Reed's Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

Libraries: Arms Too Short to Feed the Mind

N.B. This essay was motivated by a conversation with Alberta Comer, Dean and Director of the University of Utah's Marriott Library.

From my earliest days, I have sought to plumb its great depths, gleaning knowledge here, seeking meaning there, and always, encountering fellow explorers on their own intrepid quests. I speak, of course, of that extraordinary thing we so prosaically call the "public library." Beyond mere edifice, a library is the embodiment of an ancient idea – that knowledge and its representations can and must be protected, preserved, and transmitted to future generations, that access to knowledge is not limited to merely the rich or the powerful, but available to all who seek insight and understanding.

This simple notion of knowledge preservation and transmission is a noble idea for which many a person has given their very life to defend. The burning of the great Library at Alexandria is an enduring lesson on the dangers of cultural loss. More recently, Ray Bradbury's dystopian account of book burning in Fahrenheit 451 is itself a cautionary tale of censorship and the dangers that lurk when the free exchange of ideas is suppressed, something we would do well to remember today.

Books have always been my friends. From my earliest days, my parents read to me, as I nestled in their laps. Then, when I could read myself, they took me to the local library. In our case, it was a humble, small town, Arkansas library with just a few thousand books. Nevertheless, for me, it was a magical place, filled with extraordinary things.

My new University of Utah colleague, Alberta Comer, the Marriott librarian, tells a similar story of her rural Oklahoma childhood and the transformative power of the library. Alberta's parents drove her many miles to reach the traveling bookmobile, where she discovered a world unknown. Decades later, her eyes still glisten with the memory as she tells the tale. My own eyes moisten, as I too remember and understand.

As a young boy, I remember staggering up to the library's checkout counter, arms filled with all the books I could carry. Looking up at the library clerk, I struggled mightily to set the stack on a counter that was above my head. In turn, the clerk looked down at me, smiled, and asked in the adult voice every child instinctively knows, "Are you sure you can read all of these?"

The implication of the library clerk's interrogative being, of course, that I had selected more books than a young boy could possibly read in the allotted time. I thought, but dared not say, for even children sometimes understand the power and importance of deference and discretion, that I was limited by the length of my arms, not by my reading ability. Given the choice – and longer arms – I would have taken twice as many books. Instead, I simply smiled and said, "Yes, I can."

I knew what the librarian did not. I had already set myself on a book a day habit that was both highly addictive and in equal measure, emotionally and intellectually satisfying. I neither knew the pronunciation nor the etymology of the word autodidact, but I intuitively understood its meaning. I could not delay; fierce urgency drove my actions. I had to hurry – there were so many books, so many things worth knowing, and so, so little time.

In that small town's store of humankind's intellectual treasure, I found transformative ideas. In those books, I felt the warp and woof of history; I saw the power of scientific revolutions; and I marveled at the extraordinary experiences of individuals both living and dead. I read of people, places, and things that once were and are no more, of those that never were but could be, and of those that lived only in the fecund imagination of others.

Like an idea-driven junkie craving an endorphin high, I read omnivorously – books, dictionaries, and encyclopedias. From aardvark to zyzzyva (I still haven't seen either one in the flesh), I read it all. I devoured popular books, some fluffy intellectual cotton candy, momentarily satisfying, but of little import. I read tomes that were as intellectually deep as they were physically weighty, laboring over each page. In that sense, Francis Bacon was right: "Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly."

I read books whose content was well beyond my years – poetry, literature, history, economics, and science – some of which I fully understood – and others whose full import exceeded the capacity of my limited life experience to appreciate. (Reading books on the My Lai massacre at age thirteen comes to mind.) Asimov, Bradbury, Ellison, Heinlein, and Browning, Chaucer, Doyle, Golding, Lewis, Shakespeare, I savored them and many others, an intellectual cornucopia that filled me with both knowledge and wonder.

In time, I came to recognize both the wisdom and the practical truth of Desiderius Erasmus' words, "When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes." At times in my life, I have unhesitatingly made that explicit choice – spending my last dollar on education – then subsisting on canned vegetables until my job provided enough to purchase a more varied diet. One can live for weeks or months on a meager diet, but a life without books, without ideas, is unimaginable.

From impassioned and zealous acolyte, I finally came full circle, having belatedly learned the most important lesson of all – I truly know nothing – having realized that true knowledge begins with the humility of ignorance. We are all ignorant, each in different ways. Recognizing that, we approach new opportunities as humble supplicants, seeking knowledge and insights from any who would teach.

Make no mistake, books have power, for they contain both knowledge and ideas. Knowledge transforms society; ideas change minds. And it all happens in a library, for books are still the best way to upload new ideas into the wetware of willing minds.

As Plutarch noted, "A mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled." Libraries blaze, but not, I pray, with the burning of books. Rather, libraries set minds afire, and those minds illuminate the darkness that is our collective ignorance.

The future is always burning with possibilities; it begins with each enlightened mind. Books and libraries are the kindling.

Heading West: To the University of Utah

I am delighted to share some news. Effective July 1, I will be joining the University of Utah as its Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs (SVPAA). You can read the announcement at this link (https://attheu.utah.edu/facultystaff/new-senior-vice-president-for-academic-affairs/) or below.

I am both humbled and filled with anticipation.

Daniel A. Reed named Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Utah

Computational science scholar and former Microsoft executive brings unique mix of academic and economic development experience to the U's top academic position.

April 30, 2018 – Daniel A. Reed, Ph.D., has been named senior vice president for academic affairs at the University of Utah. Reed, who currently serves on the faculty at the University of Iowa, will start on July 1.

"Dan is an exceptional addition to the university's leadership team and the thought leadership of our state," said university President Ruth V. Watkins. "He is a talented scholar and administrator, and the perfect fit in our efforts to become one of the country's premier public universities. I look forward to working closely with him in the years ahead."

At Iowa, Reed holds the university's computational science and bioinformatics chair and is a professor of computer science, electrical and computer engineering and medicine. From 2012 through 2017, he served as the school's vice president for research and economic development. Reed is a former corporate vice president and technology policy leader at Microsoft, the founding director of the Renaissance Computing Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and was the director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois.

