Reed's Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

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.

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.

A {Racing} Bicycle for the Mind: Helmet Recommended

The March 1973 issue of Scientific American contained an article entitled simply “Bicycle Technology,” written by S. S. Wilson.  As the title suggests, the article recounted the technological evolution of the bicycle and how those insights contributed to the development of early automobiles and airplanes.  After all, many of the mechanical techniques used by the Wright brothers in the Wright Flyer, the first heavier-than-air aircraft, were developed in their Dayton, Ohio bicycle shop and tested at windswept Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

This Scientific American article would now be of only passing historical interest were it not for a single diagram (shown below), which plots the cost of transport (in calories per gram per kilometer) against body weight (in kilograms) for several organisms and devices, all on a log-log scale. As one would expect, flying organisms tend to be small in weight but expend energy at high levels to remain airborne. Land-based mammals, though much larger, consume less energy relative to their weight. Among the latter, bipedal humans are unremarkable, more efficient than dogs but less efficient than horses.  Similarly, helicopters are less efficient than airplanes or automobiles.  All of this matches our intuition and experience.

Ah, but here’s the story.  A human on a bicycle ranks first in energy efficiency among mobile animals and machines in energy consumed to move a certain distance as a function of body weight, and not by a little, but a lot! The chart shows that the rate of a bicyclist’s energy consumption is about one fifth that of a walking human. Anyone who has bicycled knows this is true.  A reasonably fit bicyclist can cover more than one hundred miles in a day, the so-called century ride.

By Geeks for Geeks

The fact that a human on a bicycle is quantitatively and qualitatively more efficient than anything nature has engineered via evolution caught the eye of an eager young reader, Steve Jobs.  More on that in just a minute.  First, let’s talk about the magazine, Scientific American.

Founded in 1845, like many magazines, Scientific American had its ups and downs until three partners reinvented it during the 1960s, a few years before I first encountered it.  For at least the next thirty years, it embodied everything the well-read – wait for it – scientific American might hope to know about cutting edge science and technology.   Unlike other popular science magazines, the articles were written by the scientists responsible for the discoveries they described, which gave them gravitas often lacking elsewhere. The Amateur Scientist column by Jearl Walker described experiments that could be conducted by savvy amateurs, and the Mathematical Games column by Martin Gardner enchanted many a budding mathematician and computer scientist.  

Scientific American was the kind of magazine geeks awaited eagerly each month, then stood by the mailbox reading cover-to-cover with undisguised joy, only to rush inside afterward to regale unsuspecting family members with their latest insights. I knew this firsthand, having had my own transformative experiences with the magazine, beginning with a stash of old copies I was given as a young teenager. There, I read about stellar nucleosynthesis of the elements, progress toward the Standard Model integrating three of the four fundamental forces, and new insights into DNA and gene actions, among many others. I have since been a loyal subscriber for over forty years, though I hope the magazine has been as successful in recruiting younger readers as it was with me.

I read many fascinating things in Scientific American over the years, but two things stand out most vividly. The first was Christopher Zeeman’s delightful exegesis on catastrophe theory, a mathematical model of non-linearity in complex systems, something that I wrote about recently in the context of COVID-19. (See On Catastrophes and Rebooting the Planet.) The second was Martin Gardner’s description of John Conway’s Game of Life, a beguilingly simple but powerful cellular automaton.  Sadly, John Conway, who spent many years at the Institute for Advanced Study, passed away during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Game of Life became a staple in computer science circles, engaging both experimenters and theorists who derived self-replicating entities and ultimately proved the Game of Life is Turing complete. That rabbit hole is very deep, for via its three simple rules, the Game of Life is capable of computing all that is mechanically computable, bounded only by Gödel incompleteness and the Entscheidungsproblem. From there, it is just a hop-skip-and jump to the Chomsky hierarchy and Turing’s musings on what it means to think.

