Reed's Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

From Broadcast to Narrowcast: Finding Signal in the Noise

The arc of the 20^th century is interesting for many reasons, not the least of which is how it was shaped by dramatic and traumatic events, including the Great Depression and two world wars. However, the arc of its communication mechanisms is equally striking, though less discussed outside computing and business circles.  It began with Marconi and “wireless,” transitioned through commercial radio and broadcast television, and ended with the Internet and streaming media.

For millennials and those younger, it may now seem almost inconceivable, but there was a time when almost everyone in the United States heard the news from the same three television channels, watched the same television shows, and listened to the same music on a popular local radio station. Most cities had both morning and evening daily newspapers, filled with both the minutia of daily life – crimes, weddings, and funerals – with a smattering of national and international news, and local investigative journalism by the fourth estate, shining a bit of light into the darkness.  These were shared cultural experiences, woven throughout the fabric of American society.

All that has changed, some for the better, and arguably, some for the worse.

The Golden Age of Broadcast Television

In the first half of the 20^th century, radio was the primary mechanism for disseminating entertainment and news. Beginning in the 1950s, analog (NTSC) broadcast television on the VHF and UHF bands – the big three (CBS, NBC, and ABC) -- began dominating the airwaves, with PBS as a public television latecomer.  Led by CBS News and Walter Cronkite, the nightly news broadcasts from the big three defined the national conversation on U.S. and global events, albeit mostly from a white, middle American perspective.

Unlike today’s extended social commentaries on 24x7 cable news channels, the nightly news was largely delivered in a staccato “just the facts, ma’am” format.  As Cronkite put it at the end of each broadcast, “And that's the way it is.” Although the broadcast standards supported color, the high cost of color television meant broadcasts were mostly in black-and-white until the 1960s.

Nor were there live standups from international locations or from across the studio, rather international reports were often recorded on film, then shipped to news bureaus for subsequent development and editing; remote satellite broadcasts were yet to come. Breaking news interrupted normal network programming, as this iconic photograph of Walter Cronkite informing the nation of President Kennedy’s assassination shows. 

At thirty minutes, including commercials, the network news reports also offered little time for pontification and social commentary. That made Cronkite’s February 27, 1968 special report on the Vietnam War all the more telling, when after returning from Vietnam following the Tet Offensive, he concluded,

But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.

Such was the trust in Uncle Walter that unsubstantiated stories have long said President Johnson then remarked, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

However, I did not see that, because for most of my grade school years, our aging black-and-white console TV worked only sporadically. When it did, to change channels, my father had to climb on the roof and manually rotate the antenna, while my mother leaned out the window to give him updates on the TV signal quality.  Needless to say, we picked a channel and stuck with it, in our case, the Springfield, Missouri NBC affiliate (KYTV), which aired the Huntley-Brinkley Report.

Consequently, I distinctly remember Huntley and Brinkley making their own antiwar statement in 1969 by playing Kenny Rogers’ version of Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town. While Rogers sang haunting words about a “crazy Asian war,” a camera panned through various footage, highlighting the sacrifices of U.S. draftees and their families.  Huntley and Brinkley then ended the news with their distinctive signoff, “Good night, Chet. Good night, David. And good night, for NBC News.”  (Huntley broadcast from New York and Brinkley from Washington, D.C.)

When I was in the fifth grade, my parents bought a new Sears Silvertone black-and-white TV and splurged for a new cable TV connection, and for the first time, we received all four channels.  In later years, this gave me access to Star Trek reruns (See Star Trek@50: Inspiring Discovery and Innovation) and The Dick Cavett Show, which featured an interesting and eclectic set of guests unknown to a small town boy. (See Eudora, You Got the Love?)

Until the 1980s, the four channel cultural gestalt of broadcast television extended far beyond news.  In those days, people remembered where they were and those around them when they learned about the birth of Little Ricky, Who Shot J.R., and the ending of M*A*S*H. (For the latter, I was sitting on a hotel room bed in Madison, Wisconsin.) The morning-after water cooler bonding from discussing I Love Lucy, Bonanza, M*A*S*H. Dallas, and hundreds of other hit television shows has now disappeared.

Top 40 Radio

Top 40 AM radio had a similar cultural reach, where being in heavy rotation was a clear sign that a song was a national hit, known to most teenagers and adults.  Then each Saturday, Casey Kasem’s American Top 40, counted down “the biggest hits in the U.S.A.” and American Bandstand, with the ageless Dick Clark, highlighted a popular singer or band.  I heard and saw little of that, as I had neither a radio nor a television in my bedroom. Nor did I buy and play 45 RPM singles or 33 and 1/3 RPM albums. All of these were far beyond my financial reach.

My parents owned a small kitchen radio, which we only turned on as we prepared for work and school.  Lacking an external antenna, we received only clear channel AM stations and a few nearby FM stations. Like the television, it was an aging vacuum tube radio, which took a while to warm up after it was turned on.  When it failed, we would take the failing tube, which no longer lit up, to the local drugstore, use the tube tester, and buy a compatible replacement tube.

