Reed's Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

Every Kernel A Banquet

During the summer of 1978, before my last semester as an undergraduate student, I interned with Conoco’s operations research division in Ponca City, Oklahoma.  I turned 21 that summer, watching the grass wilt in the Oklahoma summer heat.

Gasoline had skyrocketed to an-unheard-of sixty cents per gallon after the 1973 oil embargo,  the Jonestown massacre was a few months away, and the Iranian hostage crisis was yet to come. Although Grease and Animal House may have been the popular movies, the cool confines of the small-town Ponca City library provided my afterhours entertainment.

My summer objective was simple – save enough money to pay my fall tuition. With frugality as my watchword, I was living in a “fully furnished” cheap apartment, complete with an aging dinette set, an occasional chair, a couch, and a double mattress. Compared to dormitory life, it was spacious and regal. My aging car, with balding tires and a ripped Landau roof, was parked on the street outside.

The Tuition Bill Loomed

On a hot Sunday afternoon in August, I sat in one of the chairs at my Oklahoma kitchen dinette, checkbook and stamps strewn atop the worn surface of the table. It was the same table where, earlier in the summer, I had taught myself the Pascal programming language and the rudiments of cellular automata theory, using Conway’s Game of Life as a guide. (See A Feeling for the Code.)

 It was time to pay my fall tuition bill for Missouri’s engineering school, then the University of Missouri at Rolla (UMR), now the Missouri University of Science and Technology (MST). After verifying my bank balance, I carefully wrote a check for $346.50, the total due for the fall semester’s tuition and fees.  After placing the check and required paperwork in a stamped, addressed envelope, I paused to survey my situation.

After subtracting the tuition, my remaining bank balance was the now munificent sum of $2.15.  More to the point, my wallet was empty, save for my Arkansas driver’s license and my social security card. Though I possessed a battered Texaco gas station credit card, embossed with my father’s name, it was my emergency backup, used only in automotive mechanical extremis.  (Mind you, this was a time when gas stations were not convenience stores. They sold gas and oil and offered wrecker and repair services.)

Savoring Two Cans of Corn

As the coolness of the refrigerator wafted over me, the refrigerator’s interior light balefully illuminated its empty shelves. A careful inspection of my kitchen cabinets then confirmed the true paucity of my food reserves – just two cans of Del Monte whole kernel sweet corn.  Meanwhile, payday was at least a week away.

I knew I had some important culinary decisions to make. I thought about the psychology and physiology of hunger, and the biomass conversion efficiency of the human digestive tract. (I may have been poor, but science and engineering were old friends.) Should I devour the two cans of corn, then fast for several days?  Or, should I eat one third or one half of a can each day, stretching my rations?

How did I resolve this conundrum? Knowing hunger might well overwhelm rationality, I doubted my ability to stop after eating just part of a can.  Instead, I ate one can and drank the liquid. Then I fasted for three days and ate the other can. In the process, I learned a few things about myself.  First, you need a cover story for skipping lunch, because people do ask questions.  For me, it was about wanting to stay focused and finish a task.

Second, when you are seriously hungry, every kernel is a banquet, savored for texture and flavor, rolled around in your mouth like fine wine. Also, water helps sate hunger by filling the stomach, at least temporarily.  Finally, after several days, hunger declines, as the body accepts reality and begins drawing on internal fat reserves.

I counted the days with anticipation; I have never been so glad to see a payday in my life. I walked directly to the bank, deposited the check, withdrew ten dollars, and headed to the grocery store, hoping to buy something filling and inexpensive I could eat in the parking lot.  I think I settled on a can of chili with a pop-top lid. In general, I cannot recommend buying food while hungry.  Short-term gratification can overwhelm thoughtful selection, but when hungry, you do what you must.

Play the Hand You’re Dealt

Lest this semi-starvation diet seem unnecessarily draconian, it is worth understanding my life and context.  I was a poor scholarship kid, scraping by on a combination of my National Merit Scholarship and a Basic Educational Opportunity Grant (now Pell Grant), plus whatever I could save.  As a matter of frugal practicality, I was hoarding every penny I could from my summer job, knowing the fall tuition bill would come due later that summer. 

There was little my parents could do to help me financially; they were poor – the Arkansas Ozarks red clay kind of poor.  My father had a fifth-grade formal education, though he later earned a GED.  He worked hard at the sawmill, but money was scarce and indulgences were few.  I knew this from personal experience, having worked at the sawmill myself. (See Low Hanging Fruit: Memories of Childhood.) Truthfully, with one fewer mouth to feed, my parents were better off with me in college than living at home. That’s just the way life was.

Did I envy people who had more?  Yes, but I learned early not to wish for things that could not be.  Did I blame my parents?  Of course not; they were doing the best they could. Was I occasionally frustrated by those I felt were squandering opportunities I lacked? Certainly.

Though I was poorer than most, I was richer than some, and for that I was grateful, and I knew I was neither special nor unique.   From early childhood, I knew the game of life was not fair. To have any chance of winning, you play the hand you’re dealt – wisely and astutely, even if you privately feel you might be an unfortunate victim of bottom dealing.

I was both determined and desperate. The nightmare of failure – days filled with menial, dead jobs and nights spent sifting through the ashes of stillborn dreams – drove me relentlessly. I unhesitatingly embraced the Apollo 13 mission control mantra, “Failure is not an option.”  If it took me twenty years to claw my way out of my childhood circumstances, I was prepared to pay the price.  I understood the twin concepts of deferred reward and compound interest; time and relentless diligence were my friends.  (See A Taste of Sherbet and Livin’ Large on Three Cents a Bale.)

Meanwhile, I felt blessed to be in school.  Beyond the intellectual delights, I was living in a dormitory with central heat and hot water, mostly enjoying the variety and new experiences of cafeteria food. With nothing in my pockets except lint, there were no late night pizza deliveries or restaurant indulgences in my college life, just the menu of the day, whatever it might be. 

My first year in college, I quickly abandoned cafeteria breakfast in favor of extra sleep before my morning classes.  Dropping lunch while working during the summer was just the next logical step.  I stayed on the one meal a day plan for the next decade.

Wardrobe Upgrades Required: Install Now

When my summer internship in Oklahoma ended, I packed my few belongings in my old Ford Galaxie 500 and headed home to Arkansas, stopping in the big city of Springfield, Missouri to buy a few new clothes before the fall semester began in Rolla, Missouri. I completed my undergraduate degree early, in December 1978 and headed to Purdue University on a graduate fellowship, a path to a Ph.D. I happily chose despite knowing it promised years of continued penury.

Fast forward a few years. I was now a young assistant professor, teaching data structures to undergraduates. At the end of the semester, I received student feedback on my teaching performance.  (These teaching evaluations are still common, though fraught with potential bias, particularly for women and faculty of color.)

I anxiously scanned the report for feedback. Did Reed know the topic?  Yes.  Did he explain it effectively and clearly?  Yes. Was he accessible and friendly?  Yes.  All seemed good, until I read the freeform comments from my students.

To my surprise and dismay, there were several comments not about my knowledge or teaching effectiveness, but about my appearance, all variations on a common theme: “Reed really needs to upgrade his wardrobe.”  I even vaguely recall a comment suggesting I looked homeless. 

Instinctively, I looked down at what I was wearing. It hit me: they were the same clothes I had purchased five years earlier, before I started graduate school – old jeans, ratty athletic shoes, a faded t-shirt (complete with logo), and a battered flannel shirt that served as a light jacket. 

Maybe the students were right.  It was a lifelong habit, one initially born of necessity and hand-me-down clothes, but that seemed natural and inevitable. Although my roles and responsibilities had changed, I was still living like a poverty-stricken student. Offered as further evidence to the court – my little one-bedroom apartment was burglarized and nothing was stolen, because I owned nothing worth stealing.  

Years later, I related the story of my apartment burglary to a friend. He observed that the only thing worse would have been the burglar leaving a U.S. $20 bill and a note saying, “You need this more than I do.”

Field Engineering Repairs and Duct Tape

This clothes reverie took me back to my days as an undergraduate.  The teaching assistant (TA) for one of my mathematics classes arrived the first day looking sartorially challenged, dressed in faded jeans and a battered t-shirt. As he paced in front of the blackboard, explaining some nuance of vector calculus, I noticed that his athletic shoes were approaching end of life, and the sole of one shoe was beginning to separate from the shoe above.  This separation continued day-by-day until one day the shoe sole was flapping when he arrived in class.

Thinking the end was at hand, I was surprised and amused when the TA returned the next class wearing the same shoes, albeit with a field engineering repair.  He had used two turns of duct tape to re-secure the sole. Although engineers and the U.S. Marines are vastly different cultures, they both live by a common creed – improvise, adapt, overcome.   I appreciated this engineering ingenuity; it was something I would have done – if I could afford duct tape.

Later, as a financially struggling graduate student, I loaned textbooks to an international graduate student too broke to buy the required texts, and a friend related a story of another graduate student slowly starving as they sent part of their already meager graduate stipend home to an impoverished mother.  Quiet desperation takes many forms, often masquerading as normalcy to hide unfortunate reality. You simply play the hand you’re dealt.

The Moral: Gratitude

At the time, I was unaware of the Dutch humanist and philosopher, Erasmus, otherwise I would have appreciated the lived truth of his statement, “When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.”

What’s the moral of this little story? First and foremost, I have been extraordinarily blessed.  As rocker Joe Walsh famously sang, “Life’s been good to me so far.”  Alas, not everyone is so fortunate.  In a world where the cost of higher education has skyrocketed, it is now extraordinarily difficult for poor students, no matter how diligent and determined, to do what I did.  That worries me greatly.

As I preached passionately to world leaders, when I led technology policy for Microsoft, as a university leader, and in testimony to the U.S. Congress, talent is not a respecter of socioeconomic status; it emerges everywhere. Successful societies find it and nurture talent wherever it appears.

I am forever grateful that the combination of a National Merit Scholarship and a Pell grant gave me a one-way dream ticket. It is not for me to judge, but I hope I have proven worthy of the investment.

Coda

For the record, I still love corn in all its prepared varieties- on the cob, whole kernels, street corn, creamed, corn casserole, or even in cornbread. Every kernel is still a banquet. Every time I eat it, I remember that fateful summer.

An Elegy for Grover’s Corners

Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is among the pantheon of American plays, perennially appearing on nearly every list of top-ten classics. It is a legendary list, including such iconic works as Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (“The only thing you've got in this world is what you can sell.”), Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun (“Money is life. Once upon a time freedom used to be life—now it's money.”), and Tennessee Williams’  A Streetcar Named Desire (“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”)

First performed in 1938, near the end of the Great Depression, Our Town was immediately acclaimed, winning that year’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Like all enduring literary works, its message extends beyond the here and the now, for great art, in all its forms, touches something deep and elemental in the human spirit.

Our Town touched me, over fifty years ago, as a high school student in the Ozarks of rural Arkansas.  At the time, I had never seen a theatrical production other than our amateurish school plays. Though the script of Our Town was set in a New England town far removed from my southern roots, it still resonates today.

For those who have never read Our Town or seen it performed, it is a metatheatrical piece, a play-within-a-play, where the main actor, the Stage Manager, breaks the fourth wall and speaks frequently and directly to the audience, narrating and explaining aspects of the play while also participating in it.  Adding to the play’s distinctiveness, the remaining actors perform largely without props, relying on mime to convey actions and meanings.