As an undergraduate, I burned through prodigious amounts of IBM S/370 computer time myself, running Game of Life simulations, enough so that I got called on the carpet by the computing center leadership.  Being fellow geeks themselves, after I showed them the code and explained what I was doing, I was given a friendly blessing and sent on my way. (See A Feeling for the Code.) Since then, I have used the Game of Life as an example in more than one parallel computing class, illustrating parallelism, irregular workloads, and synchronization constraints.

Amplifying Human Talent

Given the impact of Scientific American on the science and technology crowd, it is no surprise that a young Steve Jobs saw the article on bicycle technology and how it augmented human capabilities. It was an idea that became a passion, finding the intellectual analog of the bicycle, something that could augment the human mind in the same dramatic way a bicycle amplified locomotion. You can watch Jobs talk about it here and here, at two different periods in his life. His memory about the condor as the most efficient was incorrect; it was not on the list. However, he captured the essence of the story, when he talked about humans as tool builders and a computer being a bicycle for the mind, able to take us far beyond our human abilities. As Jobs put it,

… somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And, a man on a bicycle, a human on a bicycle, blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts.

And that’s what a computer is to me. What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.

Jobs tried to name the then internally code-named Macintosh project the “Bicycle,” but it didn’t stick. Apple even used the bicycle for the mind analogy in its marketing, as this 1980 Wall Street Journal advertisement shows. (Alas, no copyeditors verified the condor allusion.)

A Universal Intellectual Amplifier

Over the years, I have crafted my own version of this analogy, emphasizing that computing is distinct from all other human tools in its universality. (See Intellectual Amplification via Computing.) Physical tools, from the simple inclined plane through a pulley to a screwdriver, rely on mechanical advantage, each specialized for a particular task. Put another way, a screwdriver will not help you lift a weight, nor will a pulley help you fasten two objects together. Each is useful, but each is specialized.

That specialization extends to scientific and intellectual endeavors as well.  Telescopes, such as the Vera Rubin Observatory or James Webb Space Telescope, expand our vision, reaching far beyond the electromagnetic range of visible light and the limits of the human retina. They let us see the faint, large, and distant, but do nothing to illuminate the spatiotemporal dynamics of a biochemical reaction. Nor can a cryo-EM’s amazing efficacy in understanding macromolecular structures measure the cosmic microwave background (CMB) or plumb the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.

In contrast, computing is universally applicable to diverse human intellectual efforts. That bicycle for the mind can help write sonnets (or via AI, write them itself), explore the spread of viral disease, understand galactic evolution, or a thousand other things, limited only by human imagination.

In that spirit, my friend and former colleague, Fred Brooks, one of the fathers of IBM’s System/360 family of computers, once described himself as being in the “intelligence amplification” business. After leaving IBM and moving to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he met with a University of North Carolina at Chapel administrator, whom he then wryly asked who on campus most needed their intelligence amplified.  Beyond the twinkle in Fred’s eyes as he told the story, I’ve always loved the anecdote, because it speaks to the human nature of computing as a collaborative enabler for creativity.

The Supercomputing Racing Bike

If the personal computer – Mac or PC – is a bicycle for the mind, then a supercomputer is a carbon fiber composite racing bicycle with electronic shifters, hydraulic disc brakes, and tires engineered to minimize rolling resistance.  Though the principles are the same, a supercomputing bicycle is far different than the bike you rode as a child.

Back in May 2004, I testified to the U.S. Congress about the needs of racing bicycles for the mind, something I have done several times. At the time, I was serving as the Founding Director of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), itself based on the idea that computing was universally applicable to enriching the human experience.  It was an idea I learned from my NCSA colleague and friend, Donna Cox, an artist who has enriched the lives of so many via her Renaissance teams and scientific visualizations.

The other witnesses that day were Jack Marburger, then Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP); Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a Senior Vice President from IBM; and Rick Stevens from Argonne National Laboratory.  You can read the entire transcript of the hearing here. At that hearing of the House Science Committee, I offered these words about the universality of high-performance computing and its power to expand the frontiers of human knowledge, noting

The breadth of these examples highlights a unique aspect of high-performance computing that distinguishes it from other scientific instruments – its universality as an intellectual amplifier.  Powerful new telescopes advance astronomy, but not materials science.  Powerful new particle accelerators advance high energy physics, but not genetics.  In contrast, high-performance computing advances all of science and engineering, because all disciplines benefit from high-resolution model predictions, theoretical validations and experimental data analysis. As new scientific discoveries increasingly lie at the interstices of traditional disciplines, high-performance computing is the research integration enabler.

