Rod Van Meter

Quantum computer & network architect; Caltech, USC, Keio. Husband, father. 量子コンピュータ、量子ネットワーク。カリフォルニア工科大学、南カリフォルニア大学、慶應義塾大学。父。he/him.
Personal account & opinions

pronouns: he/him
Research group: https://aqua.sfc.wide.ad.jp/
blog: https://rdvlivefromtokyo.blogspot.com/
BlueSky: Rod Van Meter (npub1ejj…tcr8)

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Last Notes

2026-01-23 08:58:18 UTC

Today I learned: if you translate the Japanese word for ambergris one kanji at a time, it's "dragon drool smell".

2026-01-12 22:58:17 UTC

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with only 130 tenure-track faculty, we offer over 600 separate courses, and overall about a thousand including the numerous sections (in American lingo) of a few core courses, so the office has a lot of legwork to do, including classroom scheduling and chasing me down when I haven't done my syllabus on time or haven't fixed something they asked me to.

2026-01-12 22:54:01 UTC

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big items the office is looking for are student screening method for limited-enrollment courses, whether there is a final exam, whether you have announced language support (Japanese or English as main language and support for those who prefer the other language), and whether there are filled-in topics for all fifteen lectures.

2026-01-12 22:50:32 UTC

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oh, and my class doesn't start until April, but we have to submit syllabuses by end of this month. The office goes through them looking for various administrative bits (which are more automated now than they used to be as the syllabus system has more separate fields that must all be filled in than it used to). They don't evaluate content at all.
Then syllabuses are published to students sometime between end of the month and start of classes

2026-01-12 22:46:47 UTC

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Active Networks and all that.
That's particularly relevant to my research, since our RuleSet approach to quantum networking is more than just SDN.

2026-01-12 22:45:00 UTC

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thanks for the introductions. Nice to meet you both!
The boundary between distributed and parallel is sometimes fuzzy. My class is mostly distributed, but we cover topics like Chandy's snapshots. What interests me about Vera Rubin is the in-network computation, which arguably goes back to Dave Tennenhouse and others (Randy Katz, maybe?) in the 1990s.

2026-01-12 05:18:03 UTC

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I'm thinking about adding something on achieving performance at data center scale.
It's not software, but the Jupiter networking papers from Google really catch my attention.
And I'd love to have something on the distributed in-network computation of inference a la the new Nvidia Vera Rubin.

2026-01-12 05:16:08 UTC

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while I have your attention, it's syllabus season again for Design and Implementation of System Software, my master's-level seminar-format class where we read about thirty key papers from the history of distributed systems. Any new suggestions?

2026-01-12 05:13:30 UTC

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trying to remember why snorerot13 thinks I know gait researchers...
Our campus has a sports tech guy who researches the forces on Olympic hammer throwers and trampoline athletes, but doubt he's interested in the socks of middle-aged non-athletes.
Or maybe there is more to Ethan than I remember?

2025-02-10 11:15:37 UTC

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what's past Centrum Silver? Gold, Platinum, Frankincense and Myrrh? I'm probably up at Myrrh.
First live action SF movie I saw in a theater was likely Escape from Witch Mountain.

2025-02-09 18:01:59 UTC

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I was whelmed by her first book, but she clearly has a lot of potential.

2025-02-09 17:58:41 UTC

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when that happens to me, it usually means either I either hate the characters or the writing. Newitz can definitely write, so...

2025-02-09 15:15:30 UTC

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Trying to tie AI to humanity's biggest leaps is a valiant goal, but they just uncritically ascribe almost arbitrary powers to future AIs, which makes any analysis trite.
I don't expect that trio to write a technical deep dive, but saying AI will find alternatives to fossil fuels, solve fusion, and build great cities is just nonsense.

2025-02-09 15:14:54 UTC

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It's really only about 20% about AI, the rest is either context or fluff, depending on your point of view. Chinese history, Magellan, Middle Eastern history, von Neumann, Einstein.

2025-02-09 15:13:50 UTC

@npub1ny7…uv57 I skimmed Genesis, the book by Kissinger, Craig Mundie (Microsoft, former CTO?), and Eric Schmitt (Google). Published posthumously, but it really does read like it was written by everyone's favorite war criminal.

2025-02-09 15:12:49 UTC

@npub1ny7…uv57 Annalee Newitz' Autonomous was a win, thanks to @npub1nqd…42m6 for the rec. It started out feeling a little shallow, but just kept building depth. Thought provoking and well written, with mostly good characters, plot and dialog. I would have liked just a touch more back story on the main villain. This world has a lot to explore, if Newitz wants to go there again.

2025-02-01 13:53:12 UTC

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I already had the sample of that downloaded, but hadn't read it and it fell off my radar. Will give it a shot!

2025-01-31 11:52:02 UTC

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I reread A Fire Upon the Deep last year, and it was good, and I read another of his that's considered a definitive cyberpunk (Something Names), and that's enough Vinge for now.
(I met him once. He was the CS prof of a friend of mine in San Diego. Nice guy.)

2025-01-31 10:09:02 UTC

I need a good cyberpunk novel. (Not something I often say.) Recommendations?
@npub1ny7…uv57

2025-01-26 22:11:22 UTC

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that said, the cost in dollars, time, carbon, and wear and tear on the body is tremendous, and everyone knows it. There are constant discussions about the long-term future of the meetings and how to do better.

