Today’s example of design gone astray — the ostrich nap pillow
Archive for May 1, 2011
Hugo Awards nominees in ebook form
John Scalzi points out that you can join the World Science Fiction convention for $50 and get electronic versions of all the Hugo nominated works. Amazing deal.
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Books
Recent Books — Sawyer, Yu, Scalzi, Crummery, Bear, Lovesey
Another batch of largely escapist fare:
- Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer. A many-worlds story, featuring an Earth dominated by civilized Neanderthals. Engaging but not much new here. Amazon says 3.5 stars, Goodreads says 3.7. There are two more in the series but I won’t chase them down, I’d give this a 3.
- How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu. What if time travel was mundane and cheap, if everyone did it, if we screwed up our time traveling lives just like we do the rest of our lives? Nicely executed. Amazon says 3.5 stars, Goodreads says 3.3, but I enjoyed the exploration of cheap, available, screwed-up time travel. 4 stars.
- Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi. 4 stars at Amazon, 4.25 at Goodreads. Entertaining tale. Avatar meets John Grisham. Scalzi writes very comfortably. I’ll say 3.5 stars — entertaining but not memorable.
- Galore by Michael Crummey. Tried to go highbrow with this trendy pick but just boring. Tries to make ensemble of intriguing characters but not enough focus on any one character to make me care. And this story is all about characters. Amazon says 4.5 stars, Goodreads says 4.25, but I gave up on it. 1 star.
- Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear. A long trip to the stars in a generation ship goes very bad. Imagine “Lord of the Flies” with all kinds of advanced biotech. Amazon says just 3 stars, Goodreads says 3.2. 3 seems about right.
- The Last Detective by Peter Lovesey. My second Lovesey, another very good English detective tale. Very human characters all around. 4 stars on amazon, 3.75 on Goodreads. I’d say 4, I found it all to be quite touching for a detective tale.
Playing around with GPU programming
Been spending a lot of time playing around with GPU programming for scientific computing the last couple weeks. Fascinating stuff, GPUs are computational beasts. Some observations:
- If you want to get into it, GPGPU.org has boatloads of great info — news, tools, definitions, primers, etc etc etc. The place to start.
- There is a good chance you’ll end up using OpenCL as the device- and platform-independent interface to GPUs. Khronos.org has tons of great info and in particular, the OpenCL Reference Card. Good stuff.
- The OSX platform has awesome support for OpenCL within Xcode. Very easy to get up and going. Great sample code up at the Apple Developer web site.
- Also tons of samples from Nvidia.
- However…you may quickly hit a dead end on OSX because only the most expensive Mac Pros come with GPUs which will support double precision, and double precision is kind of necessary for scientific computing. Info on which Nvidia processors support double precision here. I could go whack around and build my own double precision math libraries for unsupported GPUs but what a pain that would be.
- So onto a PC, I happen to have one with an ATI HD 57xx which will support double precision. WAY harder to get working OpenCL code working on a Windows PC tho. After much wandering around, the “AMD SDK“http://developer.amd.com/gpu/AMDAPPSDK/Pages/default.aspx seems to be the best way to get working buildable OpenCL sample code. The most freaking obtuse make files ever tho, I am ripping them apart. But if you start with one of the sample code bases and duplicate it for your use, it works. (C++ by the way).
- However now I am currently blocked by limitations in the trig function implementations. Some discussion online that suggests that they are single precision only. And even the single precision results seem to have crappy precision. I will definitely have to build my own.
UPDATE: a friend points out that Amazon also offers an EC2-based instance with GPU capabilities. Worth a look
Recent books — Scalzi, Lovesey, Perry, McDevitt
A handful of escapist fare…
- The God Engines by John Scalzi. Vicious little tale of a civilization and the creatures they revere as gods. Amazon says 3.5 stars, Goodreads says 3.6. It is an interesting idea but not deeply developed, I’d say 3.5.
- Skeleton Hill by Peter Lovesey. A fine English countryside mystery. Horses, cemeteries, gardens, countryside, civil war reenactments. A humble insightful hardworking detective, prideful upper class protagonists. A good example of the form. Goodreads says 3.63, Amazon says 4.5 stars, I’d give it 4.
- Strip by Thomas Perry. Modern LA noir. Ok, showed more promise at beginning, but then lost some verve as the tale hopped around the ensemble cast. Would have been stronger to focus on one character, say the detective. Amazon says 3.5 stars, Goodreads says 3.44, I’d say 3.
- Echo by Jack McDevitt. Not his strongest effort. People running around the arm of the galaxy for just a modest payoff. If you are really committed to McDevitt then it is a fine story but if not, well. Amazon says 4 stars, Goodreads says 3.68, I’d have to say 3 tops.
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Books
Recent Books — Gone-Away World, Half-Made World, InterWorld, Underworld, The Word for the World is Forest
WIth hundreds of paper and ebooks in my reading queue, I need themes to decide what to read next. Why not books with “world” in the title? Presumably they all have some reasonable degree of ambition.
- The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway. Post-apocalyptic story of a world fantastically scrambled by some kind of quantum/entropy bomb. Engaging. 4 stars on Amazon, 4.14 on goodreads, it is a solid 4.
- The Half-Made World by Felix Gilman. A strange world of western expansion and industrial development gone awry. The archetypes of the Wild West and the Industrial Revolution walk the earth, driven by demons, fighting for dominance, against a never-ending western frontier. Even more engaging. 3/78 on goodreads, 4 stars on Amazon, also a 4 here.
- InterWorld by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves. Nice YA science fiction title with all the classic memes. Reminds me of the titles I got hooked on — early asimov, heinlein, etc. 3.46 on goodreads, 4 stars on Amazon, I’ll give it 3.5.
- Underworld by Don DeLillo. A more literary book than these others, written in a purposefully disjointed style that probably reflects true stream-of-consciousness of people. But I didn’t care about the characters and the plot didn’t advance well. Gave up 25% of way through. Amazon says 3.5 stars, goodreads 3.9, i can’t give it more than 2 stars.
- The Word for the World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin. The story of Avatar, but subtler, more understated. and written some 30 years before Avatar. Goodreads says 3.75 stars, amazon says 4.5 stars. It is a solid 3.5 but the author has of course written much better since then.