I went on to say something that I believed then but seems even more true now

Although this universality is the intellectual cornerstone of high-performance computing, it is also its political weakness.  Because all research domains benefit from high-performance computing, but none is solely defined by it, high-performance computing lacks the cohesive, well-organized scientific community of advocates found in other disciplines. In turn, this has led to over-dependence on market forces to shape the design and development of high-performance computing systems, to our current detriment.

In almost twenty years since, we have seen phenomenal computing advances.  We have broken the petascale and the exascale performance barriers.  Advanced AI delivers modern day miracles, capable of playing chess and Go at levels that humble even the world’s best human players, able to translate human languages with high and rapidly improving accuracy, adept at predicting how proteins fold, and able to compose prose with near human facility.

We have come far on the racing bicycle for the mind.  We need to keep pedaling, for we still have far to go to reach our destination, given both the manifest opportunities and the equally daunting challenges. 

I have written about the challenges of building ever faster computers, given economic and technical constraints, and I have called for new approaches to designing and building advanced computers that lessen our dependence on traditional market forces, recognizing that advanced computers are increasingly bespoke research instruments rather than commercial commodities. (See American Competitiveness: IT and HPC Futures – Follow the Money and the Talent and a related article.)

We also have deep technical and social issues surrounding AI ethics, digital equality, and digital communications. We are very far from the general AI (strong AI) so omnipresent in the movies, yet as our machines take on more tasks once viewed only as the province of humankind, we need to think about roles and responsibilities, and how we best imbue our machines with the best of humanity’s values. (See Reluctant Revolutionaries, the Trolley Paradox, and Ender’s Game.)

In addition to the handlebar streamers and the thrill of the wind in our hair, a helmet might be advised.

Coda

Make no mistake, Steve Jobs was absolutely right; the computer is arguably one of the most remarkable tools we humans have ever invented.

I have been proud and humbled to be a racing bicycle for the mind designer for these past forty years. Pedal on.

From Broadcast to Narrowcast: Finding Signal in the Noise

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

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

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

The Golden Age of Broadcast Television

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top 40 Radio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digital Transformation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Triumph of Narrowcasting

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

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

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

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

Digital Echo Chambers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Naked Soul

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Shackleton himself later wrote in his book, South:

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

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

Signing Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mars Beckons

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

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

Musk put his money where his mouth was, remarking,

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

That’s called “all in.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

As for me, I want to go.

Personal Connections

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

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

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

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

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

Coda

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

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

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!

Predicting Potentialities, Reifying Futures

N.B.  This is a rather long post, motivated by my recent discussions about the art of predicting the future.

Baseball player and everyman philosopher, Yogi Berra, is justifiably famous for his malapropisms (e.g., “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.”), some actual, some simply attributed.  Now enshrined in the popular vernacular is his amusingly true and philosophically vacuous observation, “It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

Alas, navigating the darkling plain of history is as murky as predicting the pristine future, for variants of Yogi’s bon mot on the uncertain future have been attributed to such diverse figures as physicist and Nobel Laureate, Niels Bohr, and filmmaker, Samuel Goldwyn.  I speak from personal experience on uncertain exegesis.

At various times, in op-eds, columns, articles, interviews, debates, and speeches, I have pontificated on the murky future, speculating on possible and likely outcomes in education, innovation, science, medicine, technology, and society. While doing so, I have also been privileged to serve on a diverse set of advisory groups, among them, the U.S. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), the FCC’s Technical Advisory Council, the Department of Energy’s Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee, and the National Science Board (NSB). I have also participated in or led various World Economic Forum and B20 events.  

None of these experiences made me an oracle, far from it, but they have given me a sense that, as Morpheus promised in The Matrix, the rabbit hole of the future goes very deep indeed. Have a cookie and free your mind.