"Utah is a great public research university with a deep commitment to student success, breakthrough research and scholarship, effective economic development, and insightful partnerships that serve our society and health, and improve our world," said Reed. "It is a university with an even more extraordinary future. As they say on campus, it truly is Imagine U. I am excited to partner with its students, faculty and staff, and the citizens of Utah, as we build that future."

Reed's most recent scholarship has focused on challenges and opportunities related to cloud and edge computing in both academic and corporate research settings. A graduate of Missouri University of Science and Technology, he earned his master's and doctoral degrees in computer science from Purdue University.

In addition to his work on the faculty at the University of Iowa, Reed currently chairs the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee and the steering committee for the National Science Foundation's Midwest Big Data Hub. He previously served on the U.S. President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee. He also chaired the board of directors for the Computing Research Association, which represents Ph.D.-granting computer science departments in North America, and currently serves on its government affairs committee.

About the University of Utah

Located in Salt Lake City, the University of Utah is the state's flagship university. It provides education to more than 31,000 graduate, undergraduate and professional students from all 50 states and over 100 countries. The university offers 72 major subjects at the undergraduate level and more than 90 major fields of study at the graduate level. With revenues in excess of $4.2 billion (FY17), the university is considered one of Utah's primary economic engines. The institution generates over $600 million annually for the state of Utah in nontax revenue and is one of the state's largest employers, with more than 3,300 faculty members and 33,000-plus full-time and part-time employees. The university is a catalyst for a research corridor through northern Utah that is a hotbed for technology and development activities, colloquially known as Silicon Slopes.

The Hopes of Parents and the Dreams of Children

N.B. Dakota State University President, José-Marie Griffiths, recently asked if I would deliver the university's December commencement address. José-Marie is a long-time friend and a former collaborator and colleague at UNC Chapel Hill. She and I also served together on the U.S. President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC). It was, as they say, a "no brainer" to gladly accept the invitation. I was also humbled to be recognized with an honorary doctorate.

In the past, I have offered advice on the art of giving commencement addresses. See, for example, my commentary in the Chronicle of Higher Education,  Commencement Speakers: Be Cool. You can judge whether I honored my own advice. And yes, that is me at my own college graduation.

Reflections

Thank you, President Griffiths, for that kind and gracious introduction. It is both a pleasure and an honor to be here today.

I am very mindful of the cardinal rule of speaking to a captive and restive audience – be funny and be brief, and when lacking in humor, by all means, be brief.

In that spirit, let me begin with two simple questions. Why are we here today? What are we celebrating?

Outstanding achievement? Yes, of course! Anticipation for the future? Absolutely! Celebratory photographs with family and friends? That too!

Looking back on those photographs, you will marvel at the youth of everyone in the photo, your parents and yourself. Then you will shudder at your attire. Trust me on this. In my case, neither the plaid, polyester suit in my commencement photo, nor my long, curly hair, have stood the test of time. Especially my hair! My wife now leaves the engine running when I dash in to get a haircut.

Humor aside, we are here today to celebrate something extraordinary, something that defines our very humanity – the hopes of parents and the dreams of children – shaped by public education and the dedication of teachers and scholars.

The Dangers of Knowledge Loss

Let's go back, way back, to the beginning. Two great inventions – agriculture and writing – have defined our civilization. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that writing created history. For the first time, knowledge could accumulate and be passed from generation to generation by more than oral tradition.

Today, it seems inconceivable that accumulated knowledge and insight could be lost. Yet knowledge and learning have always been at risk, and that remains true today.

While the United States continues to disinvest in education and scholarship, other countries are increasing their investment. Why? Because they know their country's most precious asset is an educated citizenry. It is both the best defense of democracy and the powerful engine that drives a knowledge economy. We need to remember that too.

That history I mentioned earlier has something to teach us on this topic.

With the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, a thousand years of intellectual darkness fell across Europe. During that time, it was the Arab world that preserved and extended science and mathematics. Our word "algebra" is a Latin variant of an old Arabic word. In these days of global fear and strife, it's worth remembering that we are united by common intellectual history.

Here's another illustration of the dangers of intellectual loss, one near to my heart as an amateur astronomer. In 1902, archeologists discovered a curious and puzzling device in an ancient shipwreck near the Greek island of Antikythera. Over 2000 years old, it was a gear-driven analog computer of astonishing mechanical and intellectual complexity, capable of predicting planetary motions. It took over 1500 years – 60 generations – and the Renaissance – for European engineering skill and astronomical knowledge to equal and then exceed that of the ancient Greeks.

The recurring moral of these and countless other tales – when we waver in our commitment to the pursuit of knowledge, even for a moment, the consequences can be grave. Why? Because each of us – graduates, faculty, citizens, and parents -- is connected by a chain of discovery and creativity that stretches beyond the dawn of history.

An Idea Embodied in a Place

As graduates, your place in that chain is what we celebrate here today, as both beneficiaries of the past and stewards of the future. Though a few of you may feel burdened by student debt, you all leave here today intellectually wealthy beyond measure, having dipped deeply into the well of human knowledge.

The precious contents of that well are preserved, expanded, and shared by teachers and scholars at public universities like this one. As professors, the thrill of adding a small piece to the great mosaic of human knowledge is extraordinary. One can live a lifetime in the moment of insight. But any teacher will tell you that thrill is equaled by the joy of sharing one's knowledge with others.

From them, you learned to teach yourself new things – to solve complex, ill-defined problems. This perhaps the most important skill you take with you today.

As citizens, our support for institutions of learning is a defining attribute of our culture and our civilization. A great university is an idea embodied in a people and a place – connected to the past by knowledge and wisdom – and connected to the future by society's commitment to the dreams of our children.

The Hopes of Parents and the Dreams of Children

As parents, you know an ancient truth, one held deeply in every heart. Every child deserves a chance – a chance to live a life defined by the content of their character, the scope of their talent, the reach of their dreams, and their willingness to work.