Beyond its minimalist staging, and its artifice with the form, Our Town is a reflection on life and its meaning, seen through the eyes of everyday people, living in the fictional New Hampshire town of Grover’s Corners. It is an unconventional morality play about a place where, as the Stage Manager wryly observes, “Nobody very remarkable ever come out of it, s'far as we know.”

Though the town of Grover’s Corners is fictional, a product of Wilder’s imagination, it feels timelessly real, imbued with the friendly (and not so friendly) rivalries and small-town gossip that I immediately recognized as the lifeblood of my own small-town life. As a teenager from the Arkansas backwoods, it was a place I knew well, and it felt like home, despite its New England setting.

Our Town: A Mediation on Life and Eternity

Act One of Our Town, aptly titled “Daily Life,” describes the ordinary and pedestrian day-to-day activities of Grover’s Corners’ small-town residents. The byplay between the Stage Manager and the other actors in Our Town, as well as the Stage Manager’s commentary on them and their lives, bely the later reflections on eternity.

Against this backdrop, Act Two, “Love and Marriage,” set three years later, chronicles the wedding of two childhood sweethearts, George and Emily. There, the Stage Manager explains that love is a strange thing, like sleepwalking:

You know how it is; you're twenty-one or twenty-two and you make some decisions; then whisssh! you're seventy… you've been a lawyer for fifty years and that white-haired lady at your side has eaten over fifty thousand meals with you. How do such things begin?

It is a feeling we all know. How did these choices shape my life? Where did the time go? Did I fritter my life away? Just yesterday, I was young and filled with vigor, with my life before me. Who is this aged and stooped person now staring back at me in the mirror?

All this is the prelude to the denouement in Act Three, “Death and Eternity,” which begins nine years after the wedding. As the act opens, Emily has just died in childbirth. At Emily’s funeral, both the living and the dead gather, and the deceased Emily converses with the other dead, longing to experience again just one day of her all-too-brief life.

Against the strong admonitions from the dead to avoid spending time with the living, she revisits a joyful day – her 12^th birthday – with the assistance of the Stage Manager. Only then does she realize how blind the living often are to the importance of treasuring the simple things and living in every moment.

In a haunting realization, Emily plaintively asks the Stage Manager, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it … every, every minute?”  In the play’s most famous line, the Stage Manager replies wanly, “No. The saints and poets, maybe – they do some.”

After this brief sojourn in the afterlife, the play then ends as it began. The Stage Manager reassumes his small-town mien, addresses the audience, and bids everyone farewell, “Hm … Eleven o’clock in Grover’s Corners … You get a good rest, too. Good night.”

Naïveté and Teenaged Angst

As a middle school and high school student, like millions of others, I performed in a variety of school plays. Despite – or perhaps because – they were crafted for inexperienced high school actors, the one act plays – all comedies in my case – were excruciatingly bad; the tropes were tired and superficial, and the teenaged acting was stilted.

Our plays were neither Hamlet nor Macbeth, and we were no itinerant Shakespeare troupe, nor did any Juilliard-trained thespians with Tony Award dreams lurk among us. Having ravaged our little library’s collection of plays and literature, this truth was painfully obvious to me. (See Libraries: Arms Too Short to Feed the Mind)  I have no doubt my teachers knew all this too.  Nevertheless, the show must go on; it was an expected school ritual, however superficial and bland.

Dismayed by the insipid banality of our lines, I beseeched my English teacher, offering my services as an anonymous script doctor, hoping to augment one of our little plays with fourth wall commentary, in the spirit of Our Town. Wisely, the teacher demurred. Perhaps they thought I lacked the skill, or – equally likely – feared an outpouring of teenaged ennui, my own embodiment of Simon & Garfunkel’s My Little Town, might ruin the putative entertainment. I might have risked embarrassment, but the teacher would have received the blame. In retrospect, the teacher was right. (See Thoreau, Angst, Ennui, and Coming of Age)

Filled with hubris, I was too naïve to understand the zeitgeist or to appreciate my own reality. Our theatergoers were not urbane sophisticates, fresh from dinner on the town, anticipating the latest avant-garde musical or thought provoking theatrical piece from Broadway or the West End.

Instead, all of us, actors and audience alike, were the hoi polloi, groundlings one and all. The cafetorium was not a decorated set piece; it was a place we ate free and reduced price school lunches each day – 20 cents for those who could pay – pinto beans and boiled greens, applesauce and Jell-O, with rolls and sorghum molasses. As for me, I walked home from school each day to a ramshackle old house with only one heated room. 

As my aging grandfather, Sidney, would say, “Book learnin’ don’t make you smart, boy.”  Though he only had a third grade education, my grandfather spoke wise words. I was young, and I had learned much from books, but I lacked the wisdom only a lived life can provide. I was too stupid to see and appreciate the truth, blind in my own way to the central message of Our Town.

These small-town, overwhelmingly poor, parents did not come to the high school cafetorium on a weeknight, tired from manual labor, to struggle with existential questions about life’s meaning and purpose, whether the Münchhausen trilemma, the Hegelian dialectic, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Descartes Discourse on the Method, or even a Socratic dialogue. They paid the Sunday morning preacher to resolve all such questions of the here and now and the hereafter, wrapped in clear and simple homilies.

No, the parents came to see their child perform on the cafetorium stage – any theatrical vehicle would suffice. (Well, perhaps not a nude performance of Hair.) In the performance, they found emotional meaning and the sustenance to face another day, their own glimpse of Wilder’s truth.

Ironically, the parents from my rural Arkansas town would have all recognized Grover’s Corners, with its small-town atmosphere and ethos. It was a place much like our own, one where generations shared the same stories of aunts and uncles, grandparents, and great grandparents. A place where nothing remarkable happened.

Acting Fantasies

Despite my thwarted high school theater ambitions, I still harbor unrequited fantasies of playing Our Town’s Stage Manager. Dressed in a gray, three-piece suit, a dark tie, and a well-worn fedora, angled just so, I would walk on stage, perch on a high stool, doff my hat, and place it on my knee. There, I would bring my best Gregory Peck impersonation – earnest, wise, and serious – from that other American classic, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Looking thoughtfully into the stage lights, I would utter the play’s famous first line, “This play is called ‘Our Town.’ The day is May 7, 1901. The time is just before dawn.”  

Alas, I doubt my acting fantasy will ever be realized. Only once have I ever seen my name on literal marquee lights, when I held a public futurist discussion with Bruce Sterling, the science fiction author. Even then, I received second billing! (See A Conversation on Designing the Future)

Today, my repertory is limited to only one character, the geek, Dan Reed; I’d like to think it is my best role. I channel all my acting dreams into invited talks on the endlessly fascinating world of high-performance computing; it is as close as I will get to performance art.  

The academic world has neither greasepaint, stage lights, nor curtain calls, and comedy is even more rare – though I have tried to enliven my technical presentations with it from time to time. Instead, I take my comfort from technical presentations and the written word.  (See My Balm in Gilead)

Grover’s Corners: Our Shared Home

Each of us lives in Grover’s Corners, regardless of geography or circumstance, such is the enduring relevance of Our Town. Caught in the sturm und drang of everyday life, seeking and striving, and consumed by our own concerns, we are all too often oblivious to basic and enduring truths that define our humanity. As the dreams and ambitions of youth yield to the wisdom and regrets of age, insight peeks through the clouds, illuminating enduring truths – the laughter of a child, the smile of a mother; the helping hand; and the good deed no one observes.

As Thoreau wisely noted, “Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.” These are the truths articulated by Our Town’s Stage Manager, the ones the saints and poets sometimes glimpse. It is also a lesson Blanche DuBois never mastered, one Willy Loman learned too late, and a dream Walter Young fought to realize.

Grover’s Corners lives on, in memory and in the heart, a reflection of our shared humanity. It is, after all, our town.

Playing: It’s Serious Stuff

N.B. It has been several months since my official retirement.  Now safely ensconced in North Carolina, it is again time to engage in one of my therapeutic pastimes, musing on the past, the present, and the future.

Playing: It’s Serious Stuff

I spent the past weekend playing with my toys. Lest that naked statement conjure untoward images of me playing in a sandbox, confirming my incipient senility, let me hasten to add that they were interesting toys, ones consistent with my undeniable, lifelong geek persona.  To wit, I tuned my 3-D printers – an aging dual extruder Lulzbot TAZ5 and a newer Crealty Ender 5S1 – and I chased Parks on the Air (POTA) using my Icom 7300 HF radio, while I looked longingly at my telescopes and contemplated the winter chill that rolling any of them outside would inevitably bring.

As I played, lost in reverie, I realized that in the intervening decades, much has changed but even more has remained the same. Filled with childhood joy, I also mused on the nature of play, and why it is so important.

Childhood Play

As a three year old, I would repeatedly push a chair to the kitchen counter’s edge, turn on the knob for the cold water faucet, and watch the swirling patterns when I placed hands in the water.  Over sixty years later, I still remember my childhood thrill.  (The photograph at right shows your then much younger author contemplating the wonder that is a dandelion.)

This penchant was so strong that – even after repeated admonitions – my father was forced to remove the faucet knobs from our kitchen sink, placing them out of my reach in a high cabinet. Rather than a manifestation of obsessive-compulsive behavior, I would like to think it was an early fascination with turbulence, one of nature’s subtle complexities that has both enchanted and bedeviled scientists for centuries.

Undeterred, I spent my later childhood playing amateur scientist. Because scientific toys were a luxury my poor family could ill afford, I built and conducted experiments using the detritus from our ramshackle garage.  I built simple series and parallel electrical circuits using metal strapping from the sawmill where my father worked and played with lenses and mirrors from the chandelier of an old, abandoned house.  I was especially proud when I built a working home weather station using only household items.  (Pro tip:  A strand of your mother’s or sister’s hair is key to building a working hygrometer.)

In high school, I harbored a waking dream of building a solar-powered car, and friends had a tongue-in-cheek betting pool on my probability of success.  The nays won, as I lacked the money for the needed solar cells. However, I did successfully build a light box to support my algae experiments, which ultimately won the biochemistry prize at the state science fair (See Remembering Joel: A Teacher’s Impact).

It was always fun, and fortunately, I did not blow anything up or set anything on fire, though I violated enough laboratory safety protocols to scare my mother more than once. The most notable of these was an ill-fated attempt at distilling, which covered the kitchen windows and walls with dripping water. That experience taught me the importance of tight seals and connections.

Later, I emerged from college chemistry and physics laboratories unscathed, finding both wonder and safe harbor in the world of computers, software, and computational modeling (See A Feeling for the Code).

Play and Cognitive Freedom

We often view playing as a childhood pastime, but it is serious stuff, a deep and innate behavioral pattern found at almost every level of biology. Children jump in mud puddles with unabashed delight. Dogs and cats play with sticks and string; bears slide in the snow; even bumblebees play with toy balls when given the opportunity. (I would be remiss if I did not address the myth of bumblebee flight.  The notion that they don’t know their wings are not big enough to fly, but do so anyway, is a canard, an old failure to understand the complexity of bumblebee wing movements to generate lift. The vortices are both complex and beautiful.)

Though the biological origins of play and their neuroscience rationales are properly the domain of psychologists and neuroscientists, there is no doubt they are important to both our cognitive processes and mental health. For me, playing has always been a way to free my mind from the exigencies of daily life.  No matter how nagging the intellectual problem or how angst filled the research politics, a period of play is an intellectual reset.