From musings on Jevon’s paradox though innovation friction and educational futures to the effects of accelerating change, I have plunged in fearlessly – and some might say foolishly – to reflect on the future, with the uncertain chronicle of my dubious musings documented at http://www.hpcdan.org.

In one memorable exchange, I once debated the European Union’s science adviser, Anne Glover, before EU policymakers. It quickly became clear that she (a biologist) and I (a computer geek) were in complete agreement, though both of us puzzled at the audience’s repeated and insistent questioning about slowing the pace of change in microbiology and computing.  Whether concerning digital privacy, genetically modified organisms, cloud computing, or genetic engineering, we emphasized that scientific insights could only be managed wisely, not forestalled. 

I remain convinced this was and is the correct answer, but it was not the desired one. It is also why I believe passionately that an educated populace is an essential prerequisite to thoughtful and informed debate on the appropriate use of new technologies. Absent that, we are but on a darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight.

In a less serious but equally thoughtful vein, I interviewed and debated futurist and science fiction writer, Bruce Sterling. To the amusement of our live audience, we sought to establish the major consensus narrative (aka the truth) about future technology and society, as we rambled across post-genomic biology and medicine, nanotechnology and personalized manufacturing, cognitive radio and the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles and grand AI, and privacy and information flow in the digital age, while discussing the cultural aspects of Clayton Christensen's innovator's dilemma.  (See A Conversation on Designing the Future.)

Several times, I have been mostly right (e.g., the criticality of digital privacy) about the future.  Other times, I have been right about the technology and wrong about the socioeconomics (e.g., online higher education and MOOCs) or wrong about the technology but right about the socioeconomics.  In many cases, I have just been unambiguously and laughably wrong.  (Bought any Itanium computers lately?) However, embarrassment has never stopped me from thinking or asking others what the future might become.  As writer Neal Stephenson provocatively noted, “… if we want to create a better future, we need to start with better dreams.”

Those waking dreams begin by identifying which aspects of the present are malleable – and the associated costs (economic, political, social, and technical) and timescales (months, years, or decades) – as well as those aspects that are truly immutable.  The goal, however, is not just to understand and adapt to the future, but to shape and reify it, for dreams without plans are simply illusions.

Recognize, though, that each envisioned change must be pursued thoughtfully and wisely, for change has both expected and unexpected benefits and consequences.  Foresight is always uncertain, as Ursula K. Le Guin so poignantly portrayed in the Lathe of Heaven.

Futurist Imagining

Technical innovation – predicting the qualitative effects of quantitative change – is often easier than social and legal/policy change, though I recognize my geek bias may be evident in so saying. Even within a specific technical domain, the locus of innovation can shift with time and technology. Consider commercial aviation as one salutatory illustration.

Though the cruising speed of commercial aircraft rose throughout the first half of the 20^th century, today’s Boeing and Airbus commercial airplanes fly no faster than the vaunted Boeing 707 of the late 1950s. Higher speeds were and are technically possible, as military aircraft and the Concorde demonstrated, but supersonic commercial transport remains economically non-viable. Nevertheless, aircraft innovation continues apace, with more reliable, fuel efficient jet engines, carbon fiber designs, glass cockpits and fly by wire. (See Nothing Lasts Forever.)

For those playing the futurist game at home, consider just a few other disruptive examples, past and present. What if long distance communications were effectively free, rather than costing dollars per minute as in the days of Ma Bell? (Answer: the Internet, the web, and e-commerce). What if computers were small and cheap and could store the digital equivalent of the Library of Congress in the palm of your hand, rather than costing millions of dollars and filling massive rooms?  (Answer: laptops, smartphones, and the Internet of Things)

What if the DNA you inherited at birth were just a starting blueprint, rather than a lifelong constant? (Answer: CRISPR and personalized medicine). What if each decade the summers got just a little hotter and the winters got just a little colder? (Answer: climate change, economic loss, and global migration) What if autonomous AI systems were empowered to identify individuals and make life and death decisions? (Answer: stay tuned, this experiment is still underway)

Now slip on your futurist goggles and engage in a brief, though humorous, gedanken experiment.  Might the triumvirate of 5G cellular, talking shoes (no, not the ones with flapping soles), and drone pizza delivery be in our near future? (Stop, right now! How dare you laugh at talking shoes; they’re just a lateral from talking thermostats. Where’s your George Jetson ethos?) In a world where a dystopian Max Headroom is a quaint memory, all three depend on advanced computing, deep learning, and edge AI, but each has divergent social and economic drivers and probabilities. (See Come to the Supercomputing Big Data Edge.)

