The Prettiest Number System of All
In the spring of 2025 the tech press noticed that Huawei had filed a patent on a processor logic with three states instead of two. It read like news. It was ...
Posts by Category
- Weather 53
- HPC 52
- History 50
- tech-diary 3
- Raspberry-Pi 2
- 3D-Printing 2
- Code 2
- Academia 1
- AI 1
- Management 1
Weather
The Attack of the Killer Micros
Around 1990 a Livermore physicist named Eugene Brooks gave the coming slaughter a name: the attack of the killer micros. Cheap commodity chips, ganged by the...
The Hemisphere That Caught Up
For a quarter-century the Southern Hemisphere forecast trailed the Northern by a full day of skill. Half the planet was an observational desert – almost no r...
Eleven Years from the Adjoint
On the morning of 25 November 1997, at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Shinfield Park, Reading, the operational data assimilation s...
A Textbook for the Grandmothers
In March 1996 the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society published a thirty-five-page paper with twenty-two authors and a project name in the title ...
Thirty-Three Lines on the Map
On Tuesday 24 November 1992 the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts at Shinfield Park in Reading ran the first operational ensemble forecast i...
The Book That Crossed the Iron Curtain
In 1963 the Leningrad publishing house Gidrometeoizdat brought out a 286-page Russian monograph by a 48-year-old meteorologist at the Voeikov Main Geophysica...
The Package Deal
Norman Phillips was twenty-one and a freshly commissioned weather officer when he met Martha Nissen at a Chicago operetta rehearsal in 1944 or 1945. They wer...
The First in Bracknell
In July 1981 a Control Data Corporation truck pulled up at the Meteorological Office in Bracknell, Berkshire, and unloaded the first Cyber 205 ever sold to a...
Two Decimal Places at MIT
One day in the winter of 1961, Edward Lorenz typed six-digit numbers into the truncated three-digit form that came off his desk computer’s printer. The two r...
Seventeen Years at Suitland
On 6 May 1955, a thirty-five-year-old MIT-trained meteorologist named Fred Shuman stood next to an IBM 701 in a former Census Bureau building at Suitland, Ma...
Thirty-Eight Years on the Sphere
Sometime in the middle of the 1970s, a copy of an Australian numerical weather prediction code was placed on a magnetic tape in Melbourne and posted, or carr...
Sixty-Nine Buoys
On 26 December 1994 a NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory team in Seattle marked the deployment of the last of sixty-nine moored buoys spread across...
What Worked, What Didn’t
The architectural survey in the previous post traced seven hardware generations and what each one allowed atmospheric scientists to do. The same survey omitt...
From Tubes to GPUs
Jagadish Shukla’s memoir, A Billion Butterflies, devotes a chapter to each of the seven generations of digital computer he used between 1962 and 2024. The ch...
A Billion Butterflies
In a village called Mirdha in the Ballia district of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, eighty-five miles east of Varanasi and approximately two hundred and ...
First Cray in Europe
On 24 October 1978 a Cray Research Inc. Cray-1A vector supercomputer, serial number nine of the company’s first commercial product line, arrived by lorry at ...
It Didn’t Make Weather
Some time in the spring or summer of 1975, in the central computer facility of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Ames Research Center, a la...
Freon and Wire
On 3 May 1971 a Control Data Corporation 7600 supercomputer, serial number twelve of seventy-five, was crated up in Chippewa Falls Wisconsin and trucked the ...
The Algorithm That Outlived Its Machine
In October 1967, the first IBM System/360 Model 91 was crated up in Poughkeepsie New York and shipped two hundred miles south to the Goddard Space Flight Cen...
Thirty-Four People, Including the Janitor
On 28 August 1963, six days after a small Minnesota company called Control Data Corporation had announced a new computer called the 6600, the chairman of the...
Serial Number One
In January 1960, in a basement classroom of Spanagel Hall on the campus of the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School at Monterey, a quiet thirty-four-year-old elect...