Tuned to the local AM station (KALM), we received news read from the Associated Press wires and a healthy dose of country music.  I became well acquainted with Conway Twitty, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, George Jones, and a variety of other country singers, but I didn’t like the affected twang and the frequent stories of pickup trucks and lost love, all in search of what David Allan Coe jokingly sang about as the perfect country song:

Well, I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison
And I went to pick her up in the rain
But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck
She got run over by a damned old train

The exception was Johnny Cash; I loved Cash from the very first time I heard him.  As a poet and a fellow Arkansas boy, he spoke to deeper things – social inequities, the war, and personal loss. There are few things more melancholy than his rendition of Sunday Morning Coming Down or more haunting than his late life cover of Hurt, a song by Nine Inch Nails. (Never underestimate the power of a great singer to make another’s song their own. Heart’s Kennedy Center Honors cover of Stairway to Heaven brought Led Zeppelin to tears.)

Surprisingly, we did have the radio on one afternoon on New Year’s Eve, when the local DJ cum newscaster said, with some mocking mirth, that he was going to play the most popular song in the country for that year, the implication being that this music was drug-crazed rock and roll. With that sardonic introduction, Don Mclean’s American Pie began to play, and I was immediately transfixed with wonder.  Here was another poet, as evocative as Cash, speaking to a different generation about sadness and loss.

Given our household’s one radio and shared TV, other than a few TV variety shows like The Hollywood Palace, my access to rock and roll was largely limited to our car, but only after I learned to drive in 1973 and could pick up a Memphis rock station.  As a result, I missed the British Invasion and almost all of the music of the 1960s and early 1970s. I do remember one of the older girls who lived nearby being devastated when the Beatles broke up, though I didn’t understand why it was such a big deal. 

Digital Transformation

The uniformity of radio and television content in the post-World War II era created common cultural referents, but they largely targeted white, middle class families. If you were black, Hispanic, Asian, immigrant, poor, rural, or in any other way not part of the white middle class, you were rarely heard or seen, except in caricature or stereotype. (For the record, the Clampetts on The Beverly Hillbillies were unlike anyone I knew in my small Ozarks town.)

Slowly and haltingly, things began to change for the better, as radio and television began to reflect the population’s social and economic diversity and its wide range of interests more accurately. Antiwar demonstrations and civil rights protests forced broadcast news to begin presenting important social issues in a more nuanced way, highlighting previously marginalized voices, and television shows began doing the same (e.g., see All in the Family).

Concurrently, legal and financial battles over cable television must carry rules, the rise of cable superstations such as WGN and WTBS, the emergence of FOX as a fourth television network, new pay-per-view services, movie networks such as HBO, and expanded cable capacity all diluted and diffused the market dominance of the big three commercial broadcast networks.  Suddenly, everyone could get their MTV.

In the midst of this, the transition to high definition, digital television began, which changed wireless spectrum needs.  Notably, as analog television stations vacated parts of the VHF and UHF bands, portions of this spectrum were repurposed.  While at Microsoft, I served as a member of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Technical Advisory Committee and worked with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) on the use of the TV white spaces for unlicensed “super Wi-Fi” to address rural and underserved communities and regions in the U.S. and broadband access across the world. (See White Spaces: Celebrating the Cambridge Trial.)  Remember, analog broadcast television originally chose the VHF and UHF bands due to their long distance propagation characteristics, making them idea for communication across long distances.

Today, only live sporting events can deliver the viewership, advertising revenues, and shared experiences once common on broadcast television.  It’s why the bidding for U.S. television rights to the Olympics, the NFL and Super Bowl, and March Madness (NCAA men’s basketball) is now so intense.

Just as these brave new worlds of cable and digital television were reshaping mass media, the Internet and the World Wide Web appeared, something I was privileged to witness firsthand at the University of Illinois when the Mosaic web browser appeared.  As broadband availability and speeds increased, new access modes appeared, and creative market destruction soon followed.  (As the COVID-19 pandemic has again exposed, broadband inequity in the United States – availability, cost, and bandwidth – remains a serious problem. See Broadband: Oxygen for a Digital World.)

Although there were effective Internet search engines before Google search appeared (e.g., AltaVista), Google found a successful revenue model based on targeted advertising. After all, if you are searching for left-handed scissors, you might want to buy a pair. Combining this information with search history and web cookies could delivered a prospective customer hit rate rarely matched by the blanket advertising from newspapers, radio, and television. This devastated the traditional revenue models of daily newspapers, forcing some to merge with rivals and many others to close. Sadly, this has meant many towns and cities now lack local, independent investigative journalism.

Similarly, the convenience of Netflix movie streaming, with thousands of movies just a click away, destroyed the VHS and DVD rental market. Although Netflix initially distributed rental DVDs by mail, it was created in anticipation of higher broadband speeds that would enable streaming. Co-founder Reed Hastings once said this was why they didn’t name the company DVDflix. Coupled with inexpensive, large screen high-definition televisions, the locus of money and power soon shifted from the traditional movie studies, though few would have then imagined that Amazon would someday buy MGM to feed its Amazon Prime Video streaming service.

Paradoxically, Internet broadband gave birth to narrowcasting – websites, channels, and streaming media targeting very specific demographics. Enamored with reruns of The Gong Show (“We’ll be right back with more – stuff!”), The Lawrence Welk Show (my parents loved it) or The Midnight Special? Interested in collimating your Ritchey–Chrétien telescope, folding a paper airplane, or collecting vintage salt and pepper shakers?  Fear not, YouTube is there for you.  Love reggae/zydeco fusion or KISS tribute bands?  There’s a streaming music service for just your interests. Meanwhile, music CD sales (and even downloads) continue to plummet, following the same path to extinction as DVDs and Blu-ray discs.

