Computing
catdynamics | February 2, 2015Because I must trim browser tabs, here is a current short list of things that might be useful:
Threebody - online implementation of the open source IAS15 integrator - a 15th order high precision N-body integrator -
ASCL - Astrophysics Source Code Library - Open Source Code
Visible Spectra of the Elements - Except Astatine :-(
Astronomy Simulators - small web simulators for elementary concepts.
Some quite nifty.
From University of Nebraska.
All the Kepler 2 Campaign 0 data - with some tools to play with it
drorzel | May 23, 2012So, as you may or may not have noticed, ScienceBlogs has gotten a makeover. If you read via RSS, you might not notice anything, but if you come to the blog itself, you'll see a new look. The previous three-column layout is gone, and posts on the front page now show only short excerpts and "featured" images. This makes us look more like the blogs at National Geographic, the new Corporate Masters (for a good while now, actually, but they only just did the redesign). On the back end, we've changed from Movable Type to WordPress, which will take a little getting used to, but which lots of people…
drorzel | September 8, 20111 And the LORD looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.
2 And the LORD said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.
3 Make thee an ark, and this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred qubits, the breadth of it fifty qubits, and the height of it thirty qubits.
4 And Noah asked the LORD, What is a qubit?
5 And the LORD replied unto Noah, A qubit is a two-level quantum…
cevans | February 14, 2011
In 2007, my friends at m ss ng peces and I started work on a new Internet-television show called RESET, for the Sundance Channel. The idea was to make a show designed for computers to watch, that could teach them what it was like to be human -- a show that, while ostensibly made for human beings, would also nourish our computers' circuit boards with generous descriptions of the richness of human experience. Obviously this is just an artistic conceit, and not, as far as I know, a practicable reality, but it does raise a lot of interesting questions. You probably spend your entire day within…
cevans | February 8, 2011
To prepare for a "Book Sprint" I'm participating in at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie-Mellon University next week, I've been doing lots of research about notable historical interactions between art, science, and technology. In suit, Universe fringe benefits!
First, I'd like to tell you about "9 Evenings," organized in 1966 by a very interesting engineer named Billy Klüver with the help of the great American artist, Robert Rauschenberg.
Klüver is a fascinating character, a brilliant engineer who saw the potential in the integration of art and technology, and noticed an absence…
cevans | November 17, 2010
A few months ago, I attended Cyborg Camp in my hometown of Portland, Oregon. Cyborg Camp is an "unconference," basically a room full of cyberpunks, mega-nerds, and aspirational coders that gather in an office building to talk about the "future of the relationship between humans and technology." This event deserves a separate entry, but for now I'd like to recall a particularly evocative thing: that the most heartbreaking thing I saw at Cyborg Camp was an adult man hopelessly tangled in a web of cables.
It was his own off-the-shelf wearable computing system, a gordian thing connecting his…
cevans | October 8, 2010
In case you didn't know, reality is science fiction.
If you doubt me, read the news. Read, for example, this recent article in the New York Times about Carnegie Mellon's "Read the Web" program, in which a computer system called NELL (Never Ending Language Learner) is systematically reading the internet and analyzing sentences for semantic categories and facts, essentially teaching itself idiomatic English as well as educating itself in human affairs. Paging Vernor Vinge, right?
NELL reads the Web 24 hours a day, seven days a week, learning language like a human would -- cumulatively, over…
j7uy5 | January 30, 2010I decided to try using Google Chrome as a web browser. The reason is that it is supposed to be faster, particularly for sites that make heavy use of Flash. It turns out that installing it is a hassle if you do it the obvious way, because Flash does not work without fiddling around. That sort of defeats the purpose.
The easier way is to use the one-click install at:
http://software.opensuse.org/ymp/ope...2/chromium.ymp.
This adds the necessary repositories, downloads the application, and configures it so that flash works right away.
It seems to work pretty well. It remains to be seen…
terrasig | December 22, 2009Audio documentarian, local hero, and Pharmboy family friend, Richard Ziglar, let us know over the weekend of some employment opportunities for music and tech-minded folks at Zenph Studios in Research Triangle Park.
What is Zenph, you ask? Zenph takes classic piano recordings, often from long-departed performers, dissects them digitally to capture nuances of the live performance, and then "re-performs" them live in a recital hall on legendary Steinways driven by the software. These are *not* digital remasterings but recordings of an actual replaying of the original work.
Listen to this…
j7uy5 | December 11, 2009This is a tip for selecting the fastest DNS server.
href="http://www.opendns.com/">OpenDNS already has
fans at ScienceBlogs (
href="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/08/turkish_ass_shuts_down_a_slice.php">1
href="http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2007/08/connectile_dysfunction.php">2).
I've been using it for years. But now that
href="http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/">Google has
their own free/open DNS service, the question arises: which
is better? Or is there a different one that is better?
OpenDNS is free for anyone to use, but they also offer paid…
terrasig | October 26, 2009While working on a science-rich post and writing an exam, something came across Twitter that is, well, too good to just be seen only on Twitter.
Fullsteam is the name of the plow-to-pint Southern microbrewery in Durham, NC, no-longer-in-planning-but-not-quite-done and I have written about the tweeter several times. The imagination behind brewing a beer with sweet potatoes (it's awesome, btw) or kudzu comes from the very same mind that burped into his iPhone for the benefit of shared education with his daughters.
The result:
I use Google voice search all the time and have been very…
j7uy5 | April 30, 2009If you encounter a web site