If you remember nothing else I say today, remember this. All too often, the circumstances of birth limit the future, with opportunity crushed and children's' dreams stillborn. This is wrong.

On this, I speak from sad personal experience. I grew up in poverty. Too young, you learn some ugly lessons about not wishing for what can never be, about being hungry and cold.

Yet even among the poor, there is a hierarchy. Kathy, one of my grade school classmates, occupied the bottom rung. She was dressed in handed down, hand-me-downs – a sweater that had seen better days before she was born – and worn out shoes.

Kathy lived just up the hill. In the third grade, she and I sat in adjacent seats.

One day, our teacher told Kathy, "I will not grade your homework. You erase and reuse your paper." It was a casual reprimand; it was a life changing moment, for both of us.

I knew the painful truth. I had watched Kathy practice her multiplication tables in the winter cold, using the only flat writing surface she had – the unpainted siding of her weather-beaten house.

I watched Kathy's face, and I saw her shame. I saw the light fade in her eyes; I saw hope disappear. I knew, with childhood certainty, that there was sin in the classroom.

I see Kathy still, practicing her multiplication tables in the cold, the dying dream of a little girl.

Kathy was lost, but I was found. I was a poor, unknown boy from the Arkansas hills, the son of a father with a fifth-grade education. This country invested in me, as a scholarship boy. It was a gift and societal act of faith that still beggars my imagination. It is a debt I can never repay, for reality has exceeded my dreams.

I've preached this message the world over. Talent knows no social or economic boundaries. The nurtured dreams of our children are our most precious asset. When we sacrifice investment in their future in the name of expediency, our hands are red with the blood of children's dreams. Kathy's dreams.

Education pays bountiful dividends, pressed down, shaken together, and running over. It connects us to the past, and it is our bridge to the future. All of you are powerful witnesses to that enduring truth.

The hopes of parents and the dreams of children – that is what we celebrate here today.

Looking Forward

As graduates, you leave here empowered by a valuable education, facing a world awash in change. As your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man wryly noted, "With great power comes great responsibility."

Here is my advice.

Meet and engage people unlike yourself. Learn to see the world through their eyes. It is both humbling and illuminating. Dare to take some risks. Make new and original mistakes – life's more interesting that way. Be involved in issues that matter. Make a difference in the world. Do good things for others, especially when no one is watching.

Pay your blessings forward. Someday, you too will harbor the hopes of parents and nurture the dreams of children.

Finally, remember what I told you about commencement photographs. If you want to borrow a plaid, polyester jacket, I'll be here by the podium. You are on your own when it comes to hairstyle; I have none to spare.

Congratulations! Thank you!

Now Batting …

There's a frosty morning icing on the ground, with a chill in the air, and summer's green leaves now hang withered and brown. It's late October and the languid days of summer baseball have given way to the fall intensity of the World Series. The television coverage takes me back to Southern boyhood memories of yesteryear, when baseball was a nighttime play-by-play voice on the radio and a daytime fantasy with made up rules.

Schoolyard Intrigue

Like most of my childhood classmates, boys and girls, I played schoolyard baseball at every recess opportunity. We chose our own teams, we made our own rules, and because you can only squeeze in an inning or two at recess, the games sometimes lasted for weeks. Though it was BOYG (bring your own glove), every classroom was graced with a school-issued baseball bat and ball, and we played every day, rain or shine.

By school year's end, that ball had rolled through water, seen many a mud puddle close hand, been bounced off rocks on our less than regulation field, and been whacked enough times to make the dead ball era seem as though it had been played with Superballs. The bat didn't fare much better; we hit baseballs and rocks, leaving it chipped and dented.

It was only grade school, but I almost had my arm broken playing this schoolyard game. One recess, I stepped too close to the make-believe Babe Ruth swinging the bat at imaginary pitches and took a hard blow to my arm. On returning from recess, my 4^th grade teacher took one look at the rising lump, and then walked down the hall to the principal's office to call my mother. Mind you, there was no school nurse and only one school telephone.

During this interlude, alone in the classroom with my fellow students, I managed the classroom intrigue. The teacher liked me, I was not one of the cool kids, and my classroom social status was already shaky. I knew the schoolyard omertà, and I assured everyone that there'd be no casting of blame.

My mother arrived a few minutes later, oblivious to my political machinations, and, despite my protests, carted me away to the town doctor for an x-ray. He, in turn, verified that my arm was not broken and charged her the munificent sum of $7. Why that amount? Simple, that was the maximum expense the school insurance would reimburse, and he knew my mother could not afford to pay more. By lunchtime, I was back in the schoolyard with a new story to tell.

Ghost Runners and Homemade Bats

During the summertime, I played baseball with my neighbor and best friend. Yes, you can play baseball with only two people, but it does take a bit of childhood creative license. As I recall, the willow was first base, the walnut tree was second, the oak was third, and maple tree was home. Unevenly spaced, the distance from second to third was about twice that of first to second, but that was the least of the flirtation with the rules.

We played with a homemade bat, made by one of my older cousins in shop class. Turned on a wood lathe and a bit lopsided – woodworking was not his strength – the handle was wrapped with white surgical tape. All this seemed perfectly reasonable to me; I was proud of that bat and I swung it with pride, though I might have used black electrician's tape instead.

Now back to the rules. On a hit, the pitcher chases the ball and then races to catch and tag the batter. If successful, this is an out. (In a more physical version, the fielder can throw at the runner for an out. Our mothers frowned on that version, and I wasn't fond of it either.) If the runner reaches a base, then he or she can call a ghost runner and return to the plate to bat again.

Sometimes a mano a mano faceoff between batter/runner and pitcher/fielder determined outs. The fielder would toss the ball in the air, daring the runner to advance. As successive pitches went higher and higher, eventually the runner would bolt for the next base and the chase was on.

