Congratulations to @rstutsman for winning the #UofU College of Engineering Outstanding Teaching Award, and to @carboxylman (who works on #CloudLab, #PowderWireless, and other projects) for a CoE Outstanding Staff Award!

Seeing this poster sent me down a rabbit hole of remembering some things that I had forgotten about #Utah, and teaching me some new things that I hadn't previously known:

My first thought was: this is weird, why was there a Typographical Association in (Great) Salt Lake City in 1856, less than 10 years after White people first settled here in any numbers‽ Seems like a weird priority for a religious frontier town. And it's big enough to have a festival? With dancing! and supper! Maybe 'Typography' at the time was understood to include 'typesetting'? That might make sense, press might be a priority.

But no: this organization was for the promotion of the Deseret Alphabet[1]. See, the Mormon pioneers had a plan to fix English spelling by creating a new orthography for the language. They are not the only ones who wanted to do this, and their Deseret Alphabet was based on Pitman's shorthand[2]. One of the weird twists in this story is that the folks who developed the Deseret Alphabet were the Board of Regents for what eventually became the Utah System of Higher Education (the #UofU and its siblings). That's right, other state schools, do YOU have your own alphabet?[3]

The other truly amazing thing on this poster is the price. It may be hard to read so: the price is listed as "$3 per Couple ... Additional Lady $1". Why would that be? Could it be - polygamy‽

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deseret_alphabet
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitman_shorthand
[3] The Deseret Alphabet never really caught on, though the Regents did attempt to get some local schools to teach it. It looks like the only book ever published in it was the Book of Mormon. But it's now in Unicode!

Today in secret tunnel content: I'm now pretty sure the first steam tunnels were built in 1902, a year after the #UofU moved to its current location (previously, it was in downtown #SLC). My evidence for this is a photo from 1919 showing a heating plant directly northeast of the Park building (where INSCC is today), and a mention of that heating plant in the 1901-1902 general catalog; this year mentions the steam plant as a thing that will exist, the 1902-1903 one changes the language to imply that it's finished. I assume if they had the heating plant, they had the tunnels in place to move the steam.

With a bit of warmer, sunny weather this morning, it was a great chance to take a quick hike with some staff and students in the foothills above the #UofU campus. It was somewhat sunny when we started, and we got back just as the graupel started falling.

(Photo is panoramic, click to see the whole thing.)

X96

I was reminiscing about my time at the #UofU studying #ComputerGraphics while listening to the latest #AlternativeRock (which was mainly from Grunge bands like #StoneTemplePilots, #PearlJam, #Nirvana, #SoundGarden, etc.). I was fortunate because a new #AltRock station formed during my first year in #SaltLakeCity - #X96.

Amazingly, the station still exists. It now plays "Classic" Alt Rock... ouch! 1991 doesn't seem that long ago 😅

https://onlineradiobox.com/us/kxrk/?cs=us.kxrk&played=1

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KXRK

#UofU #SLC "U of U ALERT: Significant winter storm Monday, April 3, 2023 Sun Apr 02, 2023 7:53 PM

In advance of severe winter weather beginning Monday morning, April 3, faculty and instructors are advised to move Monday classes online if possible. " #UTwx #winter #storm #Utah #SaltLakeCity

💡 IEEE Milestone Dedication - Celebrating the Utah Graphics Pioneers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUFp6sjKbkE

#ComputerGraphics #CG #CGI #VFX #GameDev #Gaming #Animation #ComputerAnimation #DigitalArt #Artist #VR #AR #MR #XR #RayTracing #PathTracing #Rendering #RealtimeRendering #3D #CAE #ArchitecturalVisualization #VirtualProduction #GPU #ILM #Pixar #SGI #Adobe #Apple #Atari #IEEE #UniversityOfUtah #UofU

Last week, I ran a panel with @dave_andersen and Cody Cutler covering the history of the Flux Research Group at the #UofU and testbeds like #Emulab, #CloudLab, and #PowderWireless . The video is now up: https://www.youtube.com/live/LUFp6sjKbkE?feature=share&t=15360

(This is a particular timestamp in a video that covers the whole day of talks about the 50-year history of the Kahlert School of Computing and by various alumni.)

There were some great talks today at the #UofU Kahlert School of Computing 50th anniversary celebration. In these pictures: Mary Hall, the current director of the School, some of our teaching legends (Erin Parker, Dave Hanscom, and Joe Zachary), past and present architecture folks (Rajeev Balasubramonian, Chuck Seitz, Al Davis, and Duane Call), and alumna Telle Whitney, who co-founded the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.

