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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Commencement: The Inside Story
Let’s clear up a few things about the history and functions of those strange hats and robes, the archaic academic regalia one wears at commencement ceremonies. A mortarboard, despite the name, should not be confused with bricklaying or a brick hod. It’s a hat, albeit a funny looking one.
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Jaron Lanier: Time’s Thinker
Time magazine annually publishes a list of its 100 Most Influential People in the World. This year, my Microsoft XCG colleague, Jaron Lanier, was named to this list in the thinker category.
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Volcanoes, Travel and Social Networks
Many of us have had family, friends, colleagues or acquaintances stranded far from home by the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano. At one point, I joked with one friend that he should consider a land route to central Europe, catch the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok, kayak across the Bering Strait to Alaska, then drive down…
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March Madness, The Zone and The Magic
Over the past thirty years, I have asked scientists of varying distinction and age and across cultures and disciplines to explain the rationale for their intellectual passions. After some prodding and embarrassment, most tell a variant of the same story. It’s the shared tale of The Magic. I suspect you know it too.
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Innovation Via Client Plus Cloud: Microsoft-NSF Partnership
Today, February 4, Microsoft and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) announced a collaborative project where Microsoft will offer individual researchers and research groups (selected through NSF’s merit review process) free access to advanced client-plus-cloud computing. Our focus is on empowering researchers via intuitive and familiar client tools whose capabilities extend seamlessly in power and…
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SC09 Reflections
The SC09 conference set an attendance record this year – roughly 10,000 attendees at the combined conference and tradeshow – despite the economic malaise of the technology industry and the global economy. One suspects the strong resilience of the conference may be due in part to substantial government investments in very high-performance computing (HPC).