Let me add that long before I learned of the Friendly Confines or the Green Monster, I knew the importance of home field advantage. Even through my nine-year-old eyes, I saw how the lawn mowing mores of one's father heavily influenced the pace and outcome of the game. If the grass had been close cut recently, the batter had a huge advantage because the ball could roll more freely; otherwise, tall grass definitely favored the pitcher. My dad hated to mow the lawn, and I was a slow, chubby kid; I always wanted to play at home.

KMOX and the Cardinals

If ghost runners and fantasy filled the days, radio and imagination owned the night. In the Arkansas Ozarks, the nearest professional baseball team was the St. Louis Cardinals, and their games were broadcast on KMOX, a clear channel AM station. Those were the days of Lou Brock, Orlando Cepeda, and Bob Gibson, and Harry Caray was the iconic voice of the Cardinals, long before his days with the Chicago Cubs.

In a nightly ritual, my parents, my grandfather, and I would gather outside in cloth lawn chairs, parked near an open window so we could hear the radio. Armed with grape Kool-Aid (me) and iced tea (the rest), we would sit in the dark and listen to the summer breeze and the rhythm of the game.

No one in my family ever attended a Cardinals game; that would have been a wild-eyed extravagance beyond our means. Instead, we relied on our imagination and a few word sketches from Harry to conjure the scenes of Gibson strikeouts, Cepeda hits, and Brock steals. It was a richness that filled my imagination, a memory of family happiness that lingers still.

Batting Triple Zero

The summer I turned ten, the community organized a summer Little League. I was excited, beyond excited – for the first time, we would be playing "real" baseball against teams from other area communities. Why, we even had actual uniforms and rubber baseball cleats!

Dreams of glory filled my head, inspired by those Cardinals broadcasts, the derring-do of schoolyard games, and the ghost runners who whispered of bases clearing home runs. In my imagination, the parents all stared open mouthed and the fielders' heads swiveled like marionettes to watch balls launched like 1960s rockets from my bat. Dreams they were, and alas, dreams they remained. I had the passion but, as I was soon to learn, not the skills.

Not only did I fail to make the starting lineup, I rarely played, whether as a mercy to my parents and me or to the other players and their parents I do not know. If the manager put me in, one could be confident the game was either irretrievably lost or inconceivably beyond losing. I was a bellwether indicator that even the most dedicated parents might want to close the cooler and start preparing to leave; this one was over.

I was a slow, left-handed player, so naturally they put me in right field. I was okay with right field; I had a strategy. I played, deep, deep right field, closer to the parking lot than to the action. Consequently, no budding Little League hitter ever hit one over my head. This made my task simple; run down hit balls, preferably while they were still rolling, and heave them in the direction of the infield.

My outfield strategy was born of observation, for I had seen one of my friends, swifter and more athletic than me, try, and fail, to catch a fly ball in centerfield. It looked like an easy catch, but he misjudged it, and the ball hit him squarely atop the head. Tears flowed, followed quickly by parental intervention, and later by laughter from all the players. I was determined to avoid that, and I did. Only later, did I realize I'd lived Peter, Paul and Mary's Right Field, absent the dandelions.

My hitting strategy was equally calculated but far less successful. Okay, let's not be circumspect about it – I batted triple zero for the season. Wearing thick glasses, I had both severe myopia and astigmatism, and I quickly learned to appreciate the truth of the baseball adage that you can't hit what you can't see.

Mind you, I was not staring down Hall of Fame pitchers with 96 MPH darting fastballs and a repertoire of breaking balls; these were fellow ten year olds for whom unqualified success was hitting the strike zone. Not that this mattered; I literally could not see the ball in flight, and the umpire's calls seem mystifyingly random to me.

The nadir came late in one game when I stepped out of the batters' box and grabbed some dirt to dry my sweaty hands, determined that this time, hope against hope, I was going to hit the ball. No doubt thinking that he had to work the next day, the umpire looked at me as the gloaming settled, and said, "Come on son, we need to finish this game." Nothing if not obedient to my elders, I promptly struck out yet again, putting an ignominious end to my baseball career.

Later that fall, my mother took me to the optometrist, where I was again fitted with new glasses. I was stunned to realize there were individuals, now including me, who could see individual leaves on trees. I had always seen them as brownish trunks surrounded by green blobs. I like to close my eyes and believe that with those glasses, I could have played in the fall classic and now be in Cooperstown. Maybe not.

On Cognitive Loading and Intellectual Hierophany

Lately, I have been thinking, and I have been thinking about thinking. Fear not, there is no infinite regress nor Münchhausen trilemma, for I am not thinking about thinking about thinking ad infinitum, Rather, I am writing about both thinking and thinking about thinking.

Thinking is an increasingly difficult task in a world where a torrent of invasive stimuli, each tailored for maximum emotional and cognitive addiction, overwhelms one's sensorium. Even under the best of circumstances, cogitation – the focused concentration of an educated intellect – is an all-consuming endeavor. To become one with a set of ideas, to examine them from multiple perspectives, to explore their interrelationships, and to understand their implications, is neither a task for the fainthearted nor for those given to momentary reflection betwixt the churning froth of daily life. To think deeply, to appreciate subtlety, and to understand nuance requires uninterrupted time. By uninterrupted, I mean many contiguous hours, a luxury rarely vouchsafed unsought.

Cognitive psychologists have long studied cognitive load, the total effort used in the working memory. To think deeply about any topic, one must first fill one's memory with the relevant information. Because each of us has a finite working memory, each distraction or interruption consumes a portion of that memory, displacing previously internalized information. We need time to fill our working memories, and the more complex the intellectual endeavor, the larger the cognitive load. To create new insights can require weeks, months, and sometimes years of focused contemplation. To have something worth saying, one must first truly understand, having traced the complete graph of causal chains, the intellectual Feynman diagrams glowing softly in the dark of the still unknown.

Seeking a Metaphor

Despite use of such terms as working memory and interrupts, I am not suggesting humans are biological computers; that lure of ill-advised analogies and metaphors has ensnared too many unwary embracers. However, the analogy is not without relevance, even if only as a cautionary tale. On this, I speak from personal experience.