Despite trade wars, deployment costs now measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and massive picocell requirements, the early rollout of 5G cellular – or at least its marketing twin – is already underway, driven by revenue-salivating carriers and insatiable consumer demand for wireless connectivity and cat videos.  Conversely, marketing talking shoes would be cheap, a dubious fashion statement realizable by any wannabe teenaged designer of chic couture, no more or less likely than any of a dozen other bizarre trends.  Finally, pizza delivery by autonomous drone is now technically feasible, and Dominos has already delivered pizza by drone in New Zealand. Drone delivery is currently illegal in the United States, though legislation to satisfy a national craving for pepperoni might be in our future.

Multivariate Uncertainty

Make no mistake, predicting the future is not for the faint of heart, even with a 5G smartphone, a full belly, and talking shoes; the future is not a simple convolution of linearly independent possibilities. Each possibility depends on a host of uncertainties, with different constraints and interdependences – some are technical, others are cultural; some are economic, others are social; and still others are legal or ethical. More tellingly, each of these uncertainties evolves with varying speeds and scales.  The future is many things, but it is not an unconstrained n-dimensional random walk; even if it does occasionally feel like a Wiener process; it is far more Bayesian, as any inveterate Let’s Make a Deal knows all too well. (The Monty Hall problem is a classic veridical paradox; choose wisely lest you lose the Big Deal behind door number three.)

A few of my geekier friends might say the future is explained by Everett’s many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, where all possible outcomes attain, and we live in but one of many possible universes. Yes, this might mean there is a world where polyester leisure suits and platform shoes are part of a man’s professional wardrobe, disco reigns as a national art form, Inktomi dominates web search and digital advertising, high-speed maglev trains crisscross the U.S. hourly, and adult obesity and diabetes are rare.  This is not our world, though I might reluctantly accept disco, but not leisure suits, in exchange for high-speed trains and diabetes’ elimination.

Despair not, there is hope in understanding the Copenhagen interpretation of the wave function’s collapse – when the superposition of eigenstates reduces to a single state consistent with observation.  Put another way, observation tells us the status of Schrödinger's cat, the future of flying cars, and talking shoes.  Flying cars, though technically possible, are economically and statistically unlikely. However, the jury is still out on talking shoes. (For an anecdote about uncertainty and faculty recruiting, see Schrödinger’s Gershwin.)

Lessons for Futurists

Enough philosophy and raconteuring – herewith are five things I have learned about predicting and shaping the future.

1. n the near term, we tend to overestimate change, but in the long term, we underestimate it.

The Gartner hype cycle is real.  Shiny objects readily capture our attention, mesmerizing and beguiling us with pregnant possibilities.  We see a world of inflated options, infected with go fever, ignoring the challenges posed by a still nascent idea. After the trough of disillusionment, most ideas descend quickly into the valley of death.  In a few cases, after innovation and much hard work, the slope of enlightenment appears, with subsequent success.  By then, we have forgotten how much change the innovation has wrought, now comfortable in an Orwellian sense that the past is invariant, as we willingly and enthusiastically embrace double think. Yes, we have always had smartphones, and Google has always been the go to source for homework questions.