When I was a graduate student, a three hour bout of full court basketball left me physically sated  and intellectually refreshed, ready to attack challenges with renewed vigor. Sadly, my vertical leap is now measured in millimeters, and my unrealistic dream of playing in the NBA is long gone. reading (See Libraries: Arms Too Short to Feed the Mind), writing (See My Balm in Gilead), and my geek hobbies now fulfill the same need.

Playing Scientist: Seriously Important

As I have written many times, I believe every child is born a scientist, innately curious about the world around them. (See Science: It’s About the Wide-Eyed Wonder and The (Scientific) Good News). All too often, we preempt that important play in the name of conformity and perceived cultural norms. Yet childhood play is a way to explore the world, in a safe and protective environment, largely unencumbered by formal rules and processes.

While playing, children fill their minds with possibilities and potentialities, and the imagination and curiosity are far more important than the accoutrements.  Every parent who has watched their child play with the box, rather than the toy contained in the box, ruefully knows this all too well. I learned this at an early age, building my own rudimentary scientific toys.

Science is the grownup version of playing, one where the toys can be inexpensive and incidental, perhaps only pencil and paper, or enormously expensive and critical – massive particle accelerators, expensive telescopes, or planetary scale environmental sensing systems.  In both cases, the imagination, the ideas, and the ability and willingness to explore the unexpected matter most.

As a practical matter, it is also why research funding must embrace flexibility and not sacrifice opportunity and serendipity on the twin alters of financial efficiency and suffocating bureaucracy. Good science happens when prepared minds are freed to explore the unexpected, highlighting the truth in the adage that research is what you do when you do not know what you are doing.

In its purest form, science is goal-directed playing, where the unbridled joy of curiosity and the cognitive loading of one’s mind, freed from all other concerns, drive scientific discovery (See On Cognitive Loading and Intellectual Hierophany). It is also a deep and unbridled desire, one the astronomer Edwin Hubble, father of the eponymously named Hubble Constant, captured eloquently:

At the last dim horizon, we search among ghostly errors of observations for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial. The search will continue. The urge is older than history. It is not satisfied and it will not be oppressed.

This is truth. Even the playful bumblebees know this.

Coda

Now excuse me, while I go stick my hands in the water.  I need to satisfy my three-year-old curiosity again and see the Reynolds numbers dance and frolic, while I laugh with delight. For good measure, maybe I will turn one of my telescopes to the stars and watch the adaptive control system and digital camera capture a few photons older than human sentience.

The toys may (or may not) have changed, but they still bring me the same joy I felt as a six year old child, piloting my woodpile spaceship across the galaxy, trusty stick robot at my side.

Go now, my child, and play with your toys.  It’s where your dreams are born.

On “Retirement,” Gratitude, and the Future

In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, the King tells Alice, “Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end; then stop.”  My beginning was as a poor child of the Arkansas Ozarks, the grandson of a sharecropper, and the son of a sawmill worker with a fifth grade education. (See Just A Taste of Sherbet) Education transformed my life and opened a world of extraordinary opportunities. In the wonderland that is science, reality has far exceeded my childhood dreams.

Along the way, I met the love of my life, Andrea Krupa. Throughout it all, she has been my partner, my sounding board, and my supporter and friend.  The daughter of Ukrainian immigrants who fled oppression, she has lived her own version of the American dream.  She is the best thing that ever happened to me, and words cannot express the debt I owe her.

As the Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard  noted, “Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.” What of my middle and future?

Except for my fruitful years at Microsoft, I have spent all of the past sixty-one years in the U.S. educational system, first as a student – primary, secondary, university, graduate, and (briefly) post-doctoral associate – then decades as a professor and university leader. 

As I enter the forty-second year since completing my Ph.D., I am also reminded that 42 was the answer to “Life, the Universe, and Everything” in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, though it is clear the question – the large-language model (LLM) prompt, if you will, – was lost during the long years of computing. 

I often tell students that there are only three enduring questions – matter and the universe, life and nature, and the human condition. Conversely, many of the answers change continually, as we learn more and as our needs and circumstances change.  In a world of both opportunity and uncertainty, I hope we all remember both the questions and the answers.

Meanwhile, dear reader, I have already buried this story’s lede; so, without further ado, here it is.  On August 1, 2024, I will become a Presidential Professor (emeritus) at the University of Utah. This was not a quick decision; it is one I have been contemplating for quite a while, as my two year term as chair of the National Science Board drew closer to an end in May 2024.

First and foremost, this transition does not mean I will stop working – far from it.  I will continue doing many of same things – advising on science and technology policy, conducting high-performance computing research, consulting on strategy and futures, writing about many things, and much more.

For someone “retiring,” I remain extremely busy. I just finished testifying to the U.S. Congress on the future of innovation (See A Call To Action: Congressional Testimony), and several colleagues (you know them all) and I are drafting a paper on the future of high-performance computing in the United States. As I write this, my colleagues and I in the Sage sensor project just submitted major new proposal to bring large language models (LLMs) to networked environmental sensors.

I just returned from Rome and a joint EU-US research meeting on sensors and the computing continuum, as well as being in Washington, DC to address the Department of Energy’s Computational Science Graduate Fellows. I will also be writing on my blog (www.hpcdan.org) more frequently, and I have tentative plans to write multiple books, including one long-delayed novel. Amidst this, I am also involved in a major consulting effort, one I hope to describe someday, NDAs permitting.

In short, the future of my “retirement” looks to be much like my present, but with more flexibility to choose personal and professional activities. Andrea and I also plan to complete some “bucket list” travel, though we have already been so many places as part of our professional travel, and pursue other adventures. In addition to work and recreation, I hope to have more time to indulge my amateur radio (call sign KK7EUJ) and late night digital astrophotography hobbies.

Gratitude

As I look back on my life and career, I am extraordinarily grateful to my teachers and mentors (See Remembering Joel: A Teacher’s Impact, Libraries: Arms Too Short to Feed the Mind, A Feeling for the Code, and One Life to Live), my many collaborators and students, and my friends around the world.  You have made my professional life not just a career, but also an exciting adventure and a wondrous journey.  I will always be in your debt.

Fresh out of graduate school at Purdue, and filled with the crazy idea that one could – and should – build supercomputers using collections of microprocessors, I joined the University of Illinois, a fountainhead of advanced computing, and home to so many amazing high-performance computing experiments (See Stored Program Computing: Ideas and Individuals Do Change the World).

I spent twenty wonderful years as a professor at the University of Illinois, where I was blessed to work with an incredibly talented group of faculty colleagues, as well as wonderful students, post-doctoral associates, and staff  in the Pablo research group.  Later, I was privileged to lead Illinois’ computer science department, one the country’s very best.

During that time, parallel computing using microprocessors became a practical reality, student enrollment exploded during the dot.com boom, and we built the Siebel Center for Computer Science. I also followed Larry Smarr as director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), where we built early Linux clusters and deployed the NSF TeraGrid, which became XSEDE and now ACCESS, NSF’s flagship program for advanced computational resources.

In North Carolina, Alan Blatecky and I created the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), dedicated to the application of computing to important societal problems. There, I was privileged to hold faculty appointments at all three Research Triangle universities – UNC Chapel Hill, Duke, and NC State. RENCI’s animating vision drew on lessons from my Illinois friend and colleague, Donna Cox, who both preached and practiced a vision of interdisciplinary, Renaissance teams. (See Renaissance Teams: Reifying the School of Athens)

Not long after I arrived in North Carolina, Craig Mundie and Rick Rashid, along with Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates, recruited me to join Microsoft.  Being an academic, I said no – twice – but I ultimately changed my mind. At Microsoft, I was fortunate to be a corporate vice-president during the multicore revolution and the birth of cloud computing, where I created the eXreme Computing Group (XCG) to develop new, low power cloud servers and accelerators. Later, I led the Technology Policy Group, which worked with governments and non-governmental organizations around the world on Internet governance, spectrum policy, digital privacy, and a host of other computing-related issues. In the process, I learned an incredible amount about business processes, risk taking, and innovation, all of which I sought to use on my return to academia.

At Iowa and Utah, in addition to holding professorships, I served, respectively, as Vice President for Research and Economic Development and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs (aka Provost). In both roles, I was immersed in the evolving world of higher education. We built a mobile museum to take science to rural communities (See NASA, the Mobile Museum, and Children's Dreams), optimized intellectual property and technology transfer policies, and revamped undergraduate success processes. (See Higher Education in the 21^st Century)

I once said that I wanted a job filled with new and different tasks each day. Helping lead the University of Utah through the global COVID-19 pandemic more than satisfied that lifetime desire for daily uncertainty, though I am grateful to have been part of it. To protect the health and safety of our faculty, staff, and students, we (and other universities) were forced to make decisions each day that would normally take months or even years in academia. (See On Catastrophes and Rebooting the Planet).

In addition to my professional positions, I have been privileged to serve on a wide variety of government and non-governmental organization (NGO) advisory groups – far too many to mention, but all valuable experiences. Among the more notable, I was fortunate to serve on the U.S. President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) and the U.S. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), as well as serving on and chairing the U.S. National Science Board.

Enduring Verities

It is a truism that age brings wisdom and good judgment, though I am reminded pundits also say good judgment comes from experience and that experience comes from bad judgment.  I have certainly made my share of mistakes, but in the process, I did learn some things of importance. Here are just a few.

Though we are, as Alexander Pope so eloquently phrased it in his Essay on Man, but “darkly wise, and rudely great,” we are all connected by a chain of discovery and creativity that stretches to before the dawn of history; it is no exaggeration to say that knowledge preservation via writing created history. For the first time, knowledge could accumulate and be passed from generation to generation by more than oral tradition.

The scientific process is arguably one of humanity’s greatest inventions; in the moment of discovery, one can live a lifetime, but a thousand lifetimes would not be enough.  Discovery and innovation are secular but deeply holy, defining us as humans and as scholars, and they represent all that we venerate and cherish. Realizing you might be the first human to know a particular thing is a singular thrill.

In my professional lifetime, we have seen extraordinary discoveries in science and technology, many enabled by computing advances. Reaching earth orbit was once a measure of a nation state’s wealth and power, dependent on a mix of manual and automated calculations using systems less powerful than a simple calculator. Now, such capability – and even landing instruments on the moon – is well within the financial reach of a startup company, and students now build CubeSats for launch as secondary payloads.

We also mapped the human genome via shotgun sequencing, identified the genetic basis of many diseases, and explored the basis of biological life, all enabled by computing. We asked that most basic of questions – why is there anything all, and we created and tested computational models – lattice QCD and cosmological simulations – that have shaped and refined our understanding of the origin of matter and the universe. 

Meanwhile, smartphones now hold the digital equivalent of entire libraries and connect us to the world in ways previously unimaginable, while fitting in the palms of our hands.  From gigaflops to exaflops, computing continues to revolutionize scientific discovery and transform our world.  I have been blessed to be part of that revolution.

The Future Beckons

Discovery is the endless quest, its fruits the ineffable intellectual gold that enriches all of humanity. As J. R. R. Tolkien, the muse for geeks everywhere, wisely noted:

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost.
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

I may be “emeritus,” but I will keep wandering, an ever-curious explorer, seeking to make a difference.  And as long as the midway lights sparkle, the carnival music beckons, and the carousel spins, I will be riding one of the carousel's painted ponies, hand outstretched eagerly to touch the future. I expect to see you along for the ride.

Thank you to everyone who made my professional life and career so special.  The future awaits.