The Triumph of Narrowcasting

In the early 21^st century, digital narrowcasting has clearly triumphed – whatever the interest, there’s now an app or a targeted steam for it. Every other form of media distribution, from print news organizations through movie studios to broadcast television networks, is now scrambling to adapt, with varying success.  Not surprisingly, any such change brings both new opportunities and associated challenges.

On the one hand, digital narrowcasting has been hugely democratizing, freeing individuals and organizations to communicate directly with their target demographic. This blog is an example, allowing me to ruminate on any topic of my choosing, then share my ideas using social media, something only possible because instant, global communication is now effectively free. Similarly, websites, streaming media, and other tools mean individuals and shared interest groups can quickly find likeminded partners and collaborators, however narrow or arcane their interests.

Historically, the small number of broadcast platforms – newspapers, radio, and television – each had a large audience. Today, a plethora of platforms compete for a much smaller slice of the global audience, some by choice and others by necessity. Although everyone can be a social media content creator, with a potentially global audience, in practice, only a few achieve any significant influence or visibility. As the late Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon astutely noted, “… a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

The insatiable maw of digital channels must be filled, even if with endless and mind-numbing repetition. Just how many home renovation knockoffs of PBS’s This Old House can HGTV make? How many reruns of the Law and Order franchise can competing cable channels show simultaneously? Can the hosts of the cable news channels talk any more while saying even less, filling the minutes with personal opinions and creating venues that attract only the likeminded?

Digital Echo Chambers

As I look to Claude Shannon, the geek’s patron saint of information theory, I fear not all is well in the 21^st century world of digital narrowcasting; the signal-to-noise ratio of digital discourse is now near de minimis, with a cacophony of discordant voices vying for finite mindshare. Is it possible for us to imagine and create a digital world where we more clearly distinguish information (facts) from opinion, persuasion, and social consensus? Each has a role, when clearly demarcated and delineated, but they are not the same.

Facts are independently testable and verifiable, with truth independent of one’s own opinions or beliefs. It is raining at this place and this time is a testable statement, provably true or false. An opinion is not a fact. “I think it is raining” is an opinion; it may or may not be accurate. Fact-based persuasion is convincing someone else it is raining using clear, verifiable evidence that it is, in fact, raining; demagoguery is not. Social consensus is a widely held perspective, best supported by history and evidence.  It is bad if it rains on an outdoor baseball game is social consensus. (See Just the Facts, Ma’am: Reasoning is Not Dead, Jim.)

With that backdrop, the goal of any reputable information source should not be to tell you how to think; it should be to provide you with facts that allow you to develop your own hypotheses, test them against evidence, then revise them accordingly. Unbiased information – the facts – is the prelude to evidence-based reasoning and informed discourse. Such informed national discourse requires shared intellectual context, something in danger of being lost in a narrowcasting world.

All too often, the explosion of tailored communications and personal preferences can trap any one of us in a self-reinforcing echo chamber that separates and potentially demonizes those unlike us, confusing facts with opinions and beliefs. Put another way, if you have been sitting in your underwear for multiple days, binging on potato chips and beer, watching endless reruns of The Big Bang Theory, surfing the dark web, and reading extremist social media (either from the far right or the far left), it’s time to get dressed, open the curtains, seek information, and expose yourself to other perspectives, especially those that differ from your own. Fact-based understanding and multilateral communication are a messy, participatory process – one must listen, talk, and think – but from it, mutual understanding and shared perspectives, both grounded in facts, can emerge.

In higher education today, there is great focus on imparting knowledge and inculcating skills, and they are important, because employers prize them.  However, knowledge transmission pales in importance relative to teaching critical thinking – the ability to analyze evidence, test ideas, adjust one’s perspective, and form rational, thoughtful and nuanced insights. Critical thinking is the upgraded brain software that operates on the data we call knowledge. It is the hallmark of an educated citizenry.

To appreciate nuance, to understand discord, to feel empathy, one must glean the facts and also listen to diverse perspectives.  Read multiple newspapers, domestic and international; consider multiple websites from around the world; listen to news channels from the left, the middle, and the right; talk to people from different backgrounds.  Above all, think critically about what you learn; ask questions; seek your answers supported by facts.  Remember, not everyone who disagrees with you is ipso facto wrong; nor are you necessarily right if all your friends agree with you.

Cronkite knew that, as did Huntley and Brinkley. Each night, they and their compatriots did their best to bring the audience some unvarnished facts to ponder. They reserved editorial comment for rare and extraordinary occasions, and they labeled it explicitly as such, which gave it great power.  Today, the best news organizations and high-quality information sources strive to do the same.

Yes, broadcast news stories were and are filtered by mainstream cultural bias, but they are the mainstream. Though not always right, the mainstream, then and now, is more than a neologism.  It is a shared and evolving Weltanschauung created by the interplay of contrasting and often divergent perspectives, itself derived from broad communication and critical thinking. (See Shaping the Message, Using the Medium and Contemplative Reflection and Instantaneous Communication.)

And that’s the way it is, March 29^th, 2022.  Goodbye, Chet. Goodbye, David. And goodnight from HPCDan.

Signing Up, Making A Difference: Shackleton, Musk, and Computing

Deep in the soul of each human lurks an often unsated and unspoken desire – to be remembered. This is the blessing – and the curse – of sentience, awareness of our own mortality and an unquenched fear that our life will be little more than a flickering shadow, here, gone, and quickly forgotten.  We all ache to be part of something greater than ourselves, to be remembered for having done something – anything – good and memorable, best of all, as part of a likeminded and committed group.  Shakespeare eloquently captured that hope in the St. Crispin’s Day speech in Henry V:

This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

The opportunity for immortality is unexpectedly thrust upon some, though a few remarkable individuals seize it themselves. Sometimes the moment makes you; sometimes you make the moment.