2. Linear extrapolation is easy; exponential extrapolation is extraordinarily difficult.

Tomorrow is generally an incremental variant of today, and small changes rarely have dramatic effects.  Yet there are situations where change truly is exponential.  The cadence of transistor shrinkage, popularly known as Moore’s law, along with its more subtle technical enabler, Dennard scaling, has birthed exponentially more powerful and inexpensive computing systems over the past thirty years. That cadence is now ending, with profound implications for a future where an exponential has reached its fuzzy terminus. The cost of whole genome sequencing has plunged similarly, with concomitant disruptions in the science and finances of health care. (DNA sequencing at near consumer prices is here, albeit for smaller sequences – look at the nanopore-based SmidgION.)  Neither of these exponential changes was guaranteed; rather, they were the product of continued, incremental innovation.

3. Quantitative change leads to qualitative change, but this but one type of disruptive change.

Sufficient change in speed, size, capacity, capability, and price almost always lead to qualitative change. If unit prices drop dramatically and volumes rise commensurately, new opportunities and markets arise. Contrarily, continuing design improvements in gas lamps would have never led to the electric light bulb, whose disruptive technical innovation triggered an ecosystem revolution, as did the automobile and the airplane. Anticipating these disruptive innovations is by definition, difficult, but understanding context and tipping points can lessen surprise; these are the trigger points of the hype cycle.

4. Disciplinary experts are often blinded by knowledge of certain constraints; outsiders see differently.

If you have ever worked on any new idea or approach, you are intimately aware of its limitations and the associated risks, and occasionally terrified when others embrace it with blithe obliviousness.  At one level, this cautionary awareness is a critical damper on unbridled enthusiasm.  (After all, few things really are better than sliced bread, though some might opine that canned beer has been a close competitor.) Building an inclusive and thoughtful circle can lessen surprise; non-domain experts, including many science fiction writers, often better anticipate the broader implications and uptake (or rejection) of new ideas.

5. The interplay of technology evolution and social dynamics is both complex and subtle.

Predicting social reaction to technical change is challenging.  I have personally seen a single technical idea met with unbridled enthusiasm and unqualified horror when applied to slightly different human domains. None of the scientists and technologists, and I count myself among that community, would have predicted that response divergence. Again, diverse teams with disparate experiences and knowledge can lessen surprise and increase predictive accuracy.

Coda

The future is a tabula rasa, albeit with social, economic, political, and technical constraints.  We are not simply passive voyagers on an uncertain sea; we can and should shape our future. Doing so requires both contextual awareness and thoughtful shaping of alternatives. 

Remember, the best way to predict the future is to create it.

Yogi was right; the futurist mantra is pity and cautionary.

Predict, reify; rinse, repeat.

The Magic behind the Curtain: Hardware and Software

The Wizard of Oz is a beloved and widely watched movie that brought us Technicolor, several memorable songs, and lasting cultural memes – “We’re not in Kansas anymore,” “There’s no place like home,” and “Somewhere over the rainbow.” In the movie, Dorothy’s dog, Toto, pulls aside the curtain, revealing the great and mighty Wizard as a mere mortal projecting the trappings of power through indirection and abstraction.  Attempting to continue the charade, Oz proclaims, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”

Deception once revealed, however well intentioned, is mere artifice.  Accordingly, magicians guard the secrets of their tricks assiduously. After all, it is how they earn a living. More importantly, a trick’s mystique makes it both alluring and intriguing. The legerdemain in a coin’s disappearance may still bring a smile to one’s face, but familiarity with the French drop lessens its mystery.

In my experience, a distinguishing feature of researchers and scholars is their interest in not just in the “trick,” but how the trick is created and performed. These are the people peering around the corner, dissecting the art and engineering beneath each Disney World^TM theme park ride

Hence, some seek the truth, whereas others treasure illusion and, sometimes, their own self-deception. As Morpheus says in The Matrix, “You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

Segue alert! Every teacher wants his or her students to take the metaphorical red pill and explore the rabbit hole. It is about challenging beliefs, perspectives, and illusions with new ideas and approaches.  I have reflected on this dichotomy since my very first teaching experience, when I looked back at aspiring young students with both anticipation and trepidation.

As a teacher, there is no greater joy than seeing understanding in the eyes of students, when seeming magic is at last replaced by holistic insight. In short, it is about illumination and understanding, pulling back the curtain on apparent magic to reveal an unbroken chain of insights.

