God Is Real (Unless Declared Integer)
Sixty-nine years ago today, a tape arrived at a nuclear research lab outside Pittsburgh. On it was the first program that could translate a scientist’s arith...
Recent Posts
The Women They Wrote Out of the Photo
In 1946, the U.S. Army released photographs of the ENIAC with men in suits identified by name. The women who had programmed the machine were in the pictures ...
The Decade the Forecast Got Good
The 1950s had been a decade of disappointment for numerical weather prediction. The models were too slow, the computers too fragile, the forecasts too bad. T...
The Man Who Caught the Computer Disease
At Los Alamos, while critical bomb calculations waited, a young physicist sat alone in a room programming a tabulator to compute arctangents – values everyon...
The Forecast That Reached the Nobel
In 1950, a young weather observer from New York City helped run the first computer forecast on the ENIAC. He founded a laboratory, recruited a village doctor...
Three Mathematicians from Poznan
In 1932, a 27-year-old Polish mathematician cracked the German Enigma cipher using abstract algebra. He and two colleagues handed their secrets to the Britis...
The Machine That Built IBM
In a Poughkeepsie tie factory with tar dripping from the roof, 150 engineers built the machine that transformed IBM from a punch-card tabulator company into ...
The Machine That Learned Too Early
In 1958, a psychologist taught an IBM 704 to learn from its mistakes. The Navy called it the future of intelligence. His high school classmate called it a de...
The Blueprint Von Neumann Gave Away
Von Neumann refused to patent his computer. He published the blueprints and mailed them to anyone who asked. Teams on four continents built copies – and each...
The Magician Who Told No Secrets
In 1940, a Swedish mathematician cracked the German Geheimschreiber cipher in two weeks with pen and paper. When asked how, he replied: ‘A magician does not ...
The Swedes Got There First
In December 1954, Sweden began running the world’s first routine numerical weather forecasts – on a computer named after bitter schnapps, built because the A...
From Cables to Chaos: Four Computers That Changed the Weather
From a 30-ton room of cables to an 800-pound desk, four machines turned weather prediction from a dream into a science. This is their story – and the story o...
The Butterfly That Broke the Forecast
In 1961, Edward Lorenz rounded a number from 0.506127 to 0.506. The weather changed completely. He had discovered that prediction has a fundamental limit - a...
The First Climate Model Had 5 KB of RAM
In 1956, Norman Phillips simulated the entire atmosphere on a computer with 5 KB of RAM. It produced jet streams, fronts, and realistic weather - from an atm...
The Man Who Tamed the Equations
Richardson’s equations were right but produced nonsense. Charney figured out why - they were too accurate. He filtered the noise and made weather prediction ...
The Line That Models Cannot Draw, Part 3: The Ghost in the Grid
Richardson’s 200 km grid couldn’t see a front. ENIAC’s 736 km grid was hopeless. At 9 km, ECMWF starts to see them. A neural network at NOAA is learning to d...
The Line That Models Cannot Draw, Part 2: Reading the Sky
A trained synopticist finds fronts by integrating six signals at once. A satellite meteorologist reads them from cloud shapes. No algorithm does both.
The Line That Models Cannot Draw, Part 1: The Attic in Bergen
Fronts are the most recognizable feature on any weather map. The word was stolen from World War I by a 21-year-old in an attic in Norway.
The Number That Connects Turbulence to War
A single dimensionless number that predicts turbulence in the atmosphere, keeps pilots safe at 35,000 feet, and - Richardson believed - follows the same math...
The Man Who Forecasted Weather with a Pencil and a Pile of Hay
Before ENIAC, before computers, before punch cards - one Quaker ambulance driver tried to forecast the weather by hand, on a pile of hay, in a war.
Silver Tape, God’s Glory, and AI Agents: Surviving the Academic Code Thunderdome
799 panicked tweaks held together by silver tape and the glory of God. I managed a team of AI agents like junior developers. Rule one: explain yourself.
GeoBOTTOM Chronicles: When ADHD Rolls a Nat 20 on OpenMP (and a Nat 1 on Architecture)
I told myself I had one job: finish the Senyar paper. Then my ADHD brain saw a side quest. From 53 hours to 22 - by muting a lying progress bar.
Brim is the answer - Especially when you are busy with tropical cyclogenesis
A 1cm brim finally tamed the warping beast on the Sipeed Nanocluster case. Meanwhile, Cyclone Senyar had no Coriolis parameter yet spun anyway – so we melted...
Chasing the Spin: From ENIAC to the Pocket Supercomputers
From ENIAC’s 24-hour forecast to a Nokia running it in under a second. Now I’m building a Raspberry Pi cluster that outguns your phone.
Bending the nerves during another 3d print
Printing a custom Noctua fan case for the Sipeed Nano Cluster. PLA Tough + fought back with warping so aggressive the result could double as a rocking chair....
From Science to Spaghetti (and Back Again)
I bought 400 EUR in spare parts and rebuilt three-quarters of the printer. The actual fix? One checkbox: Enable Prime Tower. Sometimes the solution is not a ...
From Filament Jam Prevention to First Post: A GitHub Pages Fun
Babysitting a 3D printer on its last centimeters of filament is boring – until you decide to spin up a Jekyll blog on GitHub Pages, crash your workstation, a...