Lucasian Litotes

Well, it wasn't a woman (Gee! I'm shocked), although it could have been but the committee wimped out. And it won't be long. At 63, Mike Green is the oldest appointment yet, and if the retirement rules are applied consistently (which they haven't always been), he only gets four years in the prestigious Chair once held by such luminaries as Newton (at 26) and Dirac (at 30). Conventional wisdom has it that theoreticians are past their "sell-by" date in their late twenties, but Newton didn't write The Principia until his mid forties and Hawking is still publishing in his sixties.

Who Will Succeed Hawking?

Now that he is 67 years old, it is Cambridge University policy that Stephen Hawking relinquish his title of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics and so, he resigned that post yesterday but he did not retire from Cambridge University. This event raises the question "Who will succeed him?"

Bandwidth and Latency are Related Like Overclocked Chocolates

Prior to the appearance of special relativity theory (SRT) in 1905, physicists were under the impression that space and time are completely independent aspects of reality described by Newton's equations of motion. Einstein's great insight, that led to SRT, was that space and time are intimately related through the properties of light.

Space and time are related

Instead of objects simply being located at some arbitrary position x at some arbitrary time t, everything moves on a world-line given by the space-time pair (x, ct), where c is the universal speed of light. Notice that x has the engineering dimensions of length and so does the new variable ct: a speed multiplied by time. In Einstein's picture, everything is a length; there is no separate time metric. Time is now part of what has become known as space-time—because nobody came up with a better word.

Data + Models == Insight

Al Bundy, of the TV show Married with Children, understood it and performance engineers should too. What am I talking about? The theme music for that show is the tune "Love and Marriage" as sung by Frank Sinatra. Just like the song says about love and marriage, so it is with measurements and models ... You can't have one without the other.

The End of Computer Performance Modeling?

I haven't had time to digest all the details, but there's been a big song and dance this week about a supercomputer program doing in a day what took scientific minds centuries to accomplish: extrapolating Newton's laws of motion from the recorded motion of a pendulum. This diagram says it all; phenomenon in, model out:

[Source: Wired magazine]

From another perspective, this is also the holy grail of computer performance analysis: convert monitored performance data directly into performance models, feed those predictions or trends back to the computer and let it tune itself (so we can all go home).