NASA, the Mobile Museum, and Children's Dreams

Long ago, seemingly just after the earth cooled, Pangaea separated, and the wheel and fire were still novel intellectual property, I was a student at a tiny, rural school in the red clay hills of the Arkansas Ozarks. It was the early 1970s, a decade now best remembered for a multitude of social and cultural disasters – disco, the CB radio craze, polyester leisure suits, platform shoes, the tawdry spectacle of the Watergate scandal, and the ignominious end to the futile Vietnam War.

The 1970s also marked the waning days of the space race, as the U.S. ramped down investments in the Apollo program, with the last lunar landing occurring in 1972.  I was and still am bedazzled by its technological tour de force, one requiring the concerted effort of the planet’s richest nation-state, as it stretched its hands into the 21^st century and pulled back just enough technology to realize an age-old dream.

The Siren Call of Science

Perhaps among the extreme minority of children who were excited when the big three television networks preempted Saturday morning cartoons with live coverage of Project Mercury, Gemini, and finally, Apollo launches from Cape Canaveral, I heard the siren call of science at an early age.  In the first grade, I traded my tools of the trade – Crayola crayons and rounded children’s’ scissors – for my compatriot’s Mercury capsule pencil sharpener, having no doubt that I had made a savvy deal. (It was gold, just like the one on the right,
which I recently found on eBay.) Any child could color inside the lines and cut construction paper; I wanted to go to a magic place, one where dreams could take flight on the wings of science and technology.

I even rearranged the woodpile outside our backdoor to create a spaceship, with just enough room for my trusty robotic sidekick and me, as we explored the cosmos in my childhood imagination. There was wonder out there beyond the sky; I could see it every night when I looked up at the stars. Humoring me, my parents were careful not to destroy my spaceship as they fetched wood for our house’s old wood stove, which heated one room of our ramshackle old house. (See A Taste of Sherbet.)

Throughout, I watched the space launches and the commentary on my parents and grandparents aging analog, black-and-white televisions – at least when they worked. Of all the network commentators, Jules Bergman (ABC) was my favorite, as I sensed a fellow aficionado and true believer hidden behind the professional façade. That we could even receive multiple television channels was itself a recent miracle; in a fit of profligate spending, my grandfather had purchased an antenna rotator, which relieved us from climbing on the roof to change channels.  (See From Broadcast to Narrowcast: Finding Signal in the Noise.)

I did not know it then, but I had go fever, appreciative of the incremental technological steps, but anxious for the hoped for denouement, the first crewed landing on the moon.  When July 20, 1969 finally arrived, I watched coverage of the Apollo 11 lunar landing late into the night, even as my parents prepared for bed and work the next day, leaving me enthralled by the gray glow of the television. (Although the Eagle lunar module landed at 3:17pm CT that Sunday afternoon, Neil Armstrong first stepped onto the lunar surface at 9:56pm CT.) I knew scientific history was being made, and although the Arkansas backwoods was far from the action, I was determined to see every possible bit of it. (See That’s One Small Step for {a} Man.)

I watched all the other landings too, excited by the precision navigation, the longer excursions enabled by the lunar rover, and the associated geology. I was disappointed when, with public interest lagging, the broadcast networks began limiting their coverage. Sadly, reflecting its origins in the Cold War, only the last mission, Apollo 17, included a working scientist, Harrison Schmitt, among its crew.

Seemingly, in the blink of an eye, it was over. We left the keys in the ignition of the mighty Saturn V booster, and we walked away, satisfied that we had beaten the USSR to the moon. The historian in me understands the geopolitical context of the decision, and the twin financial strains of the space race and the Vietnam War.  (It was guns or butter, but not both, as the economists so idiomatically describe it.)  

The scientist in me also recognizes the higher scientific return on investment (ROI) from planetary and deep space probes, as Pioneer, Voyager, Viking,  Cassini and so many others aptly demonstrated.  Yet, the poet in me still yearns for the excitement of human exploration that so inspired me as a young boy.  I still want “to boldly go,” split infinitives be damned! (See Science: It’s About the Wide-Eyed Wonder.)

NASA Comes to My Little Town

Although NASA’s budgets were already shrinking by the time Apollo 11 landed on the moon, the agency still had a vibrant K-12 outreach program, which sent science demonstrations out to schools across the country. Eventually, NASA, in the form of a middle-aged man in a small van, found itself in the Ozarks backwoods of Mammoth Spring, Arkansas, my hometown. That afternoon, the teachers gathered the restive students in the school cafetorium (cafeteria cum auditorium) for a rare science demonstration.

There, the NASA representative performed a parlor trick, one still popular at children’s science museums. He dipped a piece of flexible garden hose in a dewar of liquid nitrogen, then snapped the now frozen hose apart. The demonstration, complete with a small fog of evaporating nitrogen, elicited the expected “ohhs and ahhs” from the assembled students.

I had read about dewars in that cornucopia that was the library, but I had never seen one. (See Libraries: Arms Too Short to Feed the Mind.) Geek that I was (and am), I found myself thinking not about material properties at very low temperatures, fascinating though that topic was, but about how long a small dewar could keep nitrogen in a liquid state. We were, my grandfather often said, “a fer piece” from any gas liquefaction facilities. (The answer, for those of you keeping score at home, is a few days to weeks for a portable dewar.)

The NASA visitor also recounted the history of the Apollo program, illustrating launch, docking, and descent procedures using 3-D models of the Saturn V, the Command and Service Module (CSM), and the Lunar Module (LM). As he did so, I watched the student faces as the already distant memory of the lunar landings suddenly took life in their minds. 

With well-practiced mien, he also revealed that the number of earthly visitors to the moon was an odd, rather than an even number. With a smile, he explained that in addition to the twelve humans, a bacterium had been found on the Surveyor 3 camera that the Apollo 12 astronauts had retrieved and returned to earth.  (This report of Streptococcus mitis is now suspected to be due to contamination by the Apollo astronauts, rather than a hitchhiker on a not fully sterilized Surveyor probe.)

After the demonstration ended, and as the other students beat a noisy exit for the school buses, I approached the cafetorium stage with questions. I asked about the dewar and about the more obscure, uprated Saturn 1B model on display, one used for testing prototypes and validating procedures for lunar-bound hardware. I also talked to him about Skylab and the prospects for future explorations, even as I helped carry the last of his materials back to the van.

When Dreams Die on the Pad

Looking back, I now know this was the first – and likely only – science demonstration most of my fellow Arkansas students would ever see. Doomed by inadequate educational investment to a lifetime of poorly paid minimum wage jobs, their options were few, unduly constrained by the unfortunate circumstances of their birth and mine. Yet for just a few moments, our NASA visitor had shown all of us a world beyond our reach, one where the life of the mind was real and the extraordinary was more than a dream, but a practical possibility.  (See The Hopes of Parents and the Dreams of Children.)

My Arkansas little town and its school was and still is dirt poor, just like its students and their parents. At the time, the school’s annual budget for science consumables was indistinguishable from zero, and its one “laboratory,” such as it was, consisted of a few ancient Bunsen burners, a handful of Erlenmeyer flasks, and some rusting chemical containers – all much older than I was.

A single teacher valiantly taught science to grades seven through twelve. Overworked and underpaid, he rarely had either the means or the time to create hands-on science experiments or demonstrations, though I helped him try whenever I could. In me, he saw a younger version of himself, one whose scientific dreams were not yet extinguished by harsh reality, and he was determined that I have the chance he had lost.  For that, I will forever be grateful. (See Remembering Joel: A Teacher’s Impact and A Feeling for the Code.)

The Mobile Museum Takes Flight

Almost forty years later, when I returned to academia from Microsoft Research, again became a professor and also Vice President for Research and Economic Development at the University of Iowa, my portfolio included the Office of the State Archeologist and the university’s Museum of Natural History. Like most such university organizations, they were woefully underfunded, though they regularly hosted fieldtrips from nearby K-12 schools, highlighting both the state’s geological history and its ancient flora and fauna.

The university’s student fieldtrip catchment was constrained by teacher pain thresholds – how long they are willing to sit on a school bus with hyperactive students.  The experimental data suggested the radius of the typical teacher pain threshold was roughly forty miles, centered on Iowa City.

Sadly, because Iowa is an agrarian state of ninety-nine counties and many small, rural schools, that forty-mile radius excluded a large fraction of the state’s K-12 students.  Why ninety-nine counties, you ask?  Because each county seat needed to be within a day’s buggy ride for the population it served, an anachronism in today’s globally interconnected world.

As I talked to the museum director, the state archeologist, and my senior staff, I could not help but remember the anticipation I felt when NASA visited my little Arkansas town, and how, just for a moment, faces shining with excitement, my fellow students were transfixed by a world of scientific wonder. I wanted to recapture that magic for a new generation and expand our reach statewide.

If the children could not come to us, then we would go to them! I then sketched an idea that had been gestating since my days as director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. We could build a “magic bus,” one filled with hands-on scientific exhibits, and take it to all the little towns across the state.

With this animating idea, we quickly sketched the attributes of the magic bus:

• Replaceable external graphics – a new skin each year,
• Hands on exhibits of natural history and STEM discoveries, refreshed annually,
• University-wide competitions for new ideas and exhibits,
• A self-contained vehicle, not dependent on local infrastructure,
• Capable of hosting outdoor lectures under a rollout canopy if needed, and
• Operated by student docents who would both explain the exhibits and tell their own STEM stories.

In just a few months, thanks to my wonderful staff, the mobile museum took shape.  We contracted with Winnebago in Iowa, for a custom vehicle with an open interior, exterior power plugs, and rollout canopy.  We then designed rugged interior exhibits and displays, ones capable of withstanding the pounding from rural roads and the excited fingers of young children.

This MObile MUseum, affectionately called “MoMu,” was soon traveling the highways and byways of rural Iowa, visiting schools, libraries, and county fairs, bringing science and hands-on exhibits to over 40,000 visitors a year.  I will forever be grateful to the senior staff who made MoMu a successful reality, most notably, John Doershuk, Rich Hichwa, Jennifer Lassner, Cheryl Reardon, Ann Ricketts, and Trina Roberts.

MoMu was also a valuable learning endeavor for our student docents, giving them practical experience in explaining science and an exposure to a broad cross-section of Iowa’s population.  Although we always sought to be respectful of personal perspectives, we never hid the scientific evidence, even if some might take exception. 

One of the student docents told a story of an elderly woman who visited the mobile museum. She carefully inspected each element of the exhibit on the extinct megafauna of ice age Iowa (notably Megalonyx jeffersonii, a giant ground sloth) and read every sign.  On exit, she turned to the student, smiled, and said, “Thank you so much for coming.  I am so pleased the university cares enough to come to our little town.  Please do not ever bring evolution to our town again!”  In response, the student docent could only smile and say, “Thank you for visiting.”

Just as NASA’s roving science demonstrations inspired my fellow Arkansas students and me, the University of Iowa mobile museum was a visible presence in the lives of Iowans everywhere, a beacon of scientific possibility and experiential science education shining in the rural cornfields. Coming full circle to space exploration, MoMu also highlighted the University of Iowa’s important contributions to space exploration. These included James Van Allen’s discovery of the now eponymously named radiation belts, and insights from the indefatigable Don Gurnett’s instruments on the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes, which have crossed the heliopause and are now the manmade objects furthest from the earth.

Alas, the MoMu is no more, sacrificed on the altar of financial exigencies after my departure, an unfortunate victim of ongoing budget cuts, a phenomenon all too common across public education. I am saddened, because MoMu made a difference in the lives of rural Iowans.(See Missing Talent, Missing Opportunities, and Losing Ground.)