An extraordinary few create it for those around them. (See On the Etiology of Heroes.) Who are these people? What makes them the subject of story and myth? More than masterful storytellers, they are the weavers of dreams, theirs and ours, into something connected, alluring, and compelling, making the rest of us believe in the seemingly impossible, so much so that we astound ourselves by joining them in making the impossible a reality.

Apple’s Steve Jobs was a master of the reality distortion field, with his insanely great ethos, but he was by no means the first nor the last. (As Jobs said when recruiting John Sculley from Pepsi, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?” Microsoft’s leaders made a similar pitch when recruiting me.) Shackleton, West (so wonderfully described in the Soul of a New Machine), Musk, they all knew the power of signing up.

The Naked Soul

The story of Ernest Shackleton’s famous 1914 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, an attempt to make the first land crossing of Antarctica, is of mythic proportions, memorialized in stories and in Frank Hurley’s extraordinary photographs.

Shackleton’s wooden ship, the Endurance, and his crew became trapped in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea. Eventually, the relentless ice pressure crushed the Endurance, forcing Shackleton and his men to abandon ship, then later, drag their lifeboats over the melting springtime ice to open water. Only then could the crew set sail for the desolate and uninhabited Elephant Island.  (Explorers recently found the Endurance, intact except for the ice damage, resting nearly two miles deep on the frigid ocean floor.)  This overland crossing was itself extraordinary, but it was but a prelude to what lay ahead.

Then, in a journey never before attempted, Shackleton and five others, took the sturdiest of their lifeboats, the James Caird, and set sail into almost certain death, hoping to cross 800 miles of treacherous waters in search of help for the remainder of the crew, who waited fearfully on South Georgia island.  Fortune smiled upon them only a bit.

After seventeen torturous days at sea, Shackleton and the other five made landfall, albeit on the wrong side of the island. Leaving the weakest to wait, Shackleton and two others had no choice but to attempt the first land crossing of the South Georgia interior, crossing both a mountain range and a glacier. Only upon reaching a whaling station on the other side, was Shackleton able to mount a rescue for his remaining crew on Elephant Island. 

With failure and death lurking at every turn, Shackleton’s 1914 expedition and the subsequent rescue of his men is one of the most extraordinary tales in exploration history.  Lost in Antarctica for almost two years, fighting for their very survival, all were saved by their belief in one another and the undaunted determination of the expedition’s leader.  As Shackleton put it, “Not a life lost, and we have been through hell.”

Since then, the story of Shackleton’s heroism, courage, perseverance, and an unwavering commitment to the rescue of his men has become the stuff of modern legend, de rigueur for any leadership or management training. Yet like all great stories, it reveals as much about us as it does the protagonists.

In the decades thereafter, stories began circulating about a London newspaper advertisement, where Shackleton had first sought the twenty-seven volunteers for his expedition. The advertisement is succinct in both its warning and its allure:

Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.

It was soon reported that five thousand men had responded to Shackleton’s call, and this pithy statement has been hailed as one of the greatest advertisements of all time.

Several groups have since offered rewards to the first person who found the advertisement in the newspaper archives. All these searches failed for a very simple reason; Shackleton never placed such an advertisement.  That we so desire the story to be true speaks worlds about our own hopes and dreams and our deep desire to sign up and be part of something greater than ourselves.

As Shackleton himself later wrote in his book, South:

We had pierced the veneer of outside things. We had 'suffered, starved and triumphed, groveled down yet grasped at glory, grown bigger in the bigness of the whole.' We'd seen God in His splendours, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man.

Grasping at glory. Shackleton knew that the most arduous and rewarding journey was in finding one’s own self.

Signing Up

In his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Soul of a New Machine, Tracy Kidder tells the story of Data General’s desperate bid to build a viable competitor to Digital Equipment Corporation’s (DEC) 32-bit superminicomputer, the VAX 11/780.  (If you haven’t read Kidder’s book, stop reading this meandering essay immediately, order a copy, and savor the insights of a proper writer!) 

I was a graduate student when Kidder came to Purdue to talk about his recently published book. Mind you, this was when computing was still viewed as arcane art, practiced by an obscure priesthood with its own rituals and incantations.  Microcomputers were still mostly a hobbyist item, workstations were still birthing, and the IBM PC had yet to be announced. At the time, I was using a VAX 11/780 (and a CDC 6600) to complete my Ph.D. thesis, working on the then crazy idea of building supercomputers from lots of interconnected microprocessors.

During his presentation, Kidder discussed the Eclipse MV/8000 and the late-to-market challenges facing Data General, but more than that, he told a tale of extraordinary adventure, personal sacrifice, and shared dedication to an upstart cause. As the “Hardy Boys” built the hardware, the “Microkids” fused the microcode with the software to create a working machine; these were people like me!  By the end of Kidder’s lecture, I knew I was part of something bigger than myself; the desire to build a beautiful machine was a secular, though holy thing.

The most compelling aspect of Kidder’s book, one Shackleton would have recognized instantly, was the notion of “signing up.” As Kidder explained it,

West [the team leader] invented the term, not the practice— “signing up.” By signing up for the project you agreed to do whatever was necessary for success. 