Architectural Magic

As a computer and computational scientist, I long ago realized that introductory computer architecture is the transformative place where computing prestidigitation becomes intellectual engineering. It is where varied computing insights unite in the big reveal – how an idea and the abstraction of an algorithm embodied in code becomes an instantiation in logic, hardware, and device physics.

Make no mistake, the rabbit hole runs unbroken from quantum mechanics through undecidability, the Church-Turing thesis and Turing machines to computability theory and formal language theory (Chomsky hierarchy). It touches the very nature of what it means to think.

First, let’s step back and remember how the intellectual puzzle pieces form the big reveal.

By the time most undergraduate students study basic computer architecture, they have often received an intellectual dose of electricity and magnetism (E&M), perhaps via the latest edition of the same Fundamentals of Physics by Halliday, Resnick (and now Walker) that I studied as an undergraduate over forty years ago. Conductance, capacitance, inductance, wave/particle duality, and quantum tunneling; it is all there. (I so treasured the joy of my E&M course that I have saved my lecture notes and worked problem sets across multiple moves and several decades.)

An introductory class in device physics, transistors, and digital logic often follows E&M. There, the rudiments of semiconductor devices and VLSI design include field effect transistors (FET) (See gate, source, and drain), MOSFET NAND gates, and flip-flops. From there, it is just a hop, skip, and jump to circuit design and logic minimization. At this point, students have architectural Lego^TM blocks and some vague notion these are intellectually sufficient, but microprocessor architecture remains as aspirational and unattainable as a Lego Empire State Building.

Meanwhile, most students have also been learning new programming language(s), efficient algorithms (quicksort), and associated data structures (balanced binary trees). Years ago, the programming languages of choice would have been C or FORTRAN. (I first learned FORTRAN in the 1970s, using WATFIV; see A Feeling for the Code). Today, most introductory computing courses teach Python, with its large sets of libraries, tools, and IDEs.

What really happens when one writes a loop or invokes a procedure? Is it just an incantation, an intellectual sacrifice offered to the machine? Therein lies the reification magic of compilers, which translate code in a high-level language such as C or FORTRAN into equivalent sequences of machine instructions. (The nuance of interpreted languages such as Python is a topic for another day.)

I have found manually translating a simple piece of code (e.g., a loop that sums a set of numbers) into a sequence of assembly language instructions small enough to fit on a single piece of paper is by far the best pedagogical technique. Those symbolic assembly language instructions then map directly and intuitively to individual machine language instructions, each defining a specific hardware behavior (add, read, write, branch), but whose collective describe the intent of the high-level language code.

Trust me; we are now nearing the French drop, but there is nothing up my sleeve …

Computer architecture is where code meets hardware, and the seemingly disparate Lego pieces become a dazzling whole. (It is not turtles all the way down.) Constructed using only those elementary logic gates (aka Lego blocks), the conceptual execution of machine instructions for a simple, non-pipelined stored program computer (superscalar, out-of-order, and parallel are topics for another day) can be traced easily using only pencil and paper. (Computer Organization and Design by my friends Dave Patterson and John Hennessy is as legendary in introductory computer architecture as Halliday and Resnick in physics.)

Simple, yet elegant, these designs embody the core ideas of the von Neumann architecture and its fetch-decode-execute instruction cycle. To test their designs, many a budding computer architect has also trekked to Radio Shack (RIP) or Fry’s (one stop shopping for potato and DRAM chips), or let their fingers do the walking online, for parts to breadboard simple computer components. The more ambitious and adventuresome also stuffed circuit boards and sported solder burns as a point of pride.

The great reveal, the denouement is now at hand. From electrons through transistors and gates to architecture, and from algorithms and code to machine instructions on architecture, it all comes together.  It is all there, the magic of ideas – the abstraction that is code – is now manifest in architecture, hardware, and physics. That is the “Aha!” moment, when students truly appreciate the intellectual construction, like Chartes, that both dazzles and inspires. The true wonder is that one can explain it all on a single whiteboard!

