The computation of poetry
My nadir as a programmer happened in grad school. I’d written a Fortran program to calculate the column density of a stellar atmosphere—at least, that’s what the program was supposed to do, but it had...
View ArticleStandards rule OK
My title comes from the chorus of a song on the Jam’s second album, This Is the Modern World (1977). Written by the band’s singer and guitarist Paul Weller, the song is a bombastically ironic attack on...
View ArticleMind-reading computers
Last year, the website of Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper became the world’s most-visited English-language news source. Although the Mail‘s website owes its popularity to a menu rich in celebrities,...
View ArticleGaming in meatspace
One evening earlier this summer, I was enjoying a martini at a hotel bar in San Francisco’s SoMa district. Although I’d brought an engrossing book to read—Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace—I looked up now...
View ArticleComputing hell
“Let us always keep before our mind’s eye an overheated and glowing stove and inside a naked man, supine, who will never be released from such pain. Does not his pain appear unbearable to us for even a...
View ArticleMonte Carlo, colloids, and public health
My first professional encounter with the Monte Carlo method came not during my long-abandoned career as an astronomer when I might have used the computational technique, but years later when I ran...
View Article“Supercomputers are awesome and why I love what I do!!!”
My title comes from a comment made on Physics Today‘s Facebook page by Fernanda Foertter, a physicist who programs high-performance computers for a biotechnology company. Although Foertter’s...
View ArticleThe future of computational science—in 1977
In the spring of 1977, Queen Elizabeth II toured New Zealand to celebrate the 25th anniversary of her reign, astronomers using the Kuiper Airborne Observatory discovered the rings of Uranus, and—of...
View ArticleA Czech prime minister and a Welsh wizard
The New York Times recently reported on the resignation of Czech prime minister Petr Nečas amid a corruption scandal. Hints of a romantic affair between Nečas and his glamorous and imperious chief of...
View ArticleNobel prizes for computational science
Last year I wrote this column for Computing in Science & Engineering in which I predicted—correctly, as it turned out—that Martin Karplus would win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. By the time you...
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