The Memory in Every Forecast
On 29 June 1948, walking through Harvard Yard, a young Chinese physicist named An Wang wrote in his notebook the principle that would make computer memory pr...
The Forecast on a VAX
In June 1986, two scientists at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and a graduate student published a paper in Nature claiming that they could predict El Nino ...
The Machine That Looked Like Furniture
On July 11, 1977, two refrigerated freight trucks pulled up at the Mesa Laboratory in Boulder. Inside one of them was a 5.5-ton C-shaped cylindrical computer...
He Made Walker Right
Gilbert Walker identified a statistical see-saw in tropical Pacific pressure in the 1920s and was dismissed as an empiricist without a theory. He died in Nov...
The Man Who Fit the Entire Ocean in Half a Megabyte
In 1969 a team at Princeton coupled the atmosphere and the ocean in a single computer program and ran it on a UNIVAC 1108 with half a megabyte of memory. The...
The Fireman and the Visionary
In 1961 a thirty-three-year-old Japanese physicist arrived at UCLA on a two-year fellowship. The problem he had been brought to solve was that climate models...
The Language That Refused to Die
In 2026, a language designed in 1954 for an eight-ton vacuum-tube machine still runs every operational weather forecast, every major climate model, and – thr...
The Empire That Its Creator Repudiated
In October 1977, John Backus walked to the podium at the ACM Annual Conference in Seattle to accept the Turing Award for inventing FORTRAN. He used his speec...
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...
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.
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.
HPC
The Prettiest Number System of All
In the spring of 2025 the tech press noticed that Huawei had filed a patent on a processor logic with three states instead of two. It read like news. It was ...
The Attack of the Killer Micros
Around 1990 a Livermore physicist named Eugene Brooks gave the coming slaughter a name: the attack of the killer micros. Cheap commodity chips, ganged by the...
The Hemisphere That Caught Up
For a quarter-century the Southern Hemisphere forecast trailed the Northern by a full day of skill. Half the planet was an observational desert – almost no r...
Eleven Years from the Adjoint
On the morning of 25 November 1997, at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Shinfield Park, Reading, the operational data assimilation s...
A Textbook for the Grandmothers
In March 1996 the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society published a thirty-five-page paper with twenty-two authors and a project name in the title ...
Thirty-Three Lines on the Map
On Tuesday 24 November 1992 the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts at Shinfield Park in Reading ran the first operational ensemble forecast i...
The Book That Crossed the Iron Curtain
In 1963 the Leningrad publishing house Gidrometeoizdat brought out a 286-page Russian monograph by a 48-year-old meteorologist at the Voeikov Main Geophysica...
The Package Deal
Norman Phillips was twenty-one and a freshly commissioned weather officer when he met Martha Nissen at a Chicago operetta rehearsal in 1944 or 1945. They wer...
The First in Bracknell
In July 1981 a Control Data Corporation truck pulled up at the Meteorological Office in Bracknell, Berkshire, and unloaded the first Cyber 205 ever sold to a...
Two Decimal Places at MIT
One day in the winter of 1961, Edward Lorenz typed six-digit numbers into the truncated three-digit form that came off his desk computer’s printer. The two r...
Seventeen Years at Suitland
On 6 May 1955, a thirty-five-year-old MIT-trained meteorologist named Fred Shuman stood next to an IBM 701 in a former Census Bureau building at Suitland, Ma...
Thirty-Eight Years on the Sphere
Sometime in the middle of the 1970s, a copy of an Australian numerical weather prediction code was placed on a magnetic tape in Melbourne and posted, or carr...
Sixty-Nine Buoys
On 26 December 1994 a NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory team in Seattle marked the deployment of the last of sixty-nine moored buoys spread across...
What Worked, What Didn’t
The architectural survey in the previous post traced seven hardware generations and what each one allowed atmospheric scientists to do. The same survey omitt...
From Tubes to GPUs
Jagadish Shukla’s memoir, A Billion Butterflies, devotes a chapter to each of the seven generations of digital computer he used between 1962 and 2024. The ch...