I have signed up a few times myself, dedicating long nights, sleep-deprived days, and countless weekends to a cause and a team (e.g., the first NCSA Linux clusters and the TeraGrid, and most recently, to ensure the University of Utah continued to function and flourish during the COVID-19 pandemic).  I suspect most of you reading this essay have signed up for something yourselves. (See Memos, Janitors, Teams, and Innovation.)

Stories from Microsoft's early days were legion of developers and team leaders  taking a sleeping bag to work as the crunch time of product shipment neared. Eat, code, sleep a little, repeat. When the code pirouetted before you, embodying the logic of your imagination, and then the product shipped – that was the true reward.  (See A Feeling for the Code.) The stock and the money were nice, but they weren’t why you did it.  Money was just how you kept score; it was the idea, the adventure, and the team that mattered.

I am not suggesting that one must sacrifice one’s personal life for work; balance is critical for personal well-being ad family partnerships.  There are times and circumstances, however, that require one's all.

Mars Beckons

Although the Age of Heroic Antarctic Exploration ended abruptly with the brutality of World War I, the desire still burns bright across the intervening century.  It is perhaps evident no place more than in the ambitions of Elon Musk to make humans an interplanetary society.

Outspoken and controversial, but unquestionably committed to this vision, Musk has transformed the global space industry by attracting a team of talented engineers who believe passionately in that vision. All of them “signed up” for a high stakes’ disruption of space exploration.

Musk put his money where his mouth was, remarking,

My proceeds from the PayPal acquisition were $180 million. I put $100 million in SpaceX, $70m in Tesla, and $10m in Solar City. I had to borrow money for rent.

That’s called “all in.”

Against great odds and on its final attempt before likely bankruptcy, SpaceX became the first private company to reach low Earth orbit (LEO), with its two-stage-to-orbit Falcon 1 rocket. Successive iterations of the Falcon 9 have made much lower cost launches commonplace via reusable rockets, and for the first time since the space shuttle was retired, given the U.S. a human-rated launch vehicle with the Dragon 2.

The Falcon Heavy now has the largest payload capacity of any operating launch vehicle, trailing only the mighty Saturn V and Soviet Energia. All that, however, has been but a prelude to the future launch of Starship. Designed as a fully reusable, super heavy-lift launch vehicle, Starship is powered by new Raptor engines, and is the system designed by SpaceX to take humans back to the moon and to Mars.

Whatever one thinks of Musk, there is no doubt that he has transformed the thinking of all national space agencies, including NASA, about lower launch costs, rapid reusability, and the timelines of aspirational goals.  Embodying a fail fast, iterative design process, failure IS an option, one from which you learn and continue innovating, even if you do sometimes experience what is euphemistically known as “rapid unscheduled disassembly (RUD).” It has also exposed the fallacy of the cost-plus Artemis program to return to the moon using expendable launch vehicles.

Equally importantly, Musk has rekindled the passion for spaceflight that galvanized the world in the 1960s and created new possibilities for what might be. That’s what dreamers do.  (See That’s One Small Step for {a} Man.)  Who can help but marvel at the Falcon Heavy side boosters landing at Cape Canaveral or the regular cadence of landings on SpaceX’s offshore barges.

As Musk put it once, “When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.”  Shackleton knew that, as does anyone who has “signed up.” It’s all about being part of something bigger than yourself and your personal risk-reward quotient, something I discussed in an essay entitled, A Question to Ponder.

The question I posed there was simple but revealing, “What probability of successful return would you accept to be the first human to set foot on Mars?” It’s the modern-day version of the opportunity posed by Shackleton’s apocryphal advertisement.  There’s only one wrong answer, guaranteed success, for all adventures and explorations entail risk.  Shackleton knew this well, and Musk does too.

As for me, I want to go.

Personal Connections

As a member of the National Science Board, I have been privileged to visit Antarctica, and I recorded a few of my experiences in a video here. I have stood in the very places where Shackleton and Scott once looked out at the forbidding glaciers, the frozen ocean, and the windswept landscape.  I have marveled at the still-preserved provisions in both Shackleton’s Nimrod Expedition Hut on Cape Royds (that’s it below) and Scott’s Discovery Hut on Ross Island. I have also felt the howling winds at the South Pole.

Even under its most benign conditions, Antarctica is a brutal and unforgiving place, still largely cut off from the world.  It is easy to forget that Shackleton’s expedition also lacked both electricity and any means of long-distance communication, Marconi’s first transatlantic radio transmission having been less than fifteen years before. Even now, communication bandwidth at McMurdo Station is limited, as most satellites are low on the horizon, barely accessible at all. 

A few years ago, I re-read the Soul of a New Machine. The technology has changed (RISC rather than CISC, CMOS rather than bipolar, microprocessors rather than multi-board designs), but the stories and the people remain deeply familiar. Although none of the protagonists risked life or limb as did Shackleton and his team, every one of the Data General designers felt the same call, to make a difference, to do something memorable, to be dissolved into something truly great.

Forty years ago, I had no idea that multiple characters in Kidder’s tale, notably Craig Mundie and Steve Wallach, would become deeply intertwined with my own life. At the University of Illinois, I worked on the Cedar project, led by David Kuck, which designed a shared memory multiprocessor. The hardware building blocks of the Cedar prototype were based on the Alliant FX/8, developed by a company co-founded by Mundie.  Years later, our lives intersected again when I joined Microsoft and worked with Craig on a variety of multicore and cloud computing projects.

