those people taught math pretty well. I started out, I forget, some sort of advanced algebra, and then we went into calculus which was really a continuation of algebra in many ways. Then there were some other things that were kind of like geometry in the things that you proved with it all the time and stuff like that. At a certain point, I took a class in probability, which I really, really enjoyed.
In the meantime, I had taken some philosophy classes, and one that really got to me was a logic class. We had to take these tests every week, and I always scored perfect on these logic tests. I thought, man, this might be what I need to do, is go into philosophy.
But there were lots of other things where we were looking at what the philosophy of the Greeks was and on and on. It was more of, the class involved memorizing a whole lot of stuff. Then likewise in history, I took several different kinds of history classes, and I enjoyed them. But again, the work in them, and for me at least, was more of a matter of memorizing things for tests that would ask what happened here.
The one history class that I liked the best. The first year in college, there was this guy who had this special class for what were considered the best students, and I got into it. You would go over to his house once a week, and each week, we were supposed to have read a book that he would give us. Well, he would assign us, and we'd have to go buy it, so it was kind of an expensive class. But anyway, we had all these paperback books that we were reading, and he went through American history from the early times when the colonists came over until, I don't know how far he went. Maybe he made it to World War II or something like that. But each book was about one of those periods.
The thing about it that was so interesting is that it wasn't just a matter of memorizing what happened at that period. There was always a theory of why it happened behind each one. We went through all these different books that would then give us a period of time, and then he would explain to us different theories of why that would happen. So, that made history really interesting, but it didn't continue that way. The rest of the classes I took were pretty much read this, here's what happened, and then make sure you have it memorized for a test.
I had to choose finally what I was going to do. I picked math just because I thought in many ways, I thought it was easiest for me that the logic part of it and all of the proofs that you had to do, all of that sort of stuff just sort of fell into my lap. I just thought that was easiest. For a long time, I was considering that maybe philosophy would be in that period of time or would fit well.
But, I finally decided on math, and I spent a long time on trying to do stuff there at the University of Oklahoma. I got a master's degree in a couple of years. Then I kept taking classes and trying to decide if I was going to work on a PhD, what area I wanted to be in, and which professor to work with, and stuff like that.
That's where I got two professors that really had an impact on me. One did all of the probability-type classes, which I found interesting. But a lot of it applied tremendously to these games that I had been playing, and I enjoyed it. He had gotten his degree at Oregon State. It was really hard to get anything in probability or statistics there at the University of Oklahoma because they only had a couple of professors that knew anything about it.
Then the other one was this, I took a class that was survey sampling from this other guy who had just come there. He had been there like a year, and he had gotten his degree at Florida State. He's the one that I started playing bridge with, and he knew a whole lot of things like a new bidding system for me to learn and how to play cards especially well and stuff like that and so, he was great on the bridge part. I also enjoyed the survey sampling and getting it figured out.
I decided, well, in order to get a degree, I'm going to go to either Florida State or Oregon State.
Kate: For statistics specifically?
Dad: Yeah. I don't know why, I think you mentioned the other day that maybe I decided because I liked Oregon as a place to live.
Kate: Because it had mountains, probably.
Dad: Yeah, that I would go there and get a degree in statistics, and I could make some money there, that the graduate program there, I was able to get into a thing where they let me teach math, beginning math, like algebra and stuff and get paid pretty well for it.
Up ‘til then, your mom had been working and adding to what I would, the little amount I was making as a graduate student so that we could live. I remember one of the places we decided to live was a married housing area where each building wasn't any bigger than this room here. It had been built back when my parents had been there, and my dad was finishing his degree.
Kate: This is in Oklahoma? In Norman?
Dad: In Oklahoma, yeah, when we were in Norman. We had lived there when I was like two years old.
Kate: That's really funny.
Dad: Yeah, so It was the same place. But then when we moved to Oregon, there was a married student housing area that we could be part of and join. That's where Nick was born. Then I was making enough money as a graduate student that I could support us, and everything was cheap enough there that we could live okay. Your mom became a full-time mother with all the stuff. I think she taught Nick so much stuff, it's kind of unreal in the early ages. He could talk when he was one year old, you know.
