Anyone who remembers the time before human beings stepped on the moon can recall the exhilaration of the challenge President John Kennedy made in 1961: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.”

Nothing in the interim has come close to the excitement of doing something so impossible on the face of it. But PathForward, the exascale computing challenge, comes close. We are going to make a computer so powerful and so fast that it will alter the way we live. If we succeed, life will be as different afterward as it was when we saw astronaut Neil Armstrong take “a giant leap for mankind.”

Earlier this year, the annual list of the world’s fastest computers came out: The Chinese are responsible for the top two slots, and the third is held by the Swiss, knocking the U.S. down to the fourth spot. Now, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded six American companies shares of a $258 million grant pool in the pursuit of exascale computing. If successful, the PathForward program will put the U.S. at the head of this list.

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“In those terrible places designed to rob us of our bodies and our spirits, we sustained each other.” — Philip Levine

Once upon a time, but not here, not now,
We sustained each other. Weak and varied,
We communed against the unbreakable dark.
It was not advantage we were seeking
But defiance in the presence of the truth.
We flourish then we fail and fade away.
Read the rest of this entry »

This story shall the good man teach his son. – William Shakespeare, Henry V

All the words they’ve bitten out of war
And written down with shaking hands and blood
Half-whiskey, or in grim mastery of self Read the rest of this entry »

My latest poems to be published are “Letters to David Berman and John Hodgman,” which were published in May in the New York publication, The Awl.

Read them and weep with comedy.

They go a little something… like this… Read the rest of this entry »

This poem, written in couplets, contains every word from the Oxford English Dictionary cloud of words which first appeared in Chaucer’s writing. 

Praise this poetical monster, the magician Chaucer,
Over the crude and caterwauling dotards
Who, insolent and annoying, amble fattishly,
Blocking past from future possibility.

They twitter on, their work an endless proem,
Lacking the poignant misery of a poem;
The only thing they agree on is altercation,
The pinhead’s angel-like enumeration,

Or worse, they fashion melancholic proverbs
on womanhood, or praise the jolliness of poppets
In notes of maudlin intellectuality,
Each unconvincing word said superstitiously.

No, every fleshy dalliance should be praised,
Wantonly outshine the Milky Way,
An ablution, each nymph narcotic, never sluttish,
Her femininity earthy, my enchantress;
Each good-night be Valentine’s day.