My connections with Steve Wallach are equally deep, as I used the Convex C1, a mini-supercomputer developed by a company co-founded by Steve.  Later, we discussed the OSF/1 operating system performance challenges for the Exemplar, Convex’s shared memory multiprocessor, and while I was at Microsoft, we explored the potential cloud hardware applications of Steve’s later company, Convey. In between, we have served on more high-performance computing and government panels than I can count. I still have my first edition of Kidder’s book, and a few years ago I reached out to Steve, who graciously signed my copy one night at the SC conference.

Coda

Though the ravages of time inevitably bend our backs and palsy our hands, each of us yearns for a late life requiem, when even as we stare at the rheumy-eyed reflection of age, we can, just for a moment, stand tall, hold our head high, and say with confidence and pride, “My life mattered!”

Find your passion; sign up; take some risks; make a difference. Even if never lauded in the history books, you will know, and that is the most important knowledge of all. Your future self will thank you.

Understanding and Explaining: The Feynman Technique

Richard Feynman, the late Caltech physicist and Nobel Laureate, perhaps best known for his work on quantum electrodynamics, was also a thoughtful explainer of science.  Already a physics rock star, his 1961-1963 Caltech undergraduate lectures, designed to reinvigorate the undergraduate educational experience, arguably became his most famous work. Compiled as The Feynman Lectures on Physics, they have sold over 1.5 million paper copies and are now available online as well. Anyone reading the compiled lectures or viewing the recordings will immediately recognize the contents as brilliant, complex, and subtle, pitched perhaps even above the high intellectual level of Caltech undergraduates, where being “just an average genius” could well mark you as an underperforming student.

Alas, I never met Feynman, though I had hoped I would. As a young whippersnapper assistant professor at the University of Illinois in the 1980s, I was pursuing parallel computing projects related to the Caltech Cosmic Cube and ongoing work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). (My Ph.D. dissertation was on the then crazy idea that we might build supercomputers using large numbers of microprocessors.) I agreed to serve on a panel at JPL simply because Feynman had agreed to serve as well. I wanted to discover for myself if even a portion of the oft-repeated stories were true.  Unfortunately, by then, Feynman was too sick to participate, and he died soon thereafter from the effects of cancer.

Just a few years before this, my friend and later Microsoft colleague, Tony Hey, had worked with Feynman to convert a second lecture series, on computation, into another book, the Feynman Lectures on Computation. However, this essay is about neither Feynman’s physics or computation insights, but about how to first learn and understand deeply, then explain simply and clearly. 

Feynman was unparalleled in identifying the irreducible core of any scientific topic and elucidating it with clear and simple language. If you doubt me, remember his iconic ice water demonstration of O-ring failures during the Rogers Commission investigation of the space shuttle Challenger explosion. As he later opined on the dangers of go fever, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." (See Nature Cannot Be Fooled.) 

Feynman’s simple, yet powerful four step approach to understanding a topic and sharing it with others has been codified in the now eponymously named, Feynman Technique:

• Choose a topic, study it and the interrelations among its components
• Explain what you have learned, simply and clearly, to a child
• Identify and fill the knowledge gaps exposed by your explanation
• Refine and simplify your explanation and repeat as necessary

It seems simple, and it is, but as Leonardo da Vinci reputedly said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Let’s deconstruct each of these four ideas, with a few personal detours along the way.

Choosing and Learning a Topic

Entire forests have been decimated by pundits and experts, all pontificating on the art of learning. Yes, you learn faster and more efficiently if you have had a good night’s sleep, have eaten breakfast, and (hear me, college students) are not hungover. Nor is a yellow highlighter required, though it can help. Learning is not a black art, it simply requires patience, diligence, and some paper and pencils.

Pick a topic you want to understand, something not so broad as to be an abstraction. The Theory of Everything is not the place to start, unless you are a theologian or cosmologist.  Instead, choose something clear and specific (e.g., Why is grass green?) that can be understood in terms of simpler concepts, then write down everything you know about the topic.

The act of writing will undoubtedly raise some questions; find the answers, and write them down too.  Finally, organize and reorganize what you now know into a coherent story.  Throughout, look for missing elements and contradictions. Ask yourself questions and see if you can derive the answers from what you now know.

I wasn’t joking about the pencils. Writing (or typing) is a powerful way to force oneself to think about ideas and to internalize their relationships as a coherent narrative.  For these reasons, good teachers, whether in secondary schools or universities, always tell students to take their own notes, even if the textbook or course materials contain the same information. 

Learning is not a passive process; it is an active one that requires questioning how and why the jigsaw puzzle pieces fit together, and if what you have been told is internally consistent. If you exhaust the pile of known pieces, and the puzzle is still incomplete, congratulations, you have identified the need for original research.

In his biography of Feynman, James Gleick relates a story about Feynman studying for his qualifying examinations, one of those life altering transition points for every putative PhD student. In Gleick’s telling, Feynman created a book of study notes:

On the title page he wrote: Notebook Of Things I Don’t Know About. For the first but not the last time he reorganized his knowledge. He worked for weeks at disassembling each branch of physics, oiling the parts, and putting them back together, looking all the while for the raw edges and inconsistencies. He tried to find the essential kernels of each subject.

As Feynman knew well, even as a graduate student, rather than rote memorization or blind acceptance of textbook statements, you must assemble the pieces yourself. Only by peering behind the wizard’s magic curtain, studying the theme park ride’s engineering, repeatedly asking yourself how and why, then reproducing what you have seen, can you truly be confident you understand.

