Reed's Ruminations: The Past, Present, and Future
Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience
Category: Technology
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Nothing Lasts Forever
No exponential continues forever, at least outside the mathematics textbooks. All technology-based advances are ultimately limited by something, usually some physical or economic limit. Innovation then shifts to other metrics, against which advances can be measured and valued. Computing is no exception.
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On Licking the Cookies
Licking the cookies refers to claiming action or skill in an area but in a way that prevents anything from happening. It is intended to conjure an image of a cookie plate, where one licks the cookies then returns them to the plate, rendering them inedible by all.
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Battling Evil: Dark Silicon
Dark silicon, the very phrase sounds ominious and it is, for I believe it will profoundly reshape how we think about computing in the next decade. We soon will have (and in many cases already do have) chips with more transistors than can be concurrently activated. The practical implication is that most of the chip…
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Microsoft/NSF Cloud Research Partnership
Today, Microsoft and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the latest awardees for the joint Microsoft-NSF research partnership in cloud computing. All of the award recipients were selected via NSF’s rigorous peer review process, which emphasized the scientific merit of the proposed work. The Microsoft/NSF partnership is but one part of a broader international…
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Technology and Everyday Skills
I generally believe that successful technologies become invisible, dissolved into the fabric of society. They supplant older, previously valuable skills. Few of us would now survive as hunter-gatherers, but almost all of us can now use a search engine to query the world’s knowledge base. Having said that, qualitative reasoning and intuition regarding orders of…
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Explaining Science and Engineering
As I have followed the international news regarding the Japanese disaster, I have been struck by the challenges each news organization has faced in explaining technical concepts. We live in a technological society, where understanding of scientific processes and engineering design balances are essential to informed debate and decision making.