Kate: With full sentences and everything?
Dad: Yes, with sort of the whole thing. We thought he was going to be a genius. I think it was just a matter of his being taught a lot. I don't know.
But any rate, that's where I did a lot of study in statistics. I had to catch up with a lot of people because most of the stuff that I knew was pretty much probability. And statistics, you have all this stuff involving experiments, so that was kind of part of it.
Kate: Tell me about that thing where you wrote those papers. That guy?
Dad: Yeah, ultimately, after getting my master's in statistics, then I started working with this one guy. I don't know exactly how we got going. I don't know if he was that great of a statistician logically, but he was really good at knowing all these different ways of doing statistics. He taught this final class where you learned all these different ways that you could do estimation and hypothesis testing and stuff. It was a really, really good class. I just kept kind of working with him. He paid attention to what was going on in statistics at the time.
There was this really famous statistician in England whose name was David Cox, and he developed this thing that was being used in clinical trials a whole lot called the Cox Model. It had to do with survival data, where you would have an experimental unit, give them a treatment, and see how long they lived. That length of time was the survival time. From that, then you would try to prove different things about the treatments.
He had somebody he was working with that was was doing experiments with fish there and would see how long a fish would survive under, with a certain thing in the water. I picked up on that as let's see if I can do something with that. The thing was that the survival time instead of getting, you when you have a human, usually you could pretty well say, okay, this this person survived 322 days and get the exact number of how long they lived. Whereas in this setting, what was happening was they basically just had that a fish survived a short amount of time or medium amount of time or long amount of time.
The thing about survival data is when by the time you got to the end of the experiment, you wouldn't run the experiment ‘til everybody was dead. At the end of the experiment, there were these people that we called it sensor data. They survived to a certain amount of time and then this experiment ended, and they were censored in that we wouldn't know how long they would survive.
I applied this thing Cox had developed, this model, we called it the Cox Model, and he had a way of analyzing the data at that time the method a lot of people were using was the maximum likelihood estimation. That involved a thing you could do called a likelihood function from the experiment. Then from that, you could use the data to form this function that would estimate, well, show you a function for the parameters, and then you maximize that. That would be your estimate. Then there was a way to get the variability of the estimates and do different things with the data involving that, hypothesis testing, and then, I've forgotten all the words here, but there were several different things.
I started doing that with this, what we call grouped survival data where it was just the low, medium, and high. I started applying that. It was so, it was popular and everybody wanted to know stuff about this that we were able to get publications. I had these publications before I even had my thesis finished. The first one was in America. There was this really popular journal called Biometrics. Just how to do this using the Cox Model on this kind of data was really interesting to people. We immediately got a publication with that. It was he and I, and he had this other student that was doing something related but not. It was me that basically had the thing that was published.
Then one of the really early publications that had been started by this guy named Ronald Fisher, who was considered one of the very beginning people that developed statistics, it was called Biometrika. Part of what I did, you could develop the efficiency of using a Cox analysis versus the maximum likelihood analysis. Cox had this way of just throwing away part of the data that wasn't very important but was unusual to do. I could develop the efficiency of doing that. Turned out if the effect of the treatment compared to a control was very small, that it was a really good way to do it. If it was really big, it wasn't very efficient. However, if it was really big, you could see it immediately. It was obvious, you know.
People were really interested in that thing. I had these two publications almost before I did anything. Then when I started looking for a job that helped enormously and my major professor, Donald Pierce, had gotten his degree at Oklahoma State. So that was one of the places that I applied to. And bingo, they immediately accepted me. I went ahead and decided, well, I'll go there. I'll be back close to all my people in Oklahoma that I know. That was a really good place for me to start.
I finally got my thesis completed. It was a real pain in those days because in order to write a mathematical statement and use a lot of strange symbols, you couldn't just do that with a normal typing thing. You had to get this special typist that had a typewriter that could come up with all these symbols. It wasn't like it could just be done on the computer. I had this lady that was struggling with my thesis to write it out. And finally, I said, okay, this is enough of this, so I just accepted what she wrote. Then when it was all done and I had my degree and stuff, I looked at that again, and the very first page had a mistake in it, you know? So, it was kind of oh well.