 If you cannot recreate an idea from its elementary components, you do not really understand it -- knowing something is not the same as knowing the name of something.  It is why teachers always tell students not to memorize formulas, but to understand the principles. From that, one can derive the formulas.  I agree, but it is best to do both.

Now about that green grass; it is a scientific and biological marvel. Understanding how it functions in the biological ecosystem and why it is green requires internalizing several key topics, among them the electromagnetic spectrum, differential absorption, photosynthesis, chlorophyll (itself worthy of a deep dive), quantum efficiency, ATP, optics, visual perception, and cognition.  (For extra credit, consider whether grass would be green if the sun were not a G-type main-sequence star.)

There’s a lot to assemble and connect before one can thoughtfully and clearly answer a child’s question, “Mommy, why is the grass green?” Doing so while not hiding behind jargon is even harder.

Explain What You Have Learned To A Child

Feynman himself said that the best way to know if you have well and truly understood a concept is to explain it to someone else. There is no better litmus test of one’s own understanding than explaining something to someone young. A child has a shorter attention span, a smaller vocabulary, and far fewer emotional filters than most adults. Moreover, a child will ask excited, impertinent, and repeated questions in ways that the social conditioning of adults would prevent.

Nothing can humble an adult more quickly than a child’s persistent questions. Therein lies the beauty of explaining ideas to children.  They have neither the social filters to prevent themselves from asking uncomfortable questions, nor the shame in admitting ignorance.  They expect clear, simple answers, all consistent with their own experience.  Using unnecessarily complex technical jargon is also a sign of, at best, intellectual laziness, and at worse, one’s own shallow understanding. 

Let me be clear. I believe every child is born a scientist, innately inquisitive and curious how the world works. They embody the essence of science, doggedly asking questions, being unsatisfied with answers that will not withstand scrutiny, and being utterly unimpressed by intellectual stature or pedigree. A resigned and frustrated appeal to authority – “because I said so” – is an indicator of elucidative failure. Though the incessant, “But why?” may seem like an infinite regress, fear not.  It’s not turtles all the way down, and the Münchhausen trilemma lives to fight another day.

The classic xkcd Up Goer Five cartoon about the Saturn V rocket, which uses only the ten one hundred most common words (thousand not being among them), illustrates how challenging it can be to explain complexity via only simple words.  If you doubt me, try explaining why the grass is green using a text editor that limits you to just those one thousand (uh, ten one hundred) most common words.  (Grass is not among them; you’d best start with “green sticks that grow toward the sky” instead. This might also be a good time to think about explaining phototropism and the rabbit hole of multicellular biology.)

In a televised lecture, Feynman himself talked about the egalitarian nature of scientific exploration, noting, “It doesn't make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn't matter how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is… If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong. That's all there is to it.”  (See The Epistemology of Science.) 

Quantum Confusion and Uncertainty

Years ago, when I was a corporate vice-president at Microsoft, the company’s quantum computing project, Station Q, which was then located at UC Santa Barbara, reported to me as part of the eXtreme Computing Group.  Station Q was headed by Michael Freedman, himself a Fields Medal winner, in recognition of his work on the generalized Poincaré conjecture.

As part of our computing research, we regularly brought leading experimentalists and theoreticians together for a multiday workshop, all of whom were working on topological approaches to quantum computing.  The intellectual throw-weight of the invitees was a highly skewed sample of the smart kids club; everyone in the room had won their school’s fifth grade spelling bee.

Although I can impress unsuspecting undergraduates with a whiteboard discussion of quantum computing, superposition, Hilbert spaces, and Bloch spheres, I am by no means a quantum computing expert. Hence, I fully anticipated to become intellectually lost at some point during the workshop presentations, though I expected to understand the gist of each. As the first theoretician began speaking, I was dismayed, however, at just how quickly I was overwhelmed.  After just a few minutes, as complex and subtle mathematics danced and whirled, juxtaposed with “as you can clearly see” phrasings, I realized I had no idea what the speaker was discussing, or even the point he was trying to make. 

Just as I was about to sigh with resignation, open my laptop, and begin responding to my denumerable but enervating steam of backlogged email, an equally accomplished experimentalist spoke up, saying, “Excuse me, but I have no idea what you are trying to say! Can we go back to the beginning, please?  I have some basic questions.”  As I looked around the room, gratified that I was not the only lost soul, the puzzled but relieved expressions revealed everyone – theoreticians and experimentalists alike – felt the same way.

All of the very smart, highly educated people in the room were confused, and not in the way Niels Bohr meant when, in a mashup of a Zen koan, a physics superposition joke, and Dadaist wordplay, he had commented, ““If you are not confused by quantum mechanics, you do not understand it.” Rather, we were confused due to inadequate and opaque explanation.

The speaker responded quickly and with good humor, asking where people had become lost.  What then followed was a lively give-and-take of questions and answers that led to mutual understanding, a pattern that continued throughout the day.  None of that would have happened had one person not evinced the intellectual courage to profess total confusion and an utter lack of understanding.

Although I was just a bit player in this quantum play, regrettably, I had starred in my own production.  As a senior graduate student, I had given a colloquium on my research, where I had excitedly derived all the queueing theory formulas underlying my work.  It was a disaster, leaving everyone else confused and me flustered and disheartened.  Afterward, my advisor pulled me aside and offered some sage advice, reminding me that the goal of a colloquium is to tell the audience what you have done, why it matters, and why they should care.  As he put it, “If you excite people with clear rationales and explanations, they will want to read the paper later to understand the details.”  Wisdom that.

