Coming to your car in 2025
“Bessel beam headlights with Virtual Ghost Imaging”:http://apl.aip.org/resource/1/applab/v100/i6/p061126_s1?isAuthorized=no — perfect visibility in rain, fog, or snow! OK might be a reach but really cool stuff.
The future of computing is apparently really boring.
So I read the “NYTimes Future of Computing Science section”:http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/the-future-of-computing/?src=twrhp today and was pretty underwhelmed. The presentation of the articles was incredibly dull with almost no visualization. The articles themselves were mostly soporific. The quantum computing article told me nothing. […]
I just ordered my Lytro camera.
Available February/March next year. The “Lytro”:http://www.Lytro.com features a technology they call “light field” — they grab sufficient photon data at capture time to allow refocusing, zooming, etc as a post-capture option. The Lytro is a simple step on the way […]
Recent nonfiction — Lithium, Jetpacks, Space Station, Revolutionary War, Spintronics
“Out of Orbit” and “Unlikely Allies” are the stars of the group. * “Bottled lightning: Superbatteries, Electric Cars, and the New Lithium Economy”:amazon by Seth Fletcher. Decent nontechnical book about the lithium battery and lithium production. Entertaining intro to the […]
View your body as a democracy, and the human cells are in the minority.
“Mind-Altering Bugs”:http://slashdot.org/story/11/08/29/2026226/Gut-Bacteria-Exert-Mind-Control.
Scientific computing and the cloud
This year I’ve had a chance to experiment with tools for compute intensive applications. In particular, tools that harness the profusion of inexpensive CPU/GPU cycles available — OpenMP for multi-threading on single machines so that multiple cores can be leveraged; […]
Link cleanup
A bag of stuff I’ve read recently that was compelling: * “Coffee as economic health indicator”:http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2010/05/coffee_as_city.html. Yay Seattle! Contrast with… * “World Class Orchestras”:http://reason.com/archives/2010/05/24/how-to-save-cleveland * “McKean’s Inversion”:http://whatever.scalzi.com/2011/08/11/mckeans-inversion/. Whatever you publicly espouse to be — you probably aren’t. * “Wicked Problems”:http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/07/wicked-1.html. […]
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”:http://gpgpu.org/ has boatloads of great info […]
Math software sources
Saving for later reference…. * “Netlib”:http://netlib.org/ * “NIST”:http://gams.nist.gov/ * “Trilinos”:http://trilinos.sandia.gov/ * “PETSc”:http://www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/petsc-as/ * “OpenCL”:http://www.khronos.org * “Nividia OpenCL”:http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/opencl/sdk/website/samples.html * “Apple OpenCL”:http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/search/?q=opencl * “NERSC”:http://www.nersc.gov/nusers/resources/software/. ACTS stuff dead?
Interesting — Roundest Object, Sonic Black Hole, Relativistic Arbitrage
* “Roundest Object In The World”:http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2011/02/14/roundest-object-in-the-world-the-avogadro-project/. I could so bowl 300 with one of these. * “Sonic Black Hole”:http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01-physicists-sonic-black-hole-lab.html. Bring one of these to your next meeting, watch hilarity ensue. * “Relativistic Statistical Arbitrage”:http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/04/relativistic-statistical-arbitrage.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+marginalrevolution%2Ffeed+%28Marginal+Revolution%29. This is why I would make […]
Computational Fluid Dynamics – my winter quarter adventure
This course may kill me as I know nothing of fluid dynamics, but I am hoping the computational focus will play in my favor. I’m not so interested in macro-scale behavior but more focused on nano-scale applications. Computational Fluid Dynamics […]
Year end link clean up
* “Poor Halo play prompts stabbing threat”:http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattle911/archives/231642.asp. Doesn’t seem unreasonable. I’ve heard campers threatened with worse. * “How Secure Is My Password”:http://howsecureismypassword.net/. No idea how accurate, but fun. 17 thousand years for my typical password. * “Rich on photobooks”:http://www.tongfamily.com/archives/2010/12/photobooks-for-christmas/. I […]
Silk and Timber electronics
“Paper and Lignin-based RFID tags”:http://www.physorg.com/news200760151.html. “Silk electronic metamaterials”:http://www.physorg.com/news200841751.html. Seems like we are not far away from having processing power embedded in damn near everything. Not lots of processing power, but enough to do identification and limited sensing. Interesting times.
Moving off of Matlab for numeric/image processing
Reardon abused me (not really) for still using Matlab and goaded me to look into the ImageJ world. So I am learning. Seems like I need to get smart on * “ImageJ”:http://rsbweb.nih.gov/ij/ and the “Fiji”:http://pacific.mpi-cbg.de/wiki/index.php/Main_Page distribution * Python derivatives like […]
Cannon roundup — EMP cannon, Shock cannon, Vortex cannon
* “EMP cannon”:http://www.physorg.com/news183296601.html. Mount one of these babies on your trunk and eliminate that tailgating problem. * “Shock Cannon”:http://www.physorg.com/news183142646.html and here is how to get that solicitor off your porch. * “Vortex Cannon video”:http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/07/gas-powered_vortex_cannon_as_big_ba.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890. Probably a bit more powerful than […]
Science reading
* “The Year In Materials”:http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/24229/?a=f * “Chromoscope”:http://www.chromoscope.net/#. Fascinating, there is a lot going on we can’t see. * “Massive white dwarf may go nova, endangering life on earth”:http://www.physorg.com/news182067005.html. Maybe the Russians can go fix this after they master “deflecting asteroids”:http://www.universetoday.com/2009/12/30/russia-may-head-mission-to-deflect-asteroid-apophis/. […]
Grabbag of interesting articles on math, econ, science, design, web
No theme here other than “stuff I happened across recently” Terry Tao math blog. Brain stretching. How Goldman profited on housing crash. Don’t know how reliable this source is but disturbing. Controversy about whether there is or is not a […]
Materials/Science grabbag
No time to blog, fall quarter starting, and travelling too. Dump of stuff that is interesting: * “Ultimate Productivity Blog”:http://productiveblog.tumblr.com/. I think that is clear. * “Paintable transistors”:http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122605160/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0. Semiconducting polymer stable when applied at room temp, cool. * “Hydrophobic Nano […]
Thinking that intrigues me
* Touchable holography. Uses tracking cameras and directed ultrasound to create interaction and physical sensation. Cool demo. * Algortihmatic – online library of algorithms and IDE. Cool tho limited. * The LED’s dark secret. Droop in LED performance to be […]
Quick software/hardware trial notes
* WPTouch plugin for wordpress is awesome. check out theludwigs.com from your iphone. * Messing around with Slingbox finally. Works well tho I had to massively reconfig home network to get rid of routers — configuring to get through one […]