Requiem for the Future

Our country is deeply divided, politically, economically, and culturally, riven with angst and fear of the future. Many are now questioning the value of education as a public good, a transformative force that lifts generations out of poverty, powers our knowledge economy, anchors our democracy, and, most importantly of all, gives life to the dreams of children.

I still recall my own joy when NASA came to my small town, and I saw it again with MoMu, when the faces of young children gleamed with wonder as science came to life in their own hands. I believe every child is born a scientist, filled with curiosity about the world, anxious to learn its secrets.  Nature is egalitarian, treating all who seek to understand it the same, giving up its workings to those who ask clear and precise questions. Ah, but such wondrous secrets they are!

Hear me well.  The childlike wonder lives in us all. Listen to the siren call.  Every child deserves a pre-paid ticket for the magic bus, one bound for the future of their dreams.

Coda

As I write this, it has been over fifty years since the last crewed lunar landing of the Apollo program, well over the event horizon of most humans now living on this planet. For many years, I was not sure I would live long enough to see us return to the moon or, perhaps, explore Mars, but I now have hope.

Technological progress has finally put returning humankind to the moon within the financial reach of centi-billionaires such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, as they prod NASA’s now conservative bureaucracy to move with greater alacrity. (See Signing Up, Making A Difference: Shackleton, Musk, and Computing.) As I watch SpaceX test the Starship super heavy launch vehicle and Starship spacecraft, and Blue Origin develop New Glenn, it reminds me of my childhood, when the future was pregnant with possibilities.

As President Kennedy said in the 1960s, we do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. In the difficulty and the challenge lie the opportunities; they demand the very best of us – harnessing our insatiable curiosity, marshalling our concerted intellectual talent, and fueling our sense of adventure. Most importantly, they inspire us and our children with dreams of what could be. (See Dreaming Things That Never Were.)

Despite our manifest challenges, you can still color me hopeful, so grab your crayons.

Lessons from Childhood: Fishing for Justice and Wisdom

I was five years old when I learned an important moral lesson in the red clay hills of the Arkansas Ozarks. That hot Sunday I learned the difference between rules and laws and their realization as mercy and justice. The lesson came not from the pulpit of the Sunday morning fire and brimstone preacher, but – as it should be – from the thoughtful interactions of two honest men. It was a different take on fishing for souls.

Warm, Powerful Warm

It was a sweltering southern Sunday afternoon. It was, as my grandpa Sidney Fraizer liked to say, “warm, powerful warm.” While the box fan roared vainly in the kitchen’s open door, blowing hot air into the even hotter house, outside, even the tree leaves hung limply, seeking respite from the heat.

As we sat in the shade, slowly marinating in our own sweat, watching condensation languidly trace a path down the side of our icy glasses of (sweet) tea and Kool-Aid, my dad suddenly announced we were going fishing.  Mind you, it was Sunday afternoon, and the evening church services were just a few hours away.

Hard church pews beckoned, where elderly women would desperately and futilely wave funeral home fans in the stifling heat, while the preacher thundered about sin and the hope of redemption. (I later thought hell could not be much hotter than a southern tent revival meeting.)

That we were going fishing was a big surprise to both my mother and me; my dad was not one to fish or hunt. However, when his mind was made up, my dad was rarely dissuaded, and my mother knew better than to try. She just turned to the practical and important task, making sure we all had something cool to drink while he fished.

Having announced that we were going fishing, my dad walked next door to my grandpa Frazier’s house and soon returned with an old Folgers coffee can (the ones with the key winder) filled with dirt and red wigglers, both dug from my grandpa’s worm bed. 

Unlike my dad, my grandpa Frazier was a fishing fiend, willing to drop a line in anything bigger than a mud puddle.  In later years, he and I were inseparable, as he told me stories about life and we fished the nearby creeks and rivers of his own childhood. We caught crawdads in the shallow creeks, seined for minnows, tended a worm bed, and rolled balls of Wheaties, all for bait we used to fish for perch, bluegills, bass, catfish, and rainbow trout. 

Along the way, we dangled from the railroad bridge trestle over Warm Fork, shivered in hip waders standing in Spring River, sat by the Baker and Lassiter fords, and cast lines from the Cold Springs bridge just off U.S. 63.  These are among the best memories of my young life. (See What Really Matters.)

Worms, Cars, and Fishing Holes

Now provisioned with worms and pitchers of sweet tea and Kool-Aid, we got in our old car, though I cannot remember if it were the aging Dodge with the worn out engine, the one my mom said, “wouldn’t pull the hat off your head,” or the balky Chevy with the broken transmission that made each shift into drive an uncertain experience, as we waited expectantly and uncertainly to see if we would lurch in the direction of the headlights or the taillights.  

The very phrase “old car” speaks to a certain Southern ethos and economic stratum, “old” being an unnecessary and superfluous adjective, occasionally explicit but most often implicit and unspoken. To cleave “old” from “car” would have been a grievous insult to an aging object that sat under our mulberry tree, gathering berry splatters and bird droppings. 

With rare exceptions, all the poor, rural and urban alike, drive an old car, differing only in vintage, decrepitude, scrapes, dents, rust, and visible applications of duct tape. They know bright and visceral fears, ones unknown to those better off. Will the old car start and run? Will it break down unexpectedly, leaving the driver stranded with no practical or financial recourse? Last but not least, will the gas in the tank, as evinced by that dashboard needle, always edging ominously toward empty, last until the next far-too-limited paycheck? 

Old cars create a life of quiet desperation among the poor, one my family knew all too well for multiple generations. Throughout my childhood, I never knew my dad to put more than $2 of gas in any of our old cars; a dollar in his pocket was always more valuable than a bit more gas in the tank. (See Livin’ Large on Three Cents a Bale.)

With the car windows down, we headed south from Mammoth Spring on Arkansas state road 289. I knew without asking that we were headed for a fishing hole my dad knew well – a shady spot near the Pilot Church on the Myatt – a creek that ran along the farm where he’d grown up, the son of a sharecropper.

To go fishing, my dad went home, to the place where he’d been born. (As a babe in arms, I’d cried for water during a long and hot Sunday sermon on water baptism at that same Pilot Church, but that is a story for another day.)

A Great Depression Childhood

Born in 1927, my dad often later said that rather than being raised, he’d been “jerked up,” more often working as free farm labor than being a child to be educated and nurtured. He received the equivalent of fifth grade education in a one room school house, and when his two older brothers went off to World War II, he was the oldest son left to help on the farm, before being drafted himself.  (My dad is in the back left in this World War II family photograph.) My dad spent the rest of his life trying to make up for what he missed, always reading and learning, a passion he passed on to me. (See Libraries: Arms Too Short to Feed the Mind and My Balm in Gilead.)

All this was nobody’s fault, just the reality of difficult times. With six children – my dad was the fourth – a blind wife (my grandmother Nora), and the Great Depression, my grandpa Richard “Rich” Reed and his family, like so many others, struggled to survive, raising row crops for cash near the creek bottom, where small slivers of better soil were the meager exceptions to the surrounding red clay of the northern Arkansas hills.  In such circumstances, sharecropping is at best a subsistence proposition, a few tens of acres, a mule drawn plow, and sunrise to sundown labor. Betwixt that, one grew garden edibles to feed the family. (See Low Hanging Fruit: Memories of Childhood.) 

My dad often told a story, one now burned in my memory, of a rare childhood joy.  On July 4^th, his father would head into town, the thriving metropolis of Saddle, Arkansas. There, he would buy lemons, a bag of sugar, and fifty pounds of ice, before heading home to make lemonade. It was a small thing, but it was a rare joy in an otherwise difficult childhood.

In retrospect, I think my dad found little pleasure in hunting and fishing because it reminded him so much of his difficult childhood, when hunting squirrels and rabbits and catching fish were survival actions rather than recreation or organic produce.  Nor was my mother’s family – my grandpa and grandma Frazier – in much better shape.  Throughout their lives, money was scarce, and times were hard.

The Law Arrives

At the Myatt, we pulled the old car off the gravel road into the shade, grabbed the fishing pole, the red wigglers, and cold drinks from the back seat, and settled down by the bank of the creek. Seated next to my mother, who was wearing a faded cotton sun dress with a cloth belt, I knew my job was simple – keep quiet, stay out of trouble, and watch. Little did I know how quickly that was to become important.

No sooner had my dad cast his baited hook into the water and settled down on the ground, than another car eased off the road and pulled up next to ours.  It was Orville, the local game warden, in his Arkansas Game and Fish Commission car. A rarity in town, the car was new and official looking, light green with a state logo on the side.

Seeing the car approach, my dad handed the fishing pole to me without a word. I looked at my mother with surprise; this was not part of the plan.  However, I was nothing if not an obedient and thoughtful child, an adult in a small body. If you explained what you wanted me to do and why it was the right and rational thing to do, I would quietly and unhesitatingly comply. Knowing this, my mother simply told me the truth, “You dad does not have a fishing license.  Hold the pole and be quiet.”  With big eyes, I did as I was told, uncertain but fearful.

Orville slipped out of the car, put on his Smoky Bear hat, and walked over to us.  This being a small town – a very small town of 825 according to the 1960 U.S. census – Orville knew both my mom and my dad, as well as our families. He and his wife lived just a few blocks from us, in a small house near main street in Mammoth Spring. His wife had been one of my mom’s school teachers, and a few years later she would be one of mine as well, kind and thoughtful.

Small talk ensued – how hot it was, how was the garden doing, were the fish biting. Gesturing to me, now holding the fishing pole tightly in both hands, my dad allowed that we had come out to the Myatt so he could teach me – the boy – how to fish.  This was patently false, a polite fiction, one even I recognized as such.  However, some story, any story, was necessary to justify us sitting on the creek bank with a fishing pole in the water. (For those of you who are city slickers, fishing and hunting licenses are not required for those younger than sixteen.)

Now, Orville knew my dad did not have a fishing license, and my dad knew Orville knew this. Orville knew several other things as well. Among them were the fact that my parents were in difficult financial straits. The ugly truth was simple.  My dad was unemployed, he had been for months, and the paltry unemployment checks were now gone.

Like many others, we depended on our garden for fresh and preserved produce, and canning tomatoes, beans, okra, corn, pickles, polk greens was my mother’s hot summer job. We were also grateful for the occasional government commodity my grandpa Frazier passed along. (I was partial to the government cheese; the canned meat left a lot to be desired. Perhaps that’s why I have always detested Spam.) 

Orville knew all this, and I knew it too, for I distinctly remember my parents’ furtive conversations about being down to their last five dollars. It is hard to hide the reality of being poor from a child; one learns certain things early, the most important of which is not to embarrass your parents by asking for things they cannot afford. (See A Taste of Sherbet.)

A Wise Decision

My dad was not an intentional scofflaw. He was an honest man, one I had already seen honor a promise, even when it was not in his best interests; a promise was a bond. The truth was, a fishing license was simply an expense that paled in importance to the weekly necessities, gasoline for the old car, and a few groceries to complement what we grew in our garden. We simply did not have money to spare, certainly not the small amount that a would be a $10 or $15 fine for fishing without a license. Orville knew this too.

Equally importantly, Orville knew my mother was the daughter of the only Justice of the Peace in town – the same Sidney Frazier who had given my dad the fishing worms, well aware that he had no fishing license. As Justice of the Peace, my grandpa Frazier adjudicated all petty crimes and misdemeanors, including all the hunting and fishing violations that were Orville’s responsibility. 

