Doug Meil

2 weeks ago | cacm.acm.org | R. Colin Johnson |Carlos Baquero |Doug Meil

U.S. National Laboratories (Argonne, Lawrence Livermore, and Oak Ridge) possess three of the world’s fastest exascale supercomputers (as of the November 2024 Top500 ranking), which are capable of performing one quintillion (a billion billion) operations per second. One of the highest priorities (among many) for these supercomputers is mapping and characterizing the 95% of the universe that is unseen but inferred to be there—namely, dark matter (~27%) and dark energy (~68%).

2 weeks ago | cacm.acm.org | Carlos Baquero |R. Colin Johnson |Doug Meil

Imagine you have a paper list of your monthly expenses and want to find the total. A skilled comptometer (mechanical calculator) operator could perform this calculation much faster than is possible today. The reason lies in the input method and the operator’s skill. Entering numbers on a numeric keypad is a slow process, which is why barcodes and RFIDs are commonly used in shops these days. Comptometers allow pressing multiple keys simultaneously using different fingers.

3 weeks ago | cacm.acm.org | Doug Meil |R. Colin Johnson |Carlos Baquero

An effective dashboard makes complex analysis easy to understand in small bites and hides layers of complexities. But details matter too. Posted Apr 3 2025 “I need a dashboard” says the stakeholder. Just get the data and dash it. Put it on the board. Up-lines should be trending up and the down-lines trending down. Add some graphics for sizzle.

3 weeks ago | cacm.acm.org | Tim Hornyak |R. Colin Johnson |Carlos Baquero |Doug Meil

“We are analog beings living in a digital world, facing a quantum future,” physicist Neil Turok wrote in his 2012 book The Universe Within. The deluge of digital information we face every day “feels rather alien to us as natural, living creatures,” he later explained. If that’s true, it may be one reason why visiting the Extinct Media Museum in Tokyo, Japan, feels so relaxing.

2 months ago | cacm.acm.org | Moshe Y Vardi |R. Colin Johnson |Alex Tray |Doug Meil

Homo Sapiens, “wise human” in Latin, is the taxonomic species name for modern humans. But observing the current state of the world and its trajectory, it is hard for me to accept the description “wise.” I am not the first to object to the “sapiens” descriptor. The French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson argued in 1911 that a better term would be Homo Faber, referring to human tool-making ability. This ability goes back to early humans, about three million years ago.