News update: I enjoyed giving my talk titled Work So Difficult that It Could Give the Computer a Headache at the 15th Biennial History of Astronomy Workshop at Notre Dame University this past June. Up next will be my assisting at the SC23 Supercomputer Conference in November in Denver, Colorado, as a member of the 35th Anniversary committee.
My member-contributed editorial, Processing & Production of Scientific Data: An historical marriage, now in a permanent divorce?, appeared in the May 2023 issue of CONNECT, the ACM SIGHPC newsletter.
I am revising a chapter from my 2022 dissertation for publication in American Catholic Studies to appear sometime next year. Titled Cattell’s Catholics: Who were these American Men (and Woman) of Science?, I probe the 1910 second edition of J. McKeen Cattell’s American Men of Science: A Biographical Directory with the aim of identifying individuals who, through their institutional affiliation, education, and other details, could be classified as likely being Catholic to gauge the gauge American Catholic higher education’s range and effectiveness during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Otherwise, I continue to weave a balance between my interests in history of science and supercomputing. In January my review of The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies appeared in H-Net Reviews in Humanities & Social Sciences. About the same time the December 2022 issue of CONNECT, the digital newsletter of the Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM SIGHPC), came out with my short column that offered a historical contrast between a 1922 hand-cranked calculator and the modern EXAFLOP supercomputer Frontier located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Future plans include attending the upcoming Biennial History of Astronomy Workshop to be held 21-25 June 2023 at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana.