Tag: Science

Programming and Scaling

tele-TASK Video: Programming and Scaling.

If you’ve heard me talk about DSLs but just haven’t quite been sold on the idea yet, watch this video. In fact, watch it anyway. Dr. Alan Kay gives a very inspirational and interesting speech about the past, present and future of Computer Science, technological innovation and creativity. The grand finale ties all of his ideas together in a beautiful example of the power of domain specific languages.

I found myself nodding throughout this entire presentation and even though I didn’t know where it was going I could see how it applied to my own personal research in meta#. Thank you Dr. Kay, I may never need to spend my time explaining the why’s of DSLs again, I will simply forward them to this presentation.

MemeCats: Chemistry Cat Strikes Again (via Lolcats ‘n’ Funny Pictures of Cats – I Can Has Cheezburger?)

MemeCats: Chemistry Cat Strikes Again Schrodinger's cat walks into a bar… …and doesn't Calcium plus magnesium equals lolz. … Read More

via Lolcats 'n' Funny Pictures of Cats – I Can Has Cheezburger?

Pew Research Science Poll

This quiz was surprisingly easy for the results listed below. How much do you know about some of the most current science topics?

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These results are very interesting. The question on Stem Cells seems to have the worst success rate overall. I find it interesting that women out score men on questions about over the counter drugs (#1 & #10) but not on any of the other questions except stem cells. Also, I’m really surprised about people Ages 65+ not doing much better than this. The results of #9 are also very surprising, that one sounds like a no-brainer to me but it seems a lot of people have no idea how lasers work.

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Xbox speeds up research results

There is an interesting article on the BBC today about some researchers using the Xbox GPU for parallel processing.

This would actually be fairly easy to do with XNA, though I would be really interested in seeing the types of HLSL they write for the algorithms. The only difficulty, as I see it, is that XNA doesn’t have a generalized API for data transfer to a server. The networking API’s allow you to communicate between other clients in multi-player games but they do not let you upload results to a server. They might let you upload top scores and a few other minimal stats but certainly not the large datasets these researchers are looking for. It would be really cool if the XNA team created a complimentary server client that would allow 3rd party indie game developers to create server software to enable this type of application as well as ones that might involve persistent worlds and things like that.

I would be very interested in something like that.