Science ← A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way

Coming to your car in 2025

Feb

2012

“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.

Dec

2011

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. The bioengineering article didn’t inspire. Nothing else did anything for me. I usually like the ...

I just ordered my Lytro camera.

Oct

2011

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 to a full software-defined lens — I first wondered about such a lens in 2003, ...

Recent nonfiction — Lithium, Jetpacks, Space Station, Revolutionary War, Spintronics

Oct

2011

“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 topic. Amazon gives it 4 stars, I’d say 3.5, would have liked a little more ...

View your body as a democracy, and the human cells are in the minority.

Sep

2011

“Mind-Altering Bugs”:http://slashdot.org/story/11/08/29/2026226/Gut-Bacteria-Exert-Mind-Control.

Scientific computing and the cloud

Aug

2011

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; MPI to distribute compute load over clusters of machines; OpenCL for handing general purpose computation ...

Link cleanup

Aug

2011

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. * “A one page explanation of the Higgs boson”:http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2011/07/26/the-higgs-boson-a-one-page-explanation/ * On the lighter side, “Bacon ...

Playing around with GPU programming

May

2011

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 — news, tools, definitions, primers, etc etc etc. The place to start. * There is ...

Math software sources

Apr

2011

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

Apr

2011

* “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 a crappy day trader, I always forget to include relativistic effects.

Computational Fluid Dynamics – my winter quarter adventure

Jan

2011

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 (CFD) is a set of methodologies to solve numerically the governing equations of fluid motion. ...

Year end link clean up

Dec

2010

* “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 just always use the default in Aperture but perhaps I should branch out. * “AR.Drone”:http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/12/01/ar-drone-torn-down/. ...

Silk and Timber electronics

Aug

2010

“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

Jun

2010

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 “Jython”:http://www.jython.org/ for ImageJ scripting and “NumPy/SciPy”:http://numpy.scipy.org/ for numeric/array processing * There are a ton of ...

Cannon roundup — EMP cannon, Shock cannon, Vortex cannon

Jan

2010

* “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 I ever thought about building at Halloween.

Science reading

Jan

2010

* “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/. * “World’s smallest snowman”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/6724969/Scientists-create-the-worlds-smallest-snowman.html * “Ancient computer”:http://io9.com/5441889/advanced-imaging-reveals-a-computer-1500-years-ahead-of-its-time — we are not so clever as we ...

Grabbag of interesting articles on math, econ, science, design, web

Nov

2009

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 giant magma chamber under the state of Washington. Probably not but a great disaster movie ...

Materials/Science grabbag

Oct

2009

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 Grass”:http://www.materialsviews.com/matview/display/en/1102/TEXT. Nano scale fluid handling tech is pretty awesome. * “Fantastic Solar System Photos”:http://www.smithsonianmag.com/multimedia/photos/?c=y&articleID=59247082&page=1. Humbling ...

Thinking that intrigues me

Sep

2009

* 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 overcome for broader use. * Plasmobots — “their previous research has already proved the ability ...

Quick software/hardware trial notes

Aug

2009

* 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 router was reasonable; getting through two was nearly impossible; getting through the three I had ...