A Billion Butterflies
In a village called Mirdha in the Ballia district of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, eighty-five miles east of Varanasi and approximately two hundred and ...
First Cray in Europe
On 24 October 1978 a Cray Research Inc. Cray-1A vector supercomputer, serial number nine of the company’s first commercial product line, arrived by lorry at ...
It Didn’t Make Weather
Some time in the spring or summer of 1975, in the central computer facility of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Ames Research Center, a la...
Freon and Wire
On 3 May 1971 a Control Data Corporation 7600 supercomputer, serial number twelve of seventy-five, was crated up in Chippewa Falls Wisconsin and trucked the ...
The Algorithm That Outlived Its Machine
In October 1967, the first IBM System/360 Model 91 was crated up in Poughkeepsie New York and shipped two hundred miles south to the Goddard Space Flight Cen...
Thirty-Four People, Including the Janitor
On 28 August 1963, six days after a small Minnesota company called Control Data Corporation had announced a new computer called the 6600, the chairman of the...
Serial Number One
In January 1960, in a basement classroom of Spanagel Hall on the campus of the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School at Monterey, a quiet thirty-four-year-old elect...
The Memory in Every Forecast
On 29 June 1948, walking through Harvard Yard, a young Chinese physicist named An Wang wrote in his notebook the principle that would make computer memory pr...
The Forecast on a VAX
In June 1986, two scientists at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and a graduate student published a paper in Nature claiming that they could predict El Nino ...
The Machine That Looked Like Furniture
On July 11, 1977, two refrigerated freight trucks pulled up at the Mesa Laboratory in Boulder. Inside one of them was a 5.5-ton C-shaped cylindrical computer...
He Made Walker Right
Gilbert Walker identified a statistical see-saw in tropical Pacific pressure in the 1920s and was dismissed as an empiricist without a theory. He died in Nov...
The Man Who Fit the Entire Ocean in Half a Megabyte
In 1969 a team at Princeton coupled the atmosphere and the ocean in a single computer program and ran it on a UNIVAC 1108 with half a megabyte of memory. The...
The Fireman and the Visionary
In 1961 a thirty-three-year-old Japanese physicist arrived at UCLA on a two-year fellowship. The problem he had been brought to solve was that climate models...
The Language That Refused to Die
In 2026, a language designed in 1954 for an eight-ton vacuum-tube machine still runs every operational weather forecast, every major climate model, and – thr...
The Empire That Its Creator Repudiated
In October 1977, John Backus walked to the podium at the ACM Annual Conference in Seattle to accept the Turing Award for inventing FORTRAN. He used his speec...
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...
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.
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.
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.
History
The Prettiest Number System of All
In the spring of 2025 the tech press noticed that Huawei had filed a patent on a processor logic with three states instead of two. It read like news. It was ...
The Attack of the Killer Micros
Around 1990 a Livermore physicist named Eugene Brooks gave the coming slaughter a name: the attack of the killer micros. Cheap commodity chips, ganged by the...
The Hemisphere That Caught Up
For a quarter-century the Southern Hemisphere forecast trailed the Northern by a full day of skill. Half the planet was an observational desert – almost no r...
Eleven Years from the Adjoint
On the morning of 25 November 1997, at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Shinfield Park, Reading, the operational data assimilation s...
A Textbook for the Grandmothers
In March 1996 the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society published a thirty-five-page paper with twenty-two authors and a project name in the title ...
Thirty-Three Lines on the Map
On Tuesday 24 November 1992 the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts at Shinfield Park in Reading ran the first operational ensemble forecast i...
The Book That Crossed the Iron Curtain
In 1963 the Leningrad publishing house Gidrometeoizdat brought out a 286-page Russian monograph by a 48-year-old meteorologist at the Voeikov Main Geophysica...
The Package Deal
Norman Phillips was twenty-one and a freshly commissioned weather officer when he met Martha Nissen at a Chicago operetta rehearsal in 1944 or 1945. They wer...