One morning many years ago, a computer science colleague remarked that I looked tired. I replied that I had slept poorly, consumed by a dream-cum-nightmare. I then elaborated, explaining that I had dreamed I was a hard disk under heavy load, exhausted from seeking in response to random requests. My colleague laughed and then nodded sagely, recognizing my suffering from the consequences of Little's Law, frequent interrupts, and a long work queue. Beyond irretrievably confirming me as a geek, I leave any Freudian interpretation of my dreamy incarnation as an active, though inanimate object as an exercise for the reader, noting only that my nighttime dream embodied my frustration with the day.

Quiet, I Need to Think

We all know the importance of time and reflection; our social commentary and behavior embody it. The phrases "I need some time to think," and "I will work on it tonight when I have quiet time," all capture an intuitive understanding of the need for cognitive loading.

In an age when too much discourse has the enduring substance of cotton candy, the opportunity to speak does not imbue one with the responsibility to do so. Quiet is a virtue with many facets, as the perils of pontificating pundits and instant political and social commentary illustrate. There is undeniable value in reflection before acting or opining, however learned, wise, and experienced one may be. (See Contemplative Reflection and Instantaneous Communication.)

One of the lions of early 20^th century business, Thomas Watson, Sr. captured that ethos in IBM's simple motto, "THINK." In that same spirit, the corporate embrace of shared workspaces to stimulate collaboration and, collaterally, to reduce office space requirements, has been tempered by the realization that the increased interaction is not without cost, namely the displacement of critical working memory by office minutiae. The human guinea pigs in these corporate social experiments long ago recognized this intellectual tension, as demonstrated by the proliferation of office headphones to reduce extrinsic stimuli.

Personal Perspectives

For me, thinking deeply, whether creating complex software, writing extended documents, or pondering theorems, requires long hours to internalize relationships and dependencies. I need time to load my working memory, and free my mind from other concerns. Any distraction or interruption consumes precious time to recover, and the recompense for any discontinuity, however brief, can be ten-fold in lost time. Conversely, the rewards of cognitive continuity are emotionally extraordinary; it is an intellectual and emotional bliss sustainable until physiology demandingly intrudes and Morpheus takes me away. When truly engaged, I can work, fully immersed, for ten or more hours without pause.

I am not unique in my love of long form thinking, but all too often, even those who of us who treasure both the experience and its rewards, forget how daily life conspires to prevent it. We fritter time away in inconsequential tasks of no lasting value. Like most things of great worth, long form thinking requires commitment and dedication before its rewards are manifest in insight and in substantive and learned discourse.

Coda

As we grapple with the evolving and uncertain future of the American experiment, the stunning disavowal of fact-based argument, and the seeming repudiation of public higher education as a common good, the criticality of extended thinking – assiduously, diligently, cogently – has never been clearer.

Come now, let us reason together. Learned, shared insight is the true hierophany.

Livin’ Large on Three Cents a Bale

In the halls of academe, there is much talk of the need to impart financial literacy to our students, whether via formal education or informal tutelage. Avoid excessive student debt; understand credit card interest rates; plan and save for the future. These are all important lessons.

As a professor, I know that much can be taught and much can be learned in the classroom. I also know that some of the most valuable lessons are the practical ones, best learned experientially.

A dollar is not just an economics class lesson: medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value – it can also be backbreaking labor in the hot sun, work done by fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, to provide for themselves and their families.

I learned this in the farm fields as a boy. It was a lesson beyond price, one for which I am thankful to this day.

Ozarks Childhood

I grew up in the northern Arkansas foothills of the Ozarks. There were red clay, dirt roads on three sides of my childhood house, only one room was heated, and I remember the family joy when we first got hot water. Even though I could see cows from the back porch, I was a "city boy," living in the incorporated environs, on streets with real names rather than just numbers, in a community with about 900 other souls.

Then, as now, about a third of the region's population lived below the Federal poverty line. There were few summer jobs available to enterprising teenage boys, because there were precious few jobs of any kind. Any fulltime jobs rightfully went to heads of households, even at (or below) the minimum wage, which rose from $1.60/hour to $2.00/hour in 1974. I knew many families living on the munificence of such a weekly paycheck, and even on the best of days, my family was not far from that sad state itself. A summer garden was not an organic, fresh produce luxury; it was a necessity. (See Just a Taste of Sherbet.) Health insurance, well, for most folks, that was a dream beyond imagining.

In the summers, I made a bit of money mowing lawns, but few in the community had the discretionary income to indulge in such an extravagance. Otherwise, I spent time with my grandfather, fishing for "red bellies" (sunfish) and rainbow trout and listening to the St. Louis Cardinals baseball games on the radio. During both, he would regale me with stories, all of which he remembered as true, and some of which actually were. Among them were tales of working on the farm for two bits a day, from "can to cain't" (from dawn until too dark to see). (See What Really Matters.)

Hauling Hay

Like my grandfather, my father grew up as a sharecropper, but by the time I was born, there were no row crops left in northern Arkansas. The land was too poor, and agricultural mechanization had rendered it unprofitable. Instead, timber was cleared from the hills, and those fortunate enough to own land now raised livestock on permanent pasture. Those cattle had to be fed in winter, and every summer, someone had to help the famers put hay away. As I got older, this created a new income opportunity – hauling baled hay from fields to barns.

Let's set the stage. It is 95-105 degrees Fahrenheit, with the sun shining and the humidity hovering near, oh, let's just call it southern outrageous. In other words, it was nothing special, just a typical Ozarks summer day. The hay cutting has already been windrowed for baling, and there are five of us at work. The farmer is driving the tractor, which powers and pulls the baler, ejecting two-string bales every fifteen feet or so. The farmer's wife is driving the two ton, flatbed truck, a teenaged stacker sits in the back, and two other teenaged boys are walking behind.

I can still see myself in my mind's eye. I am wearing heavy work gloves to keep the two-string bales, each of which weighs 40-75 pounds, depending on the type of hay, from cutting my hands to pieces. My job is to walk from bale to bale, pick them up, and lift them onto the truck bed for stacking. This was economic efficiency manifest – at three cents a bale, teenaged boys are far cheaper than a front loader.