Kate: Did you start using like mainframe computers around that time? Is that how you were doing your data?
Dad: When I went to Oklahoma State, they had a way of using a computer where they used cards.
Kate: The punch cards?
Dad: The punch cards. You had to spend a lot of time creating the cards then to put in the computer, and then it would do stuff with it. I didn't I didn't work on that. But there was an old guy who was kind of our computer person who did, and he showed me some stuff while we were there. It's kind of nice.
Kate: You started teaching there. I know you had to teach a lot of classes.
Dad: Yeah, the very first year they were really mean to me. There was this business statistics class that had just been started that the business people had to take a class in statistics. I had four sections of business statistics to teach, and each one had about, I don't know, 150 people in it.
Kate: Oh God, yeah.
Dad: We would meet in this great big auditorium, and I would have to have everything all set up to where I could put it up on a screen that I could sort of write on and show them things or have something already prepared to put up there.
Kate: Oh, the birds came.
Dad: The birds have arrived on our bird feeder. So, any rate, I did that and I always laughed about it with your mom that what the thing was, I'd be somewhat prepared but not too good for the very first lecture to a section, and so it would take me a long time to get through it. But I could kind of do all right with it. But then I knew all of the things that could go wrong. The second lecture went through beautifully and ended in the right amount of time. Then, the third lecture was one where I started forgetting what I had told that class versus what the previous class I just told. I would get through really fast, and I'd probably forget to tell them things. The fourth was really bad, I think. Where it took me 45 minutes on the first lecture, I might do the last one in 30 minutes and still wonder, what did I forget to tell those people? I told the, what was he called? Our, the leader of our department?
Kate: The chair?
Dad: Chair. He had some other name we gave him. But I told him this problem and how this class, it was really hard to handle so many sections.
Kate: Did you have grad students helping you?
Dad: Yeah, I did.
Kate: They did all the grading, problably.
Dad: That was the long part, was to get the grading done and to decide who passed and who didn't know. It was always a tragedy to flunk somebody. I always felt really bad.
When I was in Norman, I had a summer section to teach there that was basically algebra and calculus, and there was like two or three classes all that had to be done in a couple of months. It was for military people. So, I had several people from army, some from the Navy, maybe a couple of Marines, an Air Force guy, that sort of thing. I remember it being that the ones that got into this class were really pretty sharp, and they could get right through it no problem. But I had this one guy that just couldn't seem to get anything. And even the other students knew that and were trying desperately to help him. But in the end, I had to flunk him, and that just seemed so terrible at the time.
But when I got to the end of my six-year career at Stillwater and Oklahoma State, I reached this point where you had to get tenure, and the rest of the department had to vote that you would you had tenure. Then you basically could stay there forever. I wasn't all that sure that this thing, this tenure was coming because of the way they never told me anything about it.
So, I started applying for jobs, and the one in Kansas City working for Marion Labs was really interesting to me that it had all to do with clinical trials, which is one of the major experimental areas. I had been working, teaching a lot of stuff about experiments. So, that was especially interesting. And lo and behold, I would make twice as much money if I went there, and was in Kansas City, and they were going to help me move there, pay for my move and give me sort of an initial extra salary, couple of months, so that I could put a down payment on a house.
Kate: Wow, yeah.
Dad: It just looked really, really good to me. And then lo and behold, I finally accepted the job and like two days later, the chairman of the department came in and said, “Well, we voted and you have tenure.”
Kate: Of course, yeah.
Dad: So, I had to tell him, “No, I've decided I'm going to do this other thing.” I asked him how much they were going to pay me and, you know, it turned out about half again. That's what I was going to get. Plus, we had this little house there in Stillwater that I don't know that we were ever going to get out of. Do you remember that house?
Kate: Yeah, the little white house.
Dad: Yep. In Kansas City, we were going to have quite a bit better house. So, it was there were just all kinds of.
Kate: Lots of perks.
Dad: Improvements. I couldn't resist doing that. In many ways, it was really fun because the stuff that you do as a statistician working for a pharmaceutical company is to help design a whole lot of clinical trials and then do the analysis of what you get. Then sometimes you get to deal with the FDA and what they thought was important versus what your company was doing and stuff like that. It was really, really good. I enjoyed that.