2025-01-26 22:09:49 UTC

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as an example of serendipity, our latest paper, on the Q-Fly interconnect, was literally triggered by me learning about the Dragonfly interconnect in an IETF session a few years ago.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.09299
#quantumcomputing

2025-01-26 22:06:23 UTC

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the value of being there in person is the constant interaction in the hallways, receptions, breakfasts, lunches, dinners and bar sessions. It's an intense week, with lots of relationship building, franker discussion complete with body language (most good, some bad), and quite a bit of serendipity and unexpected learning.

2025-01-26 22:02:53 UTC

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so the working group meetings themselves are about as good as they could possibly be, thanks to a small company called MeetEcho.

2025-01-26 22:01:21 UTC

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I don't remember exactly, but I think typically about a third of registrations are for remote participation.

2025-01-26 22:00:35 UTC

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IETF busts its collective butt to make the meetings as accessible as possible across many axes, with real-time, highly accurate captions on a screen in the room as well as online, and the best suite of tools for hybrid meetings I have ever seen. Even the mic line for discussion/questions is integrated between onsite and off-site.

2025-01-25 22:23:31 UTC

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so, what to do...
Not a problem with an easy answer.

2025-01-25 22:22:53 UTC

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and of course censorship and limited Internet access is a no-go for many.

2025-01-25 22:22:11 UTC

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IETF, to the best of my knowledge, has never been to the Middle East because of Israeli-Arab visa issues.

2025-01-25 22:20:34 UTC

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and the other meetings are tricky for legal reasons. In some countries, you can be arrested for being gay, or if you are gay and travel with a spouse or child who needs medical care, you might be refused parental or spousal rights at the hospital.

2025-01-25 22:18:12 UTC

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and there are a limited number of venues and local hosts willing and able to do the work to host a thousand people.

2025-01-25 22:17:20 UTC

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this has been a problem since 9/11.
But just moving to Canada isn't a perfect solution. People with certain immigration status in the US can't LEAVE the US without govt permission that generally isn't forthcoming, so they get left out.

2025-01-25 22:14:06 UTC

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there are no easy answers on this. IETF, which meets 3x/yr (usually once in North America, once in Europe and once in Asia), struggles to find the right balance.

2025-01-15 02:26:42 UTC

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I'm on my phone and I don't see that. Will double check when I have my laptop open.

2025-01-14 23:45:46 UTC

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thanks. So it's not possible for people to identify by eye that it's RSS enabled on Blogger? I suppose I should add something to the profile or something then.

2025-01-14 23:02:41 UTC

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mine's available, according to my Settings, but how you can tell from looking at it, I dunno. I'm in favor of RSS but simply never got hooked on it.
https://rdvlivefromtokyo.blogspot.com/

2025-01-10 14:30:08 UTC

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the audio reading may be by the author himself, and it's perfect.

2025-01-10 13:34:09 UTC

@npub1ny7…uv57 I'm listening to Ben MacIntyre's A Spy Among Friends, and it's equal parts hilarious and horrifying.

2024-12-23 13:48:05 UTC

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I thought Embassytown was good, but definitely took effort. Kraken was an easier read but not as much my cup of tea.
The City and the City, though? One of my favorite novels of all time.

2024-11-23 02:45:09 UTC

PSA: single photons are absolutely stone cold lunatic.

2024-11-21 09:47:20 UTC

All right, all right, I'm getting the pattern here... -町 -cho... -cho... -cho... ...-cho...
...got it...
.
.
.
-machi.
Wait, what?
https://cdn.famichiki.jp/media_attachments/files/113/520/307/795/501/724/original/9e96b228cd69fb07.jpg

2024-11-14 01:38:42 UTC

Wow, a great quote:
"The most profound technologies are
those that disappear. They weave
themselves into the fabric of everyday
life until they are indistinguishable
from it." Mark Weiser

2024-10-23 01:52:10 UTC

THEY DISCONTINUED THE ENGLISH SUICA APP???
Trying to help some visiting friends make their lives a little more convenient, and failing...
https://kevinchen.co/blog/create-suica-for-apple-pay/

2024-09-04 00:12:34 UTC

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yep. So hard to find the local save anymore!

2024-09-01 13:48:38 UTC

Apparently, Athens, Ohio has a Tim Horton's and they have sweetened ice tea. Cultural fusion!

2024-09-01 01:12:24 UTC

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I post probably 80% of what I read on Goodreads, but with minimal reviews. It's one of the few things I have done fairly consistently. I like having the list.

2024-09-01 00:52:40 UTC

Anybody here on either Bookwyrm or Storygraph? I'm tired of how badly Goodreads sucks. If Bookwyrm, suggestions for an instance?

2024-08-24 16:41:15 UTC

I dreamed that I was with some members of my group near the beach, and we decided that one of us needed surgery RIGHT NOW, so we were trying to clean out a space in a sandy convenience store to do it. Not sure who was going to do the surgery, but I'm not the type of doctor who helps people. #dreams

2024-07-31 22:21:51 UTC

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the men won bronze, silver and gold in 1964, 1968 and 1972, then completely cratered for approximately five decades.
Ishikawa is the best individual Japanese man in decades, but Sekita drives that team like a Formula 1 car. He's gotta be one of the best setters on the planet, and at 175cm he can actually block, as he showed in the penultimate point last night.