Because I was not strong enough to lift the bales all day without touching my chest, I wore a long sleeved work shirt, which, despite the heat, was buttoned tightly to keep the hay from slicing my chest and arms. (At day's end, I discovered that the skin in the gap between my gloves and shirt was raw from repeated cuts.)

Each time the truck was filled, we drove from the field to the barn and began unloading. While tossing bales onto the growing tiers for stacking by my partner, I realized it was well over 110 degrees Fahrenheit in the barn loft, and I yearned for the breeze and the relative coolness of the open fields. During the rides to the barn, I grabbed my one-gallon plastic milk bottle and chugged ice water, thankful for the brief respite.

With sunset approaching, and after the last bale had been stacked in the barn, the farmer drove me home in his pickup truck and paid me in cash. I remember climbing slowly, painfully out of the truck, clutching my hard-earned six dollars.

That night, I could not sleep. It hurt every time I moved, and I coughed hay dust from my lungs, remembering how it had swirled in the barn's shadows all afternoon. In this world, respirators or masks were figments of an OSHA-fueled imagination.

I had thought I was in good physical condition for a teenaged boy, and I was. I had stacked lumber at the sawmill, working with grown men. I could play three hours of full court basketball in an un-air-conditioned gym, and not give it a second thought.

I was young and fit, and I thought hauling hay would be easy money; I was wrong.

Nevertheless, when another farmer came calling a few days later, I grabbed my work gloves and headed out the door. I needed the money, they needed help, and it paid three cents a bale.

Lessons Learned

Those days hauling hay as a teenager may have been among the most important educational lessons I have ever received, almost as important as understanding the power of plum jelly, and I carry them with me still.

I looked at my father with newfound respect; he worked hard at the sawmill in that hot sun every day to provide for us, and he never complained. He did what was right, not what was easy. I appreciated in a new and visceral way that there is dignity in honest work, no matter how difficult, and respect is due.

To this day, when I hold a dollar bill in my hands, I know it represents the fruits of real labor – three cents a bale – and I think carefully whether an item is really worth thirty bales. It is an emotional measure, another, personal medium of exchange.

Most importantly, I am thankful for the blessings I have received in this life and what so many have done for me. (See Transforming Lives Via Public Higher Education.)

I learned a lot, livin' large on three cents a bale.

NCSA@30: Reflections on the Revolution

When Larry Smarr, the founding director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), quietly confided to me in the fall of 1999 that he was moving the UCSD, I was Head of the Department of Computer Science during the midst of the first dot.com boom, itself enabled by NCSA Mosaic and the first web revolution. Netscape and its Illinois alumni were remaking Silicon Valley; Max Levchin had just founded PayPal while a student in the department; alumnus Tom Siebel was flying high with new CRM technology at Siebel Systems; and we had just celebrated HAL's birthday (from 2001: A Space Odyssey) with a massive Cyberfest event that attracted worldwide attention. ("I am a HAL 9000 computer, production number 3; I became operational at the HAL plant in Urbana Illinois on January 12, 1997.")

Students were beating down the doors, begging to get into computer science; we were hiring faculty at a frantic pace, unable to keep up with demand; venture capitalists were calling, and virtual reality (VR) was all the rage. In many ways, it was much like today's deep learning and VR boom, powered by cloud services and big data. As Yogi Berra might say, it's like déjà vu all over again, as we consistently underestimate the power of computing to reshape our society.

When Larry and I talked about the future and the NCSA directorship in the fall of 1999, I already had had a long association with NCSA. I had worked on joint research projects, and I had done some of the early visualization of web traffic when NCSA's web server had been the world's busiest. I was also the leader of the data management team – what we would now call big data – for the National Computational Science Alliance (the Alliance), which was anchored by NCSA as part of the NSF Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program. Based on that conversation with Larry, it was clear that both NCSA and my life were about to change in some profound ways. However, despite the universal sense that computing was a revolutionary force, none of us could have predicted just how profound those changes would be. I am very proud of the NCSA team and humbled by what they accomplished.

In the space of four years, we broke ground on three new buildings, deployed the first Linux clusters in national allocation by NSF, negotiated creation of a 40 gigabit per second transcontinental optical network for research, developed an early GPU cluster based on Sony PlayStation 2's, launched the NSF TeraGrid, and committed to support the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). In between all that, I joined the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), there were national meetings (the High-end Computing Revitalization Task Force (HECRTF)) and Congressional hearings about the future of supercomputing, and plans for petascale systems set stage for what would become Blue Waters. It was, in a very real way, an inflection point for the nature of computational science and scientific computing that continues today.

At the end of the 1990s, custom-built, parallel systems (MPPs) such as the Thinking Machines CM5 and SGI Origin 2000 dominated high-performance computing, having displaced vector machines such as the Cray Y-MP. As commodity PCs increased in performance, NCSA and the Alliance began experimenting with home-built Linux clusters, and in 2001, we deployed the first two of these – a one teraflop IA-32 cluster and one teraflop IA-64 Itanium cluster.

As strange as it may seem now, with Linux clusters the unquestioned standard for scientific computing, this was then viewed as a radical and highly risky decision. People often asked me, "Who do you call for support when something fails?" and "Who is responsible for the software?" The answers, of course, were that we were galvanizing a community and building a new support model, as we reinvented the very nature of scientific computing. NCSA led the way, as it has throughout its history.

What did not happen is not as well known. We had an opportunity to launch a big data initiative, in partnership with Microsoft. In 2000, secured a contingent $40M gift from Microsoft for a Windows-based data analytics system that would complement the Linux computational infrastructure, bringing database technology to high-performance computing. Alas, we did not receive the necessary federal funding. I will always wonder if we might have kickstarted the big data revolution a decade earlier. The irony is not lost on me that a few years later I would find myself leading the eXtreme Computing Group at Microsoft to design next-generation cloud computing infrastructure in support of deep learning and cloud services, using lessons and ideas from high-performance computing.