Kate: Yeah. We'll talk more about that later. But I did want to ask about you wrote a paper there. I think this was when I was in high school, maybe, or college, I can't remember. The Groundhog Day paper that you got published.
Dad: Yeah. There was this journal that some guy had just started that was about applications of pharmaceutical, well, of statistics to pharmaceutical, especially clinical trials. It was fairly easy to get some kind of a publication there, so one of them was this thing that I called Groundhog Day, and it was just that in thinking about analyzing a clinical trial, the hypothesis test would have the placebo be the same as the treatment so that there wouldn't be any difference. And so, you basically were thinking about repeating that over and over again by the way you randomized the experiment. But each time it came out exactly the same and so, it was kind of like Groundhog Day.
Kate: Like the movie.
Dad: Then I showed how you could do some analysis of that real simply.
The thing I found most interesting when I was at Oklahoma State is I discovered if we were using this method of experimentation where it was always some kind of treatment versus what we called a control. At that time, the control basically was that nothing happened and the treatment would make something that you were measuring change. The hypothesis was always that the treatment didn't change anything, so you would get the same result as a control. We were always causing or calling this cause and effect. The treatment was supposed to be the cause that you were going to show. And the effect was the thing you're measuring and how it changed.
I just said, at a certain point, I wanted to talk to the class I was teaching about cause and effect. I wanted to know something about what's the history of that. I went back and started looking up all kinds of things that, you know, we had a pretty good library at Oklahoma State. I was just sure that cause and effect must have been first introduced by Aristotle. That seemed like the most likely thing. I knew that Aristotle had done some stuff related to cause. That was something I had studied long ago when I was thinking about possibly going into philosophy.
I read through all this stuff that Aristotle had written about cause and it turned out all he only had done truly was to just categorize cause into four different kinds, but he didn't really talk about what it was they have a definition of it.
And then, oh gosh, there were so many philosophers along the way. I'm sure I didn't look up everybody. But lo and behold, I could look at some of the stuff that Galileo did, and it turned out that he had a definition of cause and effect that was something that made sense, and it was real close to what we were doing in statistics. It didn't have a whole thing about randomized experiments and stuff like that, but it had defined, at least, that cause was something that if the way he said it was that basically cause was something that if you removed it, then you'd lose the effect. So, cause you'd see the effect. If you removed it, you wouldn't. So it was a comparison of a treatment to a control, basically. Or a cause to a placebo or something like that.
I could start a class and talk about a definition of cause and effect and what it was. Then we started into experiments. There were lots of different experimental designs. That was my favorite class to teach. The students were all graduate students in other departments who were being asked to do experiments.
Kate: Oh, so they needed to know how to do it right.
Dad: We would show them lots of different experimental designs and how to analyze the data that you got back from that. That's where I got this thing from this old professor that I liked a lot. He came in one day and gave me this box and said, “You can use this, in teaching your experimental design class.” He said, “These are a whole bunch of little egg timers.” They were egg timers that probably cost 25 cents in that day.
He had these little stacks of cards that he had cut up and put a rubber band around and they were just tall enough with the stack that you could put the egg timer on it, and it would be leaning a little bit. It turned out that he showed me that it would take close to three minutes, say, for the egg timer to run so that you knew you were boiling an egg. You wanted to do it three minutes and then take it out, that if you lean the egg timer a little, the thing would run slightly faster. It made this wonderful thing to have experimental designs in that you could start with the simplest experimental design where you're just comparing a treatment to a control. You could take and randomize which ones were going to be standing straight up and which ones were going to be leaning and compare them. You could run the experiment in something like three minutes because you give each student an egg timer and the decision and the randomization we would do, and you'd see the result of who was going to have one straight up and down and who was going to have one leaning over and make a comparison with them.