The First in Bracknell
In July 1981 a Control Data Corporation truck pulled up at the Meteorological Office in Bracknell, Berkshire, and unloaded the first Cyber 205 ever sold to a...
Two Decimal Places at MIT
One day in the winter of 1961, Edward Lorenz typed six-digit numbers into the truncated three-digit form that came off his desk computer’s printer. The two r...
Seventeen Years at Suitland
On 6 May 1955, a thirty-five-year-old MIT-trained meteorologist named Fred Shuman stood next to an IBM 701 in a former Census Bureau building at Suitland, Ma...
Thirty-Eight Years on the Sphere
Sometime in the middle of the 1970s, a copy of an Australian numerical weather prediction code was placed on a magnetic tape in Melbourne and posted, or carr...
Sixty-Nine Buoys
On 26 December 1994 a NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory team in Seattle marked the deployment of the last of sixty-nine moored buoys spread across...
What Worked, What Didn’t
The architectural survey in the previous post traced seven hardware generations and what each one allowed atmospheric scientists to do. The same survey omitt...
From Tubes to GPUs
Jagadish Shukla’s memoir, A Billion Butterflies, devotes a chapter to each of the seven generations of digital computer he used between 1962 and 2024. The ch...
A Billion Butterflies
In a village called Mirdha in the Ballia district of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, eighty-five miles east of Varanasi and approximately two hundred and ...
First Cray in Europe
On 24 October 1978 a Cray Research Inc. Cray-1A vector supercomputer, serial number nine of the company’s first commercial product line, arrived by lorry at ...
It Didn’t Make Weather
Some time in the spring or summer of 1975, in the central computer facility of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Ames Research Center, a la...
Freon and Wire
On 3 May 1971 a Control Data Corporation 7600 supercomputer, serial number twelve of seventy-five, was crated up in Chippewa Falls Wisconsin and trucked the ...
The Algorithm That Outlived Its Machine
In October 1967, the first IBM System/360 Model 91 was crated up in Poughkeepsie New York and shipped two hundred miles south to the Goddard Space Flight Cen...
Thirty-Four People, Including the Janitor
On 28 August 1963, six days after a small Minnesota company called Control Data Corporation had announced a new computer called the 6600, the chairman of the...
Serial Number One
In January 1960, in a basement classroom of Spanagel Hall on the campus of the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School at Monterey, a quiet thirty-four-year-old elect...
The Memory in Every Forecast
On 29 June 1948, walking through Harvard Yard, a young Chinese physicist named An Wang wrote in his notebook the principle that would make computer memory pr...
The Forecast on a VAX
In June 1986, two scientists at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and a graduate student published a paper in Nature claiming that they could predict El Nino ...
The Machine That Looked Like Furniture
On July 11, 1977, two refrigerated freight trucks pulled up at the Mesa Laboratory in Boulder. Inside one of them was a 5.5-ton C-shaped cylindrical computer...
He Made Walker Right
Gilbert Walker identified a statistical see-saw in tropical Pacific pressure in the 1920s and was dismissed as an empiricist without a theory. He died in Nov...
The Man Who Fit the Entire Ocean in Half a Megabyte
In 1969 a team at Princeton coupled the atmosphere and the ocean in a single computer program and ran it on a UNIVAC 1108 with half a megabyte of memory. The...
The Fireman and the Visionary
In 1961 a thirty-three-year-old Japanese physicist arrived at UCLA on a two-year fellowship. The problem he had been brought to solve was that climate models...
The Language That Refused to Die
In 2026, a language designed in 1954 for an eight-ton vacuum-tube machine still runs every operational weather forecast, every major climate model, and – thr...
The Empire That Its Creator Repudiated
In October 1977, John Backus walked to the podium at the ACM Annual Conference in Seattle to accept the Turing Award for inventing FORTRAN. He used his speec...
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...
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.
tech-diary
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...
Raspberry-Pi
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.
3D-Printing
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.
Code
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.
Academia
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.
AI
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.
Management
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.