Reed's Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

Socializing in Cyberspace

Years ago, when I was a student, I had a poster (don’t all students have posters?) called The Real and the Unreal, created by Julius Friedman for the Martha White Gallery in Louisville. It shows a single artificial apple in a rectilinear array of polished red apples. At the time, it captured my own sense of teenage, misfit ennui, and it has since reminded me of the increasingly blurred boundaries among the loci of our intellectual and social lives in physical and the information spaces.

Yo, Head Crashes, Dude!

In an earlier blog posting, I mentioned that I was on my way to western China, to give a keynote talk at GCC2007 in Urumchi, which is in northwest China. I’ve been many places in central and eastern China (Beijing, Xian, Guangzhou, Guilin), but I had never been to western China or Tibet.

I Feel the Need, the Need for Speed

As I mentioned in my previous blog entry, I’m a sucker for big iron. You know, the stuff where you measure power in megawatts, machine room floor space in tens of thousands of square feet, DRAM in terabytes and… Well, you get the idea. It’s just cool, and big iron enables us to solve problems we simply can’t solve any other way. A jar of termites just isn’t the same as power saw, though both can make a lot of sawdust.