Reed's Ruminations: The Past, Present, and Future
Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience
Category: News and Events
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America COMPETES Passage
My Microsoft colleague, Elizabeth Grossman, has posted a thoughtful essay on today’s passage of America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science (COMPETES) Reauthorization Act of 2010 by the U.S. Congress.
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2010 Cray and Fernbach Awards
This year, I again had had the honor and privilege to chair the selection committee for the IEEE Seymour Cray and Sidney Fernbach awards, both of which were presented at SC10 in New Orleans. These eponymously named awards recognize truly outstanding contributions to high-performance computing, in honor of two early leaders of our field.
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The Love of Language
I am a lover of well crafted, erudite prose that captures and conveys nuance and subtlety. Such prose brings a smile to the lips, both the writer and the reader’s reward for dutiful and diligent background research, thoughtful paragraphs that flow as mellifluously as a mountain stream, and phrases that delight with their craftsmanship.
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Simplify, Simplify, Simplify
Had Thoreau had a smartphone, he would not have been texting his best bud, Ralph (Waldo Emerson), about the joys of solitude, nor would he have been tweeting or posting photos of his house construction. I am rather more confident he would have espoused the healing virtues of periodic digital seclusion and contemplation.
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Remembering Internet Dogs
An iconic cartoon by Peter Steiner, which appeared in The New Yorker in 1993, captured the nature of the nascent Internet. It shows a dog seated at a computer, remarking to a second dog on the floor that, “On the Internet, nobody knows you are a dog.” Not only does the Internet now know you…
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Lessons from the Gulf of Mexico
The computational demands of an integrated, fully multidisciplinary, parametric simulation study of the oil spill and all of its effects would make today’s complex models seem like child’s play on an abacus by comparison.