It was such a small difference that nearly always when you're teaching this class, you'd have a way of analyzing the data afterwards. You wouldn't have shown anything that was experimentally allowed as a final result showing the right thing, so it would just be no good. But then you'd start getting these different experimental designs. Like we'd look at all the egg timers and put all the ones that had the most sand in them in one group and all the ones that had the least amount of sand in another group. Then randomized would be a randomized block design, and the blocks were the egg timers to begin with and how much sand they have. Then you could tilt some of them within a block and some of them within the other block, do all this randomly, and then see the result. All of a sudden, it started turning out to be experimentally what we were calling, I don't know, okay.
Kate: Okay, let's go back to the Groundhog Day paper. You were going say something else about that?
Dad: Well, the idea, when I saw that movie, I realized that in terms of cause and effect, that it related as to what they were doing that the star there lived through a particular day in a certain way, and then he woke up the next day, and he was starting all over again with that same thing.
He actually got a chance to change things in the next day as to what he was doing, whereas everything else was exactly the same. So, he would change things and think that he had done something that would make things really different, and then the next day he would wake up and lo and behold, nothing changed.
He was, it says, compared to the first day, he would change something and see whether it made a difference, and he could compare them. Lo and behold, he'd wake up and do the same thing. He tried all these different things, and nothing seemed to work until finally, he lived this really perfect day in terms of the moral structure of what he did and everything. Lo and behold, he finally changes it to the next day that's really different. It was like the perfect definition of cause and effect.
I can use that as talking about how you compare one thing to another and then the definition of cause and effect. Then, the hypothesis test that we would do would essentially be that there was no cause, and you would then compare things to what you would expect if there was no cause and see if you got something dramatically different or not. Any rate, it was kind of fun to do, and they seemed to like the paper, so I got it published early on in this little journal.
Kate: Is that kind of how you did your clinical trials? Did you keep doing them over until you got a certain result?
Dad: No.
Kate: You would do it once, and that would be it.
Dad: You just have the cause and you apply it and then you see what the result is, and then you have a hypothesis that there's no effect. If the result is really unlikely, you calculate the statistical significance by how likely the thing is.
If it's really unlikely and more towards what would happen if there was a cause by the treatment, then you finally say, no, I'm going to reject that hypothesis that there's no effect and you have finally the effect. But it's interesting how all those things relate and kind of good.
For a while, you know, especially when I was in Kansas City, I didn't worry about getting any publications. When I knew I was about to retire, there were two papers I wanted to get published, and so, lo and behold, this new journal was just the perfect place for me to get published. So, I did that, and then that was kind of the end.
We were able to retire early. There were lots of things that the original company, the Marian Labs that Lorie and I belonged to, did that we were able to gain a lot of retirement. So, we retired, and we hardly had any worries except we found that
the major cost was the cost of medical insurance. We had to struggle with that. Missouri had a special thing that we could do that cut the cost about in half. Then when we moved to Colorado, they had something similar that we could do, and other states didn't, so I mean, It was really kind of a problem. But once we got old enough that we got Medicare, my gosh, then that was the thing. Another thing that we were able to do is you're always hearing how you should wait till you're 70 years old to start your Social Security.
But actually, you can start it, I think it's when you're 62, perhaps, something like that. The thing is that they increase the amount that Social Security will pay you if you wait longer, because they don't expect to have to pay you so long, because you won't live that long.
But what we did is we had enough money to basically survive okay. We started Social Security early and took essentially all of it and invested it. And it was a good time for investment. Stocks went up in value and stuff. The money we made doing that, I think, was greater than if we just waited to take our social security later.
Kate: That's interesting.
Dad: Now, if it had been a bad time, then maybe that wouldn't have made much sense. And we were real lucky in our first, when before we retired, we had a management company that handled our investments and did all these terrible things where we lost money. It looked like some of them were illegal.
Kate: Wow.
Dad: At any rate, they went out of business after a while, but we shouldn't have been with them at all. So, then we moved to this other company and had this lady, Jan, who was our investment lady. She was really smart, and everything that they did helped us tremendously. That was our major thing for our retirement. We were really lucky in that.
But you wanted to know, you know, what, what do I do nowadays? I do these little puzzles. There's one a day. If it has something involved, you know, where you, in order to solve it is, it's totally a logic thing or a math thing, I can do those really rapidly. And that's kind of fun in a sense that I, it makes me feel like, okay, my brain is still here. But if it's a puzzle that involves words, usually definitions of what word means this, just sort of like a crossword puzzle.