Linguistic castles of idiosyncratic academic buzzwords frequently isolate individuals and disciplines, preventing collaboration and shared understanding. It is an unfortunate academic disease, and too few seek the Strunk and White treatment. (See Renaissance Teams: Reifying the School at Athens.) As anyone who has read (or tried to read) research papers or academic books knows all too well, we in academia often hide behind turgid, meandering prose.  In the name of intellectual precision, we seek to impress and sometimes to obfuscate, rather than elucidate and explain. Perhaps driven by intellectual insecurity, we fear clear explanation might imply our ideas are simple and obvious – and sometimes they are.   I have been guilty of this myself.

Remember, the primary purpose of communicating is not to impress others with one’s intellectual prowess and academic stature, it is to share ideas and invite discourse. A research colloquium, paper, or poster is a not a denouement, but a prelude to conversation, one where inevitable knowledge gaps are identified and rectified, the third step in the Feynman technique.

Identify and Fill Knowledge Gaps

If you have ever spoken to a grade school class, whether as a practicing scientist or as a part of a “take a parent to school” day, you know the questions can be far more challenging than those experienced during either a venture capital startup pitch or a research colloquium.  You need to know your stuff, because you will be asked, and you may discover that you are, in fact, not smarter than a fifth grader.

Humbled by such experiences, any teacher will readily confess that when teaching a class for the first time, even one in an intellectual area where they are an acknowledged expert, perhaps even the world’s leading authority, the teacher learns far more than any of the students.  Whether from the unexpected questions that reveal poor explanations, or in an advanced graduate class, questions with no currently known answers, the act of explaining is a test of one’s own understanding. Explaining anything shows others what you truly know and do not know, exposing the gaps in your own knowledge, and it makes you ask yourself questions.

Occasionally during lectures, most often during a graduate class, I have had a student ask me a question that truly made me pause and think, “Why is that really so?” only to realize I was not sure myself. At point, honesty is the only approach, “I do not know, but I will answer your question in detail at the start of the next class.” At that point, it is time for some faculty homework, or maybe some original research.

Why is that so?  How does this relate to that?  I was told this, but why is it true?  Is it actually true? Such questions are one of the purposes of PhD qualifying examinations, to assess a student’s knowledge base and readiness to conduct independent research. Do the student understand – at a deep level – or is the student merely parroting words, phrases, and concepts? 

They may be using a CRISPR to edit genes and polymerase chain reactions (PCR) to amplify DNA, or deep neural networks to classify Seyfert galaxies, but can they explain mitosis, stellar evolution, and the convergence properties of stochastic gradient descent? Mastery of the known is a prerequisite to exploration of the unknown. (See Research: When There Are No Answers in the Back of the Book.)

Refine and Simplify

Sadly, not all initial attempts at explanation succeed, as anyone who has taught or attempted to explain something to others will ruefully acknowledge. During their educational journey, each student develops a finely tuned sense of teacher quality and explanatory skill.  Within minutes, seasoned students can separate experienced and effective explainers from those less adept.  However, recognizing is not the same as doing, as more than one inexperienced teacher has learned to their chagrin.  Explaining something clearly and accurately takes both skill and practice, though there are best practices.

Good teachers watch their students while speaking, seeking non-verbal cues for explanatory clarity.  Confused faces trigger alternative explanations, additional decompositions, and new analogies.  Recognizing that it takes courage to admit ignorance, good teachers encourage and welcome questions, for they provide additional educational opportunities. If one student is confused, others almost always are as well. 

A teacher who is dismissive of questions is rarely an expert, but more often fears having their inadequacies exposed. Conversely, true experts have a deep reservoir of background knowledge on tap for interactions and clarifications. A willingness, even an eagerness, to entertain questions is a hallmark of someone who truly understands their subject and takes joy in sharing that understanding with others. Indeed, the joy of explaining something well is its own reward, reflected in enlightened faces.

Coda

There you have it – the Feynman technique for learning:

• Choose a topic, study it and the interrelations among its components
• Explain what you have learned, simply and clearly, to a child
• Identify and fill the knowledge gaps exposed by your explanation
• Refine and simplify your explanation and repeat as necessary

The next time a child asks why the sky is blue, do not send them to the encyclopedia. Embrace the curiosity and wide-eyed wonder, sit down and begin explaining, using words they understand. Share the passion and the joy! Few things in this world are more fun and exciting than science, if explained well and correctly.  (See Science: It’s About the Wide-Eyed Wonder.)  Under no circumstances should you consider saying – Rayleigh scattering.  Though true, it is an obfuscation, not a clarification. Hiding behind big words and technical phrases is a “baffle them with B.S.” parlor trick to hid one’s own lack of understanding and intellectual depth.

Study the camber of the wings, twist the ailerons, move the rudder, work the pistons, spin the propeller, oil and assemble the parts.  Build a model yourself. Then, when the intellectual airplane takes flight, you will understand how it flies, and you will not need fancy phrases like laminar flow or Bernoulli principle to explain how and why to others.  (And for the record, that grade school demonstration, where the teacher blows over the paper, watches it rise, and exclaims, “This is how airplanes fly!” is not quite the correct explanation of lift.)

Finally, remember Feynman’s admonition, “Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.”   Go, learn, explore, explain, celebrate!