We’ve seen a lot of action over the past academic year here in Champaign-Urbana. Gnat swarms, “clout-gate,” leadership changes, budget woes, grad student strikes and furloughs: 2009-2010 was without a doubt an eventful year. But instead of dwelling on the preceding months, I’m going to take a look ahead in the spirit of hopefulness and optimism.

At some point in the next year, the University’s multi-million dollar supercomputer, Blue Waters, will be, as they say in Star Wars, “fully operational.” In order to make Blue Waters a relevant asset to our campus and our state, I have a few problems we should have it solve:

Enlighten us on the mystery of Ron Zook’s continued employment. Surely a computer capable of performing trillions of calculations per second will be able to shed some light on this enigma.

Locate an extra $500 million or so lying around Illinois. Springfield isn’t giving it to us, so I guess we’ll have to find it ourselves.

Develop an advance algorithm to find and capture the campus muggers. Non-descript 20-something creepers won’t stand a chance against Blue Waters’ mighty microchips!

Since our supercomputer will be working on predicting weather patterns, we should make turn it into a weather-modification machine. Enjoy those 75 degree temps in the middle of January? Thank Blue Waters!

Jared is a junior in LAS.