Despite the data analytics setback, the success of two Linux clusters provided the evidence needed for us to propose and deploy the NSF TeraGrid, connecting NCSA, SDSC, Argonne and Caltech in the world's largest open computing infrastructure for scientific discovery. Anchored by NCSA and SDSC, and in partnership with Intel and IBM, the TeraGrid brought distributed Grid services into national production and the subsequent expansion of the Extended Terascale Facility (ETF) created what became the NSF XSEDE program.

The TeraGrid also bought a dramatic increase in national bandwidth, as Charlie Catlett and I negotiated with Qwest to create a 40 gigabit per second wide area network that connected the Illinois and California TeraGrid sites. Our goal was to catalyze a new way of thinking about big data pipes. Ironically, Charlie and I almost nixed this deal, as we had been seeking an even faster 160 gigabits per second connection, only to settle for 40. To put this in perspective, at the time, the Internet2 transcontinental backbone operated at only 2.5 gigabits per second.

While system building, we also had great fun, made possible by the truly wonderful people that were and are the NCSA faculty, staff and students. We built (display) walls and played with smart badges for the SC02 conference. Donna Cox and her team created incredible video of severe storms and galactic evolution that illuminated the beauty of scientific discovery. Rob Pennington and his staff bought Playstation2 systems on eBay and built a GPU-accelerated Linux cluster that caught the attention of the NY Times and helped usher in today's GPU clusters.

In the midst of all this, we ran out of space – offices and computing facilities. The University of Illinois committed to an expansion of the Advanced Computation Building (ACB) that allowed us to deploy the terascale Linux clusters and the TeraGrid. ACB had originally been built to house ILLIAC IV and served as the machine room for NCSA, but the new clusters required more power, more cooling and more space. We designed the ACB expansion with plans for yet another expansion, one rendered unnecessary by the construction of the National Petascale Computing Facility.

I must give enormous credit to the university leadership team, because they built the ACB expansion before we had secured the NSF funding for new machines. I made a handshake, $100M deal with then Provost Richard Herman that if he built the ACB expansion, that NCSA would fill it with hardware. Both of us took a huge political risk, but we honored that commitment. It was just one event in a long history that reflects the repeated willingness of the University of Illinois to invest in the future.

Collectively, the team also secured funding for the NCSA office building and the new Siebel Center for Computer Science, creating an informatics quadrangle that continues to support student, faculty and staff discovery. During this time, I distinctly remember talking to Tom Siebel about the old Digital Computer Laboratory (DCL), which he described as looking like a prison. I remarked that he could help fix that, which began a long series of campus conversations that culminated in his remarkable $32M gift. Likewise, I was pleased that the NCSA building finally came to fruition, after many years of delays. It is not well known, but the two buildings were designed to allow them to connected via an extension to the NCSA building and an arch extending from the northwest corner of Siebel Center.

It was an exhilarating and exciting time. None of it would have happened without an incredible team. We built on Larry Smarr's groundbreaking vision for a supercomputing center. We created machines, software and tools; we engaged researchers, scholars and artists; we invented the future. That is – and always will be – NCSA's mission. Congratulations on 30 great years!

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Remembering Joel: A Teacher’s Impact

N.B. In memoriam: Joel Martin, a man who changed my life. It is also an homage to all who teach.

I grew up in a small town – a very small town – in the foothills of the Arkansas Ozarks. Of all the things a young boy from the backwoods might aspire to be, a scientist would have been an unlikely choice, and an even more unlikely outcome. It's no exaggeration to say that an amazing teacher named Joel Martin is a major reason why I've been privileged to spend my life as a researcher, working at the intersection of computing and the sciences. Though I mourn Joel's recent passing with a heavy heart, I celebrate the life he lived and the students he touched. (Joel's obituary is here.)

Over forty years ago, he was my science teacher for five years, from junior high school through high school. (I told you the town was small). He was *the* science teacher, and I took every course he taught. Along the way, we taught one another many other things, about imagination, about belief in the possible, about the power of observation, and about the importance of critical thinking when resources were few and precious.

Laboratory Conversations

My senior year of high school, I worked as Joel's laboratory assistant. It was his "play time," his only hour of non-classroom time during the school day. By that point, we were close, as much friends as student and teacher. We devised laboratory experiments for his classes using our meager, irreplaceable supplies. With no budget for equipment or chemicals, sometimes that meant using twenty-year-old supplies in rusted containers and hoping for the best. They were empirical experiments in a literal sense. Substituting similar compounds, based on the periodic table, almost always led to fizzle rather than a student engaging chemistry demonstration. I soon came to appreciate Marvin the Martian's lament about the lack of a kaboom.

More than the often errant experiment preparation, though, we talked about science, philosophy, life and the joy of discovery. It was during one of those conversations that he did something extraordinary, something that remains burned in my memory after over forty years. In response to a scientific question, he said, "You know more about that than I do." He knew many things I did not, but in this case, it was the truth.

That small gesture of intellectual respect meant so much to me. It was a bond of trust and an expression of his faith in my knowledge and my capability. Beyond that, he shared my passion and enthusiasm, and he savored my excitement when I was teaching myself differential calculus – limits and derivatives were cool, even if nobody else in school shared that particular intellectual thrill. All I knew was that scientists knew calculus, so I'd best get started.  (At the time, the school was too small to offer any mathematics classes beyond algebra and plane geometry.)

As we worked in the classroom, I talked about my dreams of being a scientist, of living a life of the mind. Of course, I had never met a practicing scientist, and it seemed farfetched that anyone from our little town could become such a thing. Along the way, I realized this had been Joel's dream too, one cut short by circumstances and family obligations. This I could understand, for the wildest dream my parents harbored for me was that I might get a college education, where someday I might find happier economic circumstances. Joel gave me hope; he believed in my dream, even when I was filled with doubts. He knew implicitly what Plutarch, the Greek essayist, meant when he wrote, "A mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted."

And Yet It Moves!

