qwghlm.co.uk : because all the other domain names were taken

One of the nice things about Thinking Digital is that some of it is unashamedly, gloriously geeky. Two talks in the middle of yesterday basked in that. The first was by Tara Shears of Liverpool University and CERN, who gets to play with the greatest scientific toy ever made, the Large Hadron Collider. Me jealous. Tara covered a very brief study of particle physics and the Standard Model, before showing off the sheer awesome power & capability of the LHC. She was amazingly lucid and engaging as a presenter – it reminded me of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures – and shows you don’t have to resort to the “OMG it’s going to end the world” sensationalism that was in the press coverage. If all our physics teachers were like her we wouldn’t be worrying about a shortage of decent scientists.

The sheer amount of data that CERN produces is in the hundreds of petabytes, so a special distributed computing network is needed to help process it. But that’s not just the preserve of CERN – Simone Brunozzi of Amazon was here to talk about cloud computing, or distributed computing services for all. The parallel he drew up was of electricity – factories used to have their own in-house power generation, but eventually moved to a national grid; cloud computing does the same for processor power. Simone talked a lot of good stuff – of creating applications that are robust, scalable and on demand. And scalable is difficult – it’s not just a case of throwing more processors at it, it takes a lot of clever management and architecture around it. In an age where we’re going for mobile and lightweight devices, and universal broadband is becoming a reality, then I can see the justification of cloud computing, but it’s still not going to be a household name – its future seems more b2b and quietly in the background. However, I worry as and when the first major cloud security compromise happens (which it will, security is not easy either and I thought Simone was a bit dismissive), and the privacy implications of who’s able to look at your data when it’s uploaded to a cloud application.

Curtis Wong of Microsoft Research showed off their geeky toy, WorldWide Telescope. What struck me was how great it was having free content (everything produced by NASA is public domain) and with something that allowed people to create their own content; the video of a six-year-old kid talking you through his journey through the stars made me think – damn, I would have loved this as a kid. So much better than just a poster of the solar system on your bedroom wall. It’s not the only such software out there – there’s Celestia for example, but the community & user-generated content aspects make WWT a more fun prospect. That said, I have my quibbles with WWT – the web version’s in Silverlight and no Mac desktop version – come on Microsoft, you must know that’s such a clich�… :) There’s a TED video if you want to see more. Speaking of which, more TED-like stuff in the next post…