Today we're celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Kahlert School of Computing at the #UofU (founded as the Department of Computer Science in 1973) We have lots of alumni, former faculty, etc. gathering

congrats to the #UofU Women;s basketball team! sweet 16 here we come! #MarchMadness #UUtah

The Tanner Humanities Center at the #UofU puts on amazing talks, I've been to a bunch of them this year - I highly recommend them for anyone in the #SLC area

I took some folks on a tour of the #UofU downtown #datacenter, which houses part of #CloudLab (along with a great many other things.)

Pictured: Aleks, one of the primary CloudLab administrators and the person who works most directly with the hardware. Hannah, who has been doing #HCI studies of how people use CloudLab (thanks to those who have participated!); Pavani, who is working on fine-grained measurements of latency and building a pseudo-layer1 switch using #P4; and Sachin, who is working on the #security of #ssh and network security processes more broadly.

We have spots available for undergrads to spend the summer working on "Trust and Reproducibility of Intelligent Computation" at the #UofU. Details at https://paralab.github.io/treu-web/

As any Ph.D. student knows, the hardest problem in computer science is getting enough faculty in the same place at the same time to form a committee. With that in mind, please enjoy this rare photo of all of the OS and networking faculty at the #UofU together.

We have renders of the new building for the Kahlert School of Computing at the #UofU !

If everything goes well, in a few years we'll be moving in to the Price Computing and Engineering Building. We've been growing so fast that we've run out of office, lab, and classroom space in the two buildings we occupy now (MEB and WEB). This will be a major upgrade in both size and quality of the building.

I was going to say that my office better have a good view of the mountains, but frankly it looks like all of the offices will.

Images provided by GSBS+LMN Architects. (UW folks, if this looks familiar, it's the same architects that did the Gates Center.)

Yesterday we took a group of folks from industry, government and the press on a tour of some of the #PowderWireless infrastructure.

This is one of five cell-like towers we own on the #UofU campus. (This one is on Wasatch Drive near the roundabout, for those familiar with the area.) These (plus one more on a building) are placed so that they cover one of our campus bus routes; the buses have end-user-type devices on them that can connect to these towers.

The cabinet at the bottom hosts a collection of software-defined radios that #wireless #research folks use to build their own customized #5G networks - or, because they are #SDR, really, anything, including #spectrum monitors, #LoRA networks, channel sounding, etc.

There is some compute available right there roadside, plus these are connected by fiber to some big datacenters nearby including #Emulab and #CloudLab.

https://powderwireless.net/dense

I'm an unapologetic #infrastructure nerd, so I'm glad this map exists:

https://atlas.eia.gov/apps/895faaf79d744f2ab3b72f8bd5778e68/explore

This is the #electricity infrastructure in the US. You can look at the transmission lines in your area, look at generation capacity, etc. For example, there are two cogeneration plants in my area that I didn't know about, including a small one on the #UofU campus that's part of the high-temperature water system we use for heating. You can click though to get details of historical generation, etc.

There are also versions of this map for natural gas, etc.

As for just how much of an infrastructure nerd I am: when my kid was around 6, I took them on an electrical tour. We started from an outlet, to the panel, to the meter, followed the line to a substation, and followed the transmission lines to a generating plant on the west side of #SLC . This stuff is total catnip for me.

The son of the original owner was a professor of anatomy at the #UofU for 50 years, (E. I. Hashimoto) and ran a medical practice in out of the basement. A lot of items from this practice are still there!

An exhibit about E. I. Hashimoto: https://uofuhealth.utah.edu/newsroom/news/2019/09/edward-hashimoto

An interview of Joy Hashimoto, Dr. Hashimoto's wife and national chair of the YWCA.: https://collections.lib.utah.edu/details?id=835018

#history #utah

I was just doing an end-of-year donation and would like to highlight a place I support every year: Hôpital Albert Schweitzer Haiti: https://hashaiti.org/

This is a healthcare system in the Arbonite Valley, an area with particularly low access to healthcare in one of the countries with the lowest healthcare access in the Americas. It's also a place that has had to deal with, on top of COVID, natural disasters, political instability, etc.

The reason I came to know about this organization is that Jay Lepreau grew up, in part, there: his father was a long-time doctor at the hospital. Jay was my PhD advisor, and founded the Flux Research group at the #UofU that I now help to lead. When Jay passed away, this was one of the two organizations that his family requested donations to (the other being SUWA).

This is a place that deserves your support.