My grandpa would not look kindly on having his hardworking and law abiding, albeit unemployed, son-in-law ticketed. It was even more unlikely that any conviction would ensue – there were no fish on the stringer. In the improbable event my grandpa sided with Orville, the $10 fine would be back in my dad’s pocket before Orville’s car disappeared from site of the hearing, my grandpa’s living room.  My grandpa knew my parents needed the money more than the State of Arkansas.

Orville knew all this, my dad knew this, and my mom knew this too. Being respectful of small town realities – economic, social, and legal – and wisely understanding that the law, justice, and mercy were quite different things, Orville wished me good luck fishing, nodded to my parents, moseyed back to his car, and drove away.

After Orville disappeared, my dad sighed, then laughed, reclaimed the fishing pole, and asked my mom to pour him a sweet tea.  He proceeded to drown the rest of the worms, with nary a bite.

Honest lawbreakers, we drove home empty handed, with no fish on the stringer. In addition to mercy and kindness, perhaps there was justice – at least cosmic justice – after all.

Coda

That hot Sunday afternoon, I learned an important lesson from two good men, each trying to do the right thing. During a difficult time, my dad sought comfort in fishing and the memories of his childhood home.  Orville respected that, even if it did not exactly comport with the letter of the law. Even more importantly, he was wise enough not to embarrass a proud and honest man in front of his family.

What’s the moral? Laws are rules intended to ensure fairness and safety, albeit with context limited by history and generalizations. Justice and mercy are humane applications of those rules, tempered by specific circumstances and human wisdom. 

Yes, the law matters, but compassion, wisdom, and justice matter even more. At five years old, I first learned this important truth, not from the Sunday preacher, but from two good men doing what was right.

On WSPRs, Geeks, and Luftballons

A few weeks ago, a large, high altitude balloon carrying a large payload of Chinese surveillance equipment was shot down by a U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptor using an AIM-9X Sidewinder missile.  The F-22 was scrambled from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, the downed balloon landed offshore in South Carolina, and an intensive intelligence salvage operation began immediately.  This was a large, likely multiple ton, balloon with a substantial array of solar cells, navigational and directional capability, and electronic packages. Because my wife and I own a beach house in North Carolina, near the South Carolina border, I received local warnings to report and deliver any floating debris to the authorities.

In response, Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, canceled his planned trip to Beijing, and Sino-American geopolitical relations, already strained, sank even further, with public accusations and recriminations flying fast and furiously. The resulting consternation ignited political posturing by pundits across the political spectrum, which, in turn, led to strident calls for a public statement from the U.S. President.

How could this happen?  Why wasn’t the balloon detected earlier?  Why was it allowed to drift across the continental United States before being shot down? Members of the U.S. Congress wanted answers, and they got them via classified national security briefings. Meanwhile, NORAD increased its aerial and near-space surveillance, given heightened national awareness and concern about other objects in the sky. 

International law is clear that satellite overflights of a country (i.e., from space) are allowed.  Conversely, countries have the complete right to control the airspace over their territory, though international law is a bit uncertain about the rules at very high altitudes. As a practical matter, might makes right; if you can shoot it down over your territory, you have the right to do so. (Remember the history of the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes and note that the aerial photograph of the balloon above was taken from a U-2.) Relatedly, radio transmissions are controlled by International Telecommunications Union (ITU) treaty, as part of the United Nations.

Putting aside the very real and important national security questions behind the Chinese balloon and the calculations and mis-calculations that led to its path over the United States, the public hysteria and political ennui brought to mind the West German band Nena’s song, Neunundneunzig Luftballons (99 Air Balloons), which became an international hit in 1983 as an anti-war protest. It’s a poignant and melancholy Cold War story of a group of air balloons accidently triggering a 99-year global war, leaving only devastation in its wake.  (You can find it on YouTube, and the German lyrics are just as haunting today as they were forty years ago.)

            Original German                                          English Translation
            Neunundneunzig Jahre Krieg                        Ninety-nine Years of War
            Ließen keinen Platz für Sieger                       Left no room for winners
            Kriegsminister gibt's nicht mehr                    There is no longer a Minister of War
            Und auch keine Düsenflieger                        And also no jet planes
            Heute zieh' ich meine Runden                      Today I'm doing my rounds
            Seh' die Welt in Trümmern liegen                 See the world in ruins
            Hab' 'n Luftballon gefunden                          Found a balloon
            Denk' an dich und lass' ihn fliegen               Think of yourself and let him fly

An English version of the song, entitled 99 Red Balloons, was released shortly thereafter, with somewhat different lyrics, changed to scan with the original melody, and with a more American-centric story. However, many felt it lacked the punch and ennui of the German original, and it failed to achieve the same chart success. My always limited German language skills have atrophied with time, but I am inclined to agree.

But Wait, There Are More!

In the wake of the balloon shootdown, questions were asked; fingers were pointed; answers were demanded. Were there other, heretofore undetected, balloons floating over the United States and Canada? It turned out the answer was yes, and UFOs, literally – unidentified, flying objects – were back in the news. Soon, an unidentified balloon was reported to be drifting over Alaska and heading into the Canadian Yukon, followed by another over Lake Huron, the latter described as “small, metallic balloon with a tethered payload below it.”

After diplomatic consultations between the U.S. and Canada, both were shot also down by the U.S. Air Force. (Technical aside:  One should be impressed at NORAD’s surveillance capability, which can identify extremely small objects in the large airspace over North America.)

Were aliens in flying saucers involved?  Was North America under threat?  Was there a new Cold War “balloon gap,” analogous to the infamous “missile gap?” Inquiring minds wanted to know.

In a “you can’t make this stuff up” farce, a comedic mashup of fiction and reality – Dr. Strangelove (“You can’t fight in here.  This is the War Room!”), Neunundneunzig Luftballons, and national security fears – the news was soon filled with speculation that the United States may have used a $100M advanced fighter jet and $500K missile to shoot down a $250 amateur science project, a pico-balloon carrying a ~10 gram, extremely low power amateur “ham” radio transmitter. (See Hobby Club’s Missing Balloon Feared Shot Down By USAF.) 

The group potentially responsible for a balloon traversing America’s airspace is – wait for it – the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade (NIBBB), a group of pico-balloon amateur radio  and science enthusiasts whose club was named in homage to the 2009 animated movie Up. If you are thinking these people hardly look like a threat, you would be right; the NIBBB notes that the club’s youngest member is only eleven years old.

One of their balloons, with amateur radio call sign K9YO-15 (balloons use the FCC call sign of the owner and a distinguishing number), was launched from Libertyville, Illinois on October 10^th, 2022 and had circumnavigated the Earth multiple times before the club lost contact with it.  The balloon’s last reported position was at 38,910 feet off the coast of Alaska on February 10^th, 2023.  The NOAA HYSPLIT wind model projected the balloon to be over the Yukon on February 11, 2023.

On that same day, NORAD downed an unidentified airborne object in the Yukon. The Pentagon issued a press release, and the Canadians searched briefly for the downed fragments but found nothing. 

However, given the small size of the balloon and the remote environment, it is unlikely that any debris will ever be found, leaving it uncertain if K9YO-15 was indeed the object shot down.  The NIBBB responded with equanimity as well, noting:

As has been widely reported, no part of the object shot down by the US Air Force jet over the Yukon territory has been recovered. Until that happens and that object is confirmed to be an identifiable pico-balloon, any assertions or claims that our balloon was involved in that incident are not supported by facts.

Even as the klieg lights of sudden and unexpected fame can be harsh and unforgiving, the NIBBB website shares the group’s passion for pico-balloons and amateur radio, including detailed construction details and a bill of materials.

That’s quite the story, with lots of jargon.  Let’s deconstruct this just a bit, starting with pico-balloons.

That’s My Science Project

What’s a pico-balloon, you say?  As the name suggests, it is a very small balloon, such as the Mylar kind filled with helium one might purchase from a hobby store or a florist shop. As anyone who has brought one to a birthday or graduation party knows, they can be purchased for a few tens of dollars, and are at most a few feet in diameter.

Most such balloons are soon discarded, though a few escape, intentionally or unintentionally, and float into the sky, never to be seen again. How high can they go?  The answer depends on the characteristics of the balloon material, gravity, and the Archimedes principle.  Scientifically, a balloon rises until it reaches neutral buoyancy (i.e., the balloon’s average density equals that of the surrounding air and the buoyant force balances gravity).

Simple Mylar party balloons are unlikely to rise to altitudes beyond 6-9 kilometers (20,000-30,000 feet), limited by either helium leakage or material stresses. In contrast, hardier balloons made of polyethylene or latex are neutrally buoyant up to fifteen kilometers (~50,000 feet). Bear in mind that these pico-balloons are much, much smaller than weather balloons ,and are often less than one meter in diameter. As such, their payload is also quite small, only 10+ grams (0.02 pounds for those of us in non-metric countries), and they are easily affected by weather, even frost.  For this reason, experienced pico-balloon aficionados prefer balloons that can rise to higher altitudes above most weather.

Under Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) 14 CFR Part 101, such small balloons can be launched by anyone, anywhere in the United States, without the need for FAA approval or reporting.  The only requirements are that the balloon’s payload weighs less than six pounds, and the balloon is launched in an unrestricted area. Given the low weight of pico-balloons, the jet stream can easily carry a balloon around the world, and there are many tracked and reported cases of such circumnavigation.

Why might anyone want to do this?

The truth is that people do such things because they are possible and they are cool. After all, humans did not build the Gossamer Albatross to usher in a new era of human powered aviation. They did it because building a human powered airplane that could cross the English Channel was the union of technological prowess and human inspiration; it was the epitome of cool. (See Science: It’s About the Wide-Eyed Wonder.)

Amateur radio pico-balloon enthusiasts are no different. Yes, the technical answer is that amateur “ham” radio enthusiasts often use pico-balloons to study the atmosphere and radio propagation characteristics, but the joy is in the construction and the operation. In such cases, the payload consists of a GPS tracker for location, a WSPR or APRS radio transmitter, an inexpensive micro-controller such as an Arduino to manage the transmitter, and a few solar cells to power everything. A complete package, including the balloon, can be assembled for at most a few hundred dollars.

What’s WSPR, you say?  It’s an acronym for Weak Signal Propagation Reporter (WSPR). The protocol was designed by Nobel Laureate and avid ham radio operator, Joe Taylor, and is intended to test propagation paths on the medium frequency (MF) and high frequency (HF) amateur radio bands using very low (and I do mean very low) power transmissions. A typical WSPR message contains the licensed amateur radio operator’s call sign, the Maidenhead grid locator of their rough location, and the transmitter power in dBm.  The entire message fits in 50 bits. Transmitting such a 50-bit WSPR message takes 110 seconds at 1.46 baud.

Okay, let’s now reconstruct the phrase “pico-balloon carrying an extremely low power amateur ham radio transmitter.”  There are several design options of varying price and sophistication, but here are the elements of a globe-circling amateur balloon, all within the expertise of amateurs and even (with supervision) high school science enthusiasts

• One small balloon (~$50 from Yokohama Balloon or ~$150 for a slightly more expensive research version from Scientific Balloons)
• Helium canister for balloon charging (~$75)
• Lightweight (~10 gram) payload, custom designed or purchased (e.g., ~$90 ZachTek WSPR controller or ~$130 QRPLabs LightAPRS-W tracker) h containing
  • GPS tracker
  • Microcontroller (e.g., Atmel 8-bit AVR microcontroller)
  • WSPR and/or ARPS transmitter
  • Solar cells for electrical power
• Dangling 0.005-inch wire dipole antenna of resonant length for the desired frequency (~33 feet for the 20m radio band)
• Open source software
  • Microcontroller configuration (call sign, Maidenhead locator, …)
  • Flight path prediction (e.g., NOAA HYSPLIT model or com)
  • Pico-balloon tracking collaborations (e.g., https://amateur.sondehub.org/ or http://lu7aa.org/wsprset.asp)

I would have been thrilled beyond measure to have had the opportunity to participate in such an activity as a student. Such projects are precisely the kind of experiential science education that can excite students, filling them with the realization that science is not a desiccated recitation of facts, but rather is an endeavor filled with passion and excitement. We need many more such experiences if we are to attract the millions of additional STEM workers this country needs to remain globally competitive. (See For Science and Society, The Future Begins with Better Dreams.)