I took two biology courses from Joel, the standard one required of all students and the advanced course with just a handful of fellow classmates. I noticed that there were entire chapters of our textbook, all on evolution, that he skipped with nary a classroom reference. I asked him one day, when other students were not around, "Why aren't we talking about evolution? We both know it is the critical underpinning of all of biology." With a wan smile, Joel answered, "Of course it is. But if I teach that, I will lose my job."

It took some courage on my part to even ask the question, because my family and I, and most of the community, were conservative, evangelical Christians. Yet I found myself facing the age old conundrum, one encountered by so many, of belief system and obviously contradictory scientific facts. Or in the apocryphal words of Galileo, "E pur si muove" (And yet it moves). Whether evolution or climate change, I have learned to never fear the questions, and always follow the facts, wherever they may lead.

This was also my first introduction to the power of social forces to stifle intellectual inquiry and reject overwhelming scientific evidence. It also made me realize the difficult choices some teachers must make, then and now. Joel was right; he would have lost his job, and we would all have been the less for it. That conversation has remained our mutual secret until now. Parenthetically, it is why academic tenure matters so much.

Science Fair Road Trip

Perhaps no expression of Joel's faith was greater than his support for my science fair experiment. The little school had never had a science fair before, but he decided we should, and I wanted to make him proud. In a forward nod to biomass production, my project was entitled, "Hormonal growth stimulation of unicellular and colonial algae." Joel helped me order the algae and gibberellins from a research supply company, and I built a controlled light apparatus, then measured the growth of Chlorella and Volvox in response to various gibberellin doses using our only good microscope. (My father was not happy that the experimental apparatus sat in our living room for six weeks. But, it was the only heated room in the house, and I needed something approximating a controlled environment. Fortunately, my mother intervened, as only mothers can.)

After I was fortunate enough to win the biochemistry division of the regional science fair, Joel packed my display in the school's driver's education car and drove all night to take me to the state science fair, which was held that year in Magnolia, Arkansas, on the state's southern border. There, I was surprised (and thrilled) to take first prize in biochemistry,  and I just missed a trip to the national science fair. When we returned, Joel insisted that I set up my little display at the PTA meeting. He then  embarrassed me by calling me to the front of the auditorium to present a medallion for science excellence. I will never forget how he beamed at me like a proud father.

Thank You, My Friend

I believe each child is born a scientist, with an innate curiosity about all things. Nurturing, supporting, and shaping this most fragile of things, unbounded curiosity, is the privilege and sacred duty of teachers. This is not mere epistemological sophistry; it is the quintessence of our humanity. Joel lived this philosophy.

In the spirit of Chaucer's cleric, Joel was the embodiment of the adage "Gladly would he teach, and gladly learn." In my mind's eye, I see him walking into school with his briefcase filled to overflowing with books and papers; I hear him explaining ecosystem dynamics, covalent bonds, and mitosis; but most of all, I remember the passion and excitement in his voice.

Joel, my friend and mentor, yours was a life well lived. On behalf of generations of students, thank you for believing in our dreams.

Because of you, I am a scientist. I will always be in your debt.

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An updated version of an essay I originally wrote in 2015, with guidance for commencement speakers, appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education in May 2016. Entitled, Commencement Speakers: Be Cool, it reminds us that commencement events are celebrations for graduates, family and friends, not bully pulpits for speakers.

I Can’t Do Much, But I Can Do This

N.B. I have changed Mrs. Wilson's name to shield her family's identity.

Some of life's smallest events, in circumstances least expected, teach its biggest lessons. A homemade cherry pie, made by an elderly woman, taught me more about honor and respect – the basic human need to contribute and be valued – than any learned teacher ever could.

Let me take you back to a simpler place and time, when I just a young boy living in a tiny town, nestled in the hills of the Arkansas Ozarks. It was an era of un-air-conditioned country churches, where elderly women who smelled faintly of lavender, fanned themselves with funeral home fans, and young boys dangled their legs from wooden church benches, sang "Jesus Loves Me," and daydreamed during the longwinded Sunday sermon.

My mother was a member of our small town church's "food committee," now a fading tradition from a different era. Composed of wives and mothers, the group mobilized each time an aging member of the congregation passed away. As the extended family of the departed loved one gathered to grieve, usually at the family home, the food committee contacted other members of the congregation to prepare food for the family.

I never gave it much thought; it was a deep and unquestioned part of life, as natural as fishing with my grandfather or playing in the woodpile. Then, when I was seven, my beloved grandmother died. (See What Really Matters.) Within hours, the small kitchen table of my grandparent's house was heaped and groaning with food – fried chicken, ham, potato salad, green beans, cakes and homemade pies. As sad as I was that grandma would never kiss me again, it was the first time I ever had the chance to compare fried chicken recipes! It was an extraordinary outpouring of support, made more noteworthy by the poverty of the small town community. (See A Taste of Sherbet.)

A few years later, it was my mother's turn to chair the church's food committee. On a cold winter day, we drove slowly from house to house, picking up food, usually at the back door. At a time when seatbelts were unknown, and would have been ignored anyway, my job was to sit in the back seat and make sure the food did not spill or slide.

I was surprised when mother eased our car to a stop at one old, rundown house. I knew the widow who lived there was almost eighty and nearly blind. She was too infirm to attend church, and I could barely remember the last time I had seen her. Turning to my mama, I asked why we were stopping here.

As she opened the car door, she said, "Because Mrs. Wilson called me and insisted that I come get her cherry pie." She said she'd tried to convince Mrs. Wilson that there were plenty of younger cooks willing and happy to help, but Mrs. Wilson had pleaded, "Please; I'm an old woman, there's not much I can do anymore, but I can do this."

I sat dumbfounded amidst the fried chicken and three bean salad, watching my mother walk toward the backdoor of the old house. As the old woman gently handed my mother the cherry pie, I realized she had unknowingly given me something far more valuable, a life lesson that still echoes across the years.

The undying need for respect, to make a difference and to matter, regardless of circumstance, crosses cultures and generations. It was just a cherry pie, but it was much, much more. I can't do much, but I can do this. I'll always remember.