Deep and Open Questions: Not All Is Yet Revealed

The amazing construction that is modern computing rests on many scientific and engineering insights, a few of which are now feeling the strain of their age. The von Neumann model, for all of its elegance and simplicity, increasingly limits future innovation (See Nothing Lasts Forever), and the future of semiconductor technology – 7 nanometers and below – is economically and technologically uncertain. The Landauer principle and low energy (operations/joule) or even reversible computing beckon.  Quantum computing labors in an uncertain aborning, brain-inspired neuromorphic computing is in its infancy, and DNA-based storage and computing are nascent.

Perhaps, the most important intellectual question of all, one deeply related to the nature of computational complexity and the partial recursive functions lies open. Does P=NP? (i.e., is the class of problems where verifying a solution requires non-deterministic polynomial time (NP) the same as the class of problems where computing the solution requires polynomial time (P))? Put another way, if the solution to a problem can be verified in polynomial time, can it also always be found in polynomial time? Most think not, but resolving the question has bedeviled the some of the best mathematical minds of the last century. (If you think you have a proof, sketch it in the margin and claim mathematical immortality.)

Make no mistake, the rabbit hole goes deep, connecting two of the greatest intellectual edifices of the last hundred years – decidability, computability, and complexity united with quantum mechanics and the standard model – via algorithms, software, and computer architecture. The rabbit hole reaches to the very foundational question of what it means to think and share information. There is undeniable magic inside, and that magic continues to transform our perceptions and our world.

Given a choice, always follow the rabbit hole. Scrutinize the man behind the curtain. Seek the big reveal. See the whole whiteboard. Therein lies magic.

Now Batting …

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

Schoolyard Intrigue

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

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

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

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

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

Ghost Runners and Homemade Bats

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

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

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

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

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

KMOX and the Cardinals

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

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

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

Batting Triple Zero

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoreau, Angst, Ennui, and Coming of Age

July 12, 2017 marks two hundred years since the birth of Henry David Thoreau. As an essayist, philosopher, protestor, and transcendentalist, to name just a few attributes, he is an enduring figure in the American literary pantheon. Best known for his book Walden, which extolled the virtues of lifestyle simplicity, and his Civil Disobedience essay, which called on individuals of conscience to resist unjust government, Thoreau's ideas and influence burn brightly in the hearts and minds of every American secondary school English teacher, and by extension, in the existential ennui and soul searching angst of every teenaged would-be poet and wanna-be folksinger.

Thoreau's famous lines echo Arnold's eternal note of sadness and the long, melancholy withdrawing roar:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. -- Walden

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. – Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

Add a dash of John Donne, a pinch of Franz Kafka, and a teaspoon of Poe. Stir vigorously with a stock of Shakespeare and you have a witch's brew of coming of age uncertainty and self-doubt. What does it all mean? Why am I here? What does my future hold?

The thoughtful of every new generation taste this bitter soup, seeking answers to the timeless questions. I certainly did, and my struggle was by no means unique or even unusual.

As a small town boy in Arkansas, I craved intellectual and emotional certainty. The former, I found in books, which opened a world of science and technology, of art and music, of poetry and philosophy, in a place where those were rare. The latter – emotional maturity – I learned, comes only with life experiences and time, for learning and knowledge, however deep, are not understanding.

As a boy, fishing with my grandfather taught me the essential truth of Thoreau's observation, "Many go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after." Sometimes my grandfather and I caught fish, but both of us knew that was not why we went repeatedly to the pond. Together, young and old, we sought and found something much more important, in the shared conversations, in the fading memories of a life lived, and in the ill-formed dreams of a life yet formed.

Thoreau expressed some essential and eternal truths, sometimes rendered banal by over-repetition, ones all too often lost in the hubbub of living. On Thoreau's 200^th birthday, it is worth remembering just a few:

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've imagined.

Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.

Resist unnecessary conformity; seize opportunity; pursue your dreams; heed the distant drummer; live your own life. Therein lie the answers to those teenaged questions, and a life well lived.

As Kierkegaard said, "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."