My Geek Bona Fides

During the COVID-19 pandemic, my days (and often my nights) were consumed with managing the evolving crisis and ensuring the academic enterprise of the University of Utah continued with as few disruptions as possible.  Given the stress and uncertainty, I regularly counseled others to spend some time away from work doing something fulfilling and emotionally satisfying, lest they be overwhelmed by uncertain and rapidly changing events. (See The Simple Things Matter, Most of All Now.)  Knowing I should heed my own advice, I sought solace and distraction in my own happy place – science and technology. 

My first stop was my digital astrophotography hobby, which though always rewarding, proved uncertain, given the vagaries of Utah weather.  More practically, the late nights were incompatible with my day job due to sleep deprivation. After that, I turned to writing (See My Balm in Gilead) and, finally, to my tried and true friend, computing technology.

First, I developed an end-to-end suite of software for low-power, wireless sensors, using an inexpensive ESP32 microcontroller, LoRaWAN low power wireless transceivers, environmental sensors, and open source software tools.  All of this served as a citizen science complement to the larger SAGE project of which I am a part. (See Cyberinfrastructure: Lots of Room at the Edge.)

With the sensor suite complete, I studied for and passed the three FCC-mandated examinations – technician, general, and amateur extra – to become a fully licensed amateur radio operator.  The study materials gave me an opportunity to refresh my memories of electricity and magnetism (E&M) from undergraduate physics and also to delve more deeply into antenna and radio transceiver design.  The geek in me wished the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) examination materials had been a bit more mathematical, as many of the concepts are best understood via their roots in Maxwell’s equations.

All of which brings me back to pico-balloons and the “because we can” excitement.

First, armed with an ICOM-7300 radio and a trusty PC, I fired up WSJT-X and transmitted WSPR messages (radio callsign KK7EUJ, maidenhead grid locator DP40cp) at one milliwatt on the 20M HF band (14.0956 MHz) using my house’s gutter as an end-fed-random-wire (EFRW) antenna. Reflecting the effectiveness of WSPR encoding in a high noise, low power environment, these WSPR messages have been received by amateur stations across the entire continental United States, as shown at the right.

Second, I have written extensive code for the ESP32 and its smaller, 8 and 16 bit cousins, the ESP8266 and Arduino, the latter based on the Atmel 8-bit AVR microcontroller. Just as the proliferation of powerful, open source software has enabled construction of complex toolkits, so too have open source libraries of hardware components and powerful, open source design tools (e.g., KiCAD) facilitated design of inexpensive, custom hardware boards. As a complement to the wireless sensor library, I have also specified the design of custom printed circuit boards (PCBs), with GPS, sensors, and ESP32, which have been inexpensively fabricated in varying quantities by one of many fabrication firms.

Put another way, I realized I had followed the same path as my pico-balloon compatriots, using open source software and easily designed open source hardware to build new and interesting projects, ones that in the past would have been only within the reach of nation-states.

Coda

Sino-American relations remain deeply strained, and not just because of the surveillance balloon. The global battle for 21^st century geopolitical hegemony is underway, waged via economic competition, trade sanctions, diplomacy and political rhetoric, and military posturing. There seems little doubt that we are entering a new political era, one fraught with uncertainty.

In the midst of all this, I was on Capitol Hill just days after the downing of the Chinese balloon, discussing the importance of greater U.S. research investments and developing the domestic STEM workforce. I have been working with the National Science Board (NSB) on the intersection of dual use technologies, basic scientific research, economic competitiveness, and national security. In addition to a variety of meetings on Capitol Hill, I have invited the White House National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, to join the NSB in discussions.

Meanwhile, no alien UFOs have been confirmed, unless the definition of alien includes a loose affiliation of geeks (young and old), all fascinated by the combination of electronics, software development, atmospheric sciences, mathematics and coding theory, ionospheric electromagnetic propagation, and small balloons, and all wishing to share their scientific passion with others.  Could they be?  They might be. The signs and omens are all there. Yes, they are.  I am proud to say those are my people.

I am a geek, albeit an aging (and balding) left-handed, myopic one, some of those adjectives necessarily being implied by the geek nom de guerre.  I will try not to trigger an international incident by launching any pico-balloons of my own, but I will not rest in encouraging the passion of discovery in young minds.

Nena WSPRed rightly about the Luftballons:

        Man, who would have thought
        That it will come to this
        Because of ninety-nine balloons

Holiday Explanations: So, What Do You Do?

Any young researcher, whether in academia or a government laboratory, who spends time with childhood friends and extended family over the holidays, will undoubtedly be asked, “What do you do?” Red Alert! Shields Up! Brace for Impact!

This is not an academic question, posed by a colleague and potential collaborator, where an extended, deeply technical answer is both expected and desired.   No, this is a potential social trap, one that has ensnared more than one naïve academic in its steely jaws. With the exception of your parents, and maybe your therapist, the putative interlocutor does not really want to know; they are simply feigning interest to stimulate social discourse.

The Social Conundrum

Yes, you are excited and passionate about what you are doing, and you should be.  After all, the scientific process may be the most successful intellectual endeavor in human history, demonstrably capable of illuminating the three big and enduring questions:  matter and the universe, life and its processes, and the human condition.  It has been and always will be about the age-old desire to explore and to understand, and in doing so, make life better for those around us.

Alas, you are fighting ingrained stereotypes and misinformation.  Everyone knows what a plumber does, but few people understand how science is really conducted.  Their models are usually the (sadly) boring experiences of primary and secondary school science, which often made after-school detention look attractive by comparison.  Class, what are the steps of the scientific method?  What is DNA? What causes it to snow?  These are important and interesting questions, but they are desiccated recitations, lacking all the joy of curiosity and the excitement of discovery that motivate every intellectual explorer, whether aged 8 or 50, who doggedly and persistently keeps asking “Why?” and “How?” (Editorial comment: We must stop ingraining scientific disdain and dislike in generations of students. See The Epistemology of Science and For Science and Society, the Future Begins with Better Dreams.)

Alternatively, the scientific understanding of your family and friends may be shaped by the Hollywood stereotypes perpetuated on television and the movies.  You know the ones I mean.  There’s the hacker tapping on the keyboard for a few seconds, then exclaiming, “I’m in.” (Brute force attacks on public key cryptography systems are exceedingly time consuming and difficult. Oh, and there are fascinating mathematical topics at the intersection of quantum computing and homomorphic encryption. Stand down; your spidey-sense tingling – the social trap is near.) Then there’s Spock or Scotty conjuring a scientific miracle to save the Enterprise before the next commercial break. Or, and this one beggars the imagination, the crime laboratory that does precise facial recognition using nine pixels from a VHS video tape recovered from a convenience store’s ancient, analog surveillance system.

You know the reality is far different. Science involves long hours of toil, filled with dead ends – experiments that do not work, which can be even more frustrating than failing, and elegant theories that are crushed by contradictory data – confounded with balky instruments, uncooperative specimens, and buggy code – and often fueled by hot coffee and cold pizza. Conversely, the reward is something transcendent, unraveling a mystery older than history and being the first person to ever understand the answer to a vexing scientific question.  At its best, science is child-like wonder as a lifelong passion.  Why wouldn’t you be excited? After all, you are doing Cool Stuff^TM that solves nature’s mysteries and might change the world! (See Science: It’s About the Wide-Eyed Wonder.)

Yes, you are fighting stereotypes as you sit at the holiday dinner table. Among them is the hoary cliché, one every scholar resignedly learns at some point in their career:

You learn more and more about less and less, until you know everything about nothing.  Then, we give you a Ph.D.

The positive interpretation speaks to the specialization and depth required to truly understand a topic and extend, even marginally, the boundaries of human knowledge. The explosive growth of knowledge means it is now impossible – and even laughable – for even the most gifted, determined, and learned to make any credible claim to know all that is worth knowing, even in a narrow academic field. These are the days of Renaissance teams, not Renaissance individuals. (See Renaissance Teams: Reifying the School at Athens.) You are an expert, but in a necessarily limited area. You learned a lot, but experience, wisdom, and humility also taught you that compared to what there is to know, you know almost nothing.

The negative interpretation – that you are filled with knowledge but lacking in practical “smarts” – is the one you seek to avoid at all costs. There’s an even more colorful, though less polite version of the everything about nothing aphorism that has one learning B.S., then M.S., and until finally, it’s Piled Higher and Deeper.

If you are still a graduate student, it can be even worse, when you may be asked “the question.”  It’s the one that bedevils every Ph.D. student, “When are you going to finish?” (See Doctoral Comedy: Which Way Is The Door?) Few understand that completing a Ph.D. is a qualitatively different process, involving open-ended, original research, not just completing additional classes. Consequently, the question stirs angst and ennui in even the most accomplished Ph.D. student.  Will I finish and if so, when?  Or, will I die homeless and alone, an ABD? (That’s All But Dissertation (ABD) for those of you playing the game at home.)

Explaining What You Do

Despite your well-justified passions, resist all temptation to open your laptop and walk your uncle through the brilliant presentation on early galaxy formation you just gave at the departmental seminar.  Do not fetch the 3-D prototype you just built (still in your backpack) and explain additive manufacturing and laser sintering to your cousin. Avoid explaining the innovative laboratory protocol you are using to screen for SARS-CoV-2 vaccine resistance to your mother – she’s already proud of you. 

Do not ask your nieces and nephews if they have an opinion on the P=NP problem, and if you foolishly do, thank your precocious eight-year-old niece who delightedly tells you that they are equal when N = 1. (Note to self: while the other adults are telling stories about their lives, make sure to talk to her about the joy of science and mathematics. Encouragement really matters!)

Finally, whatever you do, do not expound on Tomasulo’s algorithm and pipelined microprocessor design at a holiday party.  (I am personally guilty of the latter. Trust me; it’s rarely an effective ice breaker. If it is, you are in a safe place, with “your people.” See The Magic behind the Curtain: Hardware and Software for why I was (and still am) so excited.)

When asked what you do, pause, take a deep breath, and think. Few in your family really want to know all the details, and certainly not at the depth and breadth with which you are tempted to reply. This is your time to shine, by channeling your inner Mr. Wizard or Richard Feynman, by being clear, thoughtful, and memorable, but most of all, funny, self-deprecating, and brief.  (See Understanding and Explaining: The Feynman Technique.)

Keep your inner Sheldon Cooper in check, and whatever you do, do not engage in an argument, especially if some of your family members think COVID-19 vaccines were a government conspiracy, the Apollo moon landings were fake, or that humans and dinosaurs were temporally co-resident. Do not bring a knife (logical arguments) to a gunfight (emotional belief). Even if you win (and you won’t), you lose. (See Just the Facts, Ma’am: Reasoning is Not Dead, Jim.)