Kate: See, that's what I like. I like those things.
Dad: That's where I have lost so much memory from my epilepsy that I don't know that many words anymore. When you ask for a definition, here's the definition, what word is that? That is the worst thing that I could possibly do. So, I've never spent any time with it.
But at any rate, it makes me say, okay, I can't do this very well. Let's work on these a while. Let's see how much I can get.
Kate: You’ll try.
Dad: But I can't really get one of those. Just asked Lorie, and she seems to have the memory of words like crazy and bingo, she knows the answers.
Kate: And you also do Sudoku a lot. Do you do that on?
Dad: Well, I used to.
Kate: Oh, you don't anymore? Okay.
Dad: Every now and then one of the puzzles is a
Kate: You just stick with your daily puzzle calendar?
Dad: Yeah. I used to do that, and you can play bridge on …
Kate: Your phone?
Dad: Or your computer. Where you have one part, one player, and then the other three players are all done by the computer automatically. I like doing that. But I haven't been doing those kinds of things recently.
Kate: Yeah, you still play a lot of in-person games. Like we just played Mahjong the other day. And I know you play bridge and …
Dad: Yeah. Well, bridge, that was kind of interesting. Lorie didn't really know how to play, and when we moved here, there were several people that that wanted her to join and play bridge. So, I taught her how to play and she steadily got better and better at it. And she has this group now of the four of them and they love to get together. One of them even moves to Texas in the winter, and they can do it by computer. So, they play bridge all the time. If one of them is not there, then I might take over that spot to keep their game going.
But then we play with the Lunns, that they know how to play. Of course, it's really kind of funny when we're with the Lunns because Joe absolutely loves to play bridge and wants to do it, you know, and Marsha had sort of learned from him. But she gets so tired in the evenings. I don't know if you've been around, but it seems like she gets up early, does all this kind of work, and then by nine o'clock in the evening, she's going to sleep on us. If we try playing bridge together early.
Kate: Yeah, I know we need to start early. But you’re a night owl person.
Dad: When you're with them, what always happens is they spend an enormous amount of time on the, what's the word, pre-dinner food.
Kate: Happy hour?
Dad: And then the cooking, so we probably won't have dinner until eight or nine o'clock. If we try to play bridge, it's super late. That's the wrong time.
Anyway, Lorie learned how to play pretty good, so she's got it all figured.
Kate: You know who's starting to get really good at hearts is Will.
Dad: Really?
Kate: Yeah, Will and Sofia now play. And they really like it, which I thought was kind of funny.
Dad: Well yeah, that's got a plan to it.
Kate: It’s a genetic thing, think. What about, I wanted to ask this last thing about how you eat M&M's?
Dad: Yes. Really?
Kate: You have a method.
Dad: Yeah, well.
Kate: And you used to have peanut M&M's on your desk at work. Remember, everybody would come to you to talk to you because they could get some M&M's.
Dad: My favorite thing was for a long time, M&M's. There's six colors now. You know, the thing with the red was a problem for quite a while. But they seem to have a dye now that's safe. So, there's six of them, and I just get a cup of M&Ms and start eating, and I want to end up with the largest ones. I don't know why they taste better to me. Maybe they have more chocolate in them or something.
Kate: Yeah, maybe.
Dad: And also, I like having all the colors there. So, whenever I see two of them that are the same color, then I eat the smaller one of those, but make sure I don't eliminate that color. So, I keep working my way down until I get to the final six that are all different colors and the biggest ones.
Kate: The biggest. Okay.
Dad: And then I just eat them by the smallest first.
Kate: Oh my God. Alright. Well, Why don't we go have some M&Ms?
Dad: You could.
Kate: Thank you for telling me all these stories.
Dad: Okay. Well, if you want to come back again.
Kate: I'm sure I will.
Dad: I can tell you some more things about my family.
Kate: We’ll do that.
Dad: Growing up and stuff like that.
Kate: We’ll do a lot of that, yeah. There's a lot to tell.
Dad: Okay. And then how I met your mom, and some of that.
Kate Okay. Alright.
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