February 21, 2019
The Pursuit of Productivity
I’m a person who’s only satisfied if I feel I’m being productive. I like figuring things out. I like making things. And I want to do as much of that as I can. And part of being able to do that is to have the best personal infrastructure I can. Over the years I’ve been steadily accumulating and implementing “personal infrastructure hacks” for myself. Some of them are, yes, quite nerdy. But they certainly help me be productive. And maybe in time more and more of them will become mainstream, as a few already have.
January 21, 2021
It All Started with Feynman Diagrams
Any serious calculation in particle physics takes a lot of algebra. Maybe it doesn’t need to. But with the methods based on Feynman diagrams that we know so far, it does. And in fact it was these kinds of calculations that first led me to use computers for symbolic computation. That was in 1976, which by now is a long time ago. But actually the idea of doing Feynman diagram calculations by computer is even older.
So far as I know it all started from a single conversation on the terrace outside the cafeteria of the CERN particle physics lab near Geneva in 1962. Three physicists were involved. And out of that conversation there emerged three early systems for doing algebraic computation. One was written in Fortran. One was written in LISP. And one was written in assembly language.
High school students from 33 schools will be competing for $5,000 in prize money from 18 employers in the second New Mexico Governors STEM Challenge. Hosted and organized by New Mexico State University, the Los Alamos National Labs Foundation, New Mexico Department of Public Education and New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions, this event will be entirely virtual Saturday, Dec. 12.
Ten-person student teams have submitted solutions to the NMSU formulated question, How can you combine New Mexicos natural resources with technology to address regional/global needs? Employer partners have provided judges who will rate the solutions based on quality, creativity, presentation, and how they match up with skills that employers need for future hires in their own industries. Selected teams will receive $500 per student in cash.