If asked by family members what I do, I have learned to check my propellor beanie at the door and focus on the potential impact of what I am doing – designing and building cheaper and faster computers -- and how those faster computers help create new medicines or enable better weather forecasts.  How research improves lives is something people generally understand and appreciate; the technical details are rarely important to them.  If they ask and clearly want to know, I will explain but try to do so in ways connected with their experience.

This is my most important piece of advice to young scientists and would-be science advocates.  Do not try to impress people with your erudition, and do not use obscure, though technically accurate nomenclature.  Speak clearly and in ways everyone can understand. It’s about the societal outcomes, not the personal quest for academic success or even expanding the human knowledge base. (See Simplifying Communication and Research, Education, Engagement and Bovine Transport.)

Above all, do not be flippant.  I learned this from painful experience. When asked if I were going to teach during the summer, I explained that I did not teach during the summertime because the federal government paid me to think. Though vacuously true, this response was met with stunned silence, especially after I unhelpfully added that if I had a good idea, I was supposed to write it down, omitting all discussion of research proposal submissions and peer review. The facial expressions alone confirmed my extended family member’s worst fears about my lack of common sense and wasteful government spending! (See Research Summers.)

Trust me, few people really want to hear an extended holiday discourse on exascale algorithmic efficiency, deep learning models, decidability and Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, CRISPR DNA editing, or Lambda-CDM cosmology models – endlessly fascinating though they all are.  Even when enlivened with wild gesticulations and impromptu diagrams drawn in the mashed potatoes and gravy, in-depth science explanations are enough to make even your beloved grandmother look longingly at the holiday sherry, and they will confirm everyone’s unstated but deeply held belief that you are a “special child.”

Eschew the obscurity; chew the turkey. Stick to football if you can, opine on religion or politics if you must, but try to avoid the treacherous intellectual waters of scientific explanations over the holiday cranberry sauce and sliced turkey.  If they really want to know, they will pull you aside during the football game with specific questions. Only then should you unleash a small glimpse of your inner geek.

SenseCam Experiences: What I Really Do

As an academic researcher, what do I spend my time? Sometimes I wonder myself. To find out, while at RENCI, I once spent several weeks wearing a Microsoft SenseCam on a lanyard around my neck, and the University of North Carolina even wrote a story about my experiences.

A SenseCam takes periodic, still photographs, triggered either by elapsed time (roughly a minute) or by motion.  The resulting images then form a stop motion movie of the wearer’s day. The technology has also found use in assisting patients with memory loss, by replaying their experiences to strengthen memory pathways.

The Microsoft SenseCam was an early example of wearable computing, part of the Microsoft MyLifeBits life-logging project, long before smartphones with digital cameras were available. In turn, MyLifeBits was an attempt to realize Vannevar Bush’s 1940s vision of a Memex, which he described in a seminal essay, As We May Think:

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

My friend and future colleague, Gordon Bell, then at Microsoft, popularized the SenseCam for personal recording of his life experiences. Gordon is, of course, best known as a parallel computing pioneer, creator of the eponymously named Gordon Bell Prize, and the father of the Digital Equipment Corporation VAX 11/780, one of the first superminicomputers.

The New Yorker has a great 2007 article, entitled Remember This? about Gordon and his digital knowledge experiences with MyLifeBits. About the same time, I wrote about the coming library revolution, with digital archives and portable devices as potentially transformative educational forces, something I still believe, particularly when coupled with adaptive artificial intelligence.

The first sight of me wearing a SenseCam (see the photograph of a younger me above) triggered expressions of shock and concern for my health, as my colleagues initially feared I had suffered a near fatal heart attack and had been outfitted with an external pacemaker. After assuaging those fears, I explained the SenseCam’s functions, and I offered to put it in my pocket if they were concerned about being recorded during our meeting.  Some were, but most were simply amused by yet another manifestation of my geek disposition. Years later, the response was the same when I donned both a Narrative Clip and a Google Glass.  (See Though a Google Glass, Darkly.)

For a few months, I wore the SenseCam literally all over the world, from Australia to many trips across the United States.  Without exception, it prompted questions about the technology and operation (most common) and about privacy and intended uses (second most common).

So, what did I learn from my SenseCam experience?  Perhaps unsurprisingly, my professional life largely consists of three things: drinking prodigious amounts of coffee, reading a deluge of email, and participating in meetings. In this regard, the broad outlines of my professional life – and that of most other academics – differed little from that of most office workers. However, betwixt these prosaic activities were the distinguishing attributes of my professional life, the all too brief periods of thinking and writing – research papers, conference presentations, and that bane of all researchers, project reports and funding proposals.

Coda: A Safe Harbor

There is, of course, one safe harbor, where being a geek is valued at the holidays. I speak, of course, about the assembling, installing, configuring, and/or testing of any electronic devices the family received as gifts.  Here, family members will temporarily put aside their skepticism of your life choices and dubious assessment of your practical skills if you can connect the Wi-Fi or produce a needed USB hub from your backpack. If they are wondering why you have – at a minimum – a spare USB hub, as well as a set of HDMI and DisplayPort adapters, USB keys of varying capacity, and a microphone headset, then they’ve never been a road warrior. Bask in your momentary glory, then ask for a second helping of pecan pie.

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.

Stored Program Computing: Ideas and Individuals Do Change the World

Johnny von Neumann is a name often spoken with considerable reverence in scientific circles. The epitomy of prodigy and polymath – and even those words fail to do him justice – von Neumann had the kind of mind that made even the world’s most brilliant stare in slack jawed awe.  In idle musings on new topics, he often offered insights that would have been the crowning achievement and life’s work of other, lesser talents.

Indeed, based on his seminal contributions to mathematics, physics, economics, statistics, and yes, computing, one can make a rather compelling case that Johnny may well have been the smartest human being on the planet during his lifetime.  (Well, assuming he wasn’t a Martian, as Leo Szilard sometimes joked about the group of Hungarian expats.) As Edward Teller once put it, “von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us.” 

The “von Neumann” Design

Given von Neumann’s involvement in the Manhattan Project and its associated computing needs,  as well his deep familiarity with the work of Gödel and Turing, it is no surprise that he turned his attention to digital computing, writing the 101-page, “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC,” while commuting by train from Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) to Los Alamos.  Released on June 30^th, 1945, the draft contained the first published description of the stored-program concept, now often called a von Neumann architecture, where both instructions and data were contained in the same memory, central arithmetic and control units coordinated instruction execution, and input/output devices serviced the computing infrastructure. It is no exaggeration to say the draft report transformed and codified modern digital computing. 

The report originated from von Neumann’s role as a consultant to the EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) design, and on its publication, the report generated some controversy. The EDVAC team, notably Mauchly and Eckert, felt von Neumann had simply summarized their design without listing them as authors, and via publication, prevented patents on the stored program ideas.  (In March 1946, both Eckert and Mauchly left the University of Pennsylvania over intellectual property disputes and formed the company that developed UNIVAC.)

Given his prodigious talent and contributions in other areas, one cannot help but believe that von Neumann generalized and codified several ideas he heard during the EDVAC conversations, but we are unlikely to ever know for sure. Regardless of the controversy, von Neumann’s report had a major influence on computer design and construction for the next decade, when each machine was a bespoke design.

Illinois Innovations

My first intellectual home, the University of Illinois, built two machines based on von Neumann’s IAS design, driven by Illinois faculty who were previously associated with the IAS. The first, ORDVAC, was delivered to the U.S Army Aberdeen Proving Grounds in 1951.  As part of that contract, Illinois was given funds to build a second copy in 1952, which became ILLIAC I (Illinois Automatic Computer), the first computer built and owned entirely by a U.S. educational institution.

It was the beginning of a long, illustrious, and continuing history of advanced computing innovation at Illinois, with the ILLIAC II (ECL, core memory, and pipelined operations), ILLIAC III (fine-grained SIMD pattern matching), ILLIAC IV (parallel processing), and Cedar (hierarchical shared memory) computing systems, as well as PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) computer-aided instruction, the Eudora e-mail client, and the Mosaic web browser, itself the progeny of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) ecosystem.

As an aside, just a few years before I arrived, the four color theorem, unresolved for nearly one hundred years, had been proven by Illinois mathematicians Appel and Haken, using a theoretical framework to test a provably finite number of cases by computer.  For many years, mail from the University of Illinois was embossed with the simple phrase “Four colors suffice.”  I loved that quiet and understated academic trash talking, a way of communicating, as Dizzy Dean once did, “It ain’t braggin’ if you can do it.”

Personal Reflections

I have written about several of these Illinois experiences over the years and how they have shaped my professional life, including the formation of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), application of high-performance computing ideas to energy efficient cloud data center design while at Microsoft, and my work as an academic leader:

• Luck Is a Fickle Friend (lessons from ILLIAC IV)
• Eudora, You Got the Love? (why passion matters)
• Mind to Mind: Building Innovation (reflections on PLATO and human empowerment)
• NCSA@30: Reflections on the Revolution (musings on rapid technological change)
• Renaissance Teams: Reifying the School at Athens (interdisciplinary collaboration insights)
• The Magic Behind the Curtain: Hardware and Software (the joy of teaching computing)

I have said elsewhere, and I will say again here, that I went to Illinois as a young assistant professor because it was as close to heaven as a young high-performance computing researcher could find here on Earth.  I was not disappointed!  I loved my time at Illinois because of the incredible people (Bardeen, Bitzer, Cox, Holonyak, Kuck, Lawrie, Smarr, Robertson, Slotnick, and so many others) and their repeated proof-by-demonstration that one should not just dream about the future, but that one can and must build it! (See Predicting Potentialities, Reifying Futures.)

I am proud to have had a role in adding a few small pieces to that rich history via my own work on distributed memory parallel computing, leadership of the Illinois’ Department of Computer Science, recruitment of new faculty, construction of Siebel Center, and the conception, design, and construction of the NSF TeraGrid (later XSEDE) while NCSA director. In between, we also had some fun, playing with gigabit testbeds and I-WIRE (thanks, Charlie Catlett), building parallel computing clusters from Sony PlayStations (See the New York Times article), and visualizing web traffic in the CAVE, when NCSA’s webserver was the busiest in the world.

Coda

At a time when some question our continuing will and ability to mount big, audacious initiatives, it is worth pausing to draw a few intellectual lessons from the pioneers of digital computing, and remember the transformative power of dedicated individuals and compelling ideas.  (See On the Etiology of Heroes and That’s One Small Step for {a} Man.)  It has always been important to imagine the future, not as a dream, but as reality to be realized.

As the legendary Chicago architect, Daniel Burnham remarked,

Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir mens’ blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency.

The logical diagram of the ”von Neumann” architecture has lived on and continued to transform our world. Today’s supercomputers, smartphones, and the Internet of Things (IoT) all rely on variants of the von Neumann idea.

Yet, like all great ideas, the “von Neumann” architecture has its limitations. (See Nothing Lasts Forever.) The bandwidth and latency bottlenecks of the separated execution and storage units continue to drive architectural and technological innovation, in the pursuit of higher performance via end-to-end co-design.  (See Advanced Computing: Integrative Thinking for the Future.) The end of Dennard scaling has led to renewed focus on parallelism, architectural specialization, and energy efficiency.  If he were alive today, I am confident Johnny would still be excited about computing and would be deeply involved in work on quantum computing and approximate computations.

Ask the deepest questions.  Run with the big dogs.  The company, the journey, and the destinations all matter.  It has always been and always will be where the action is. On that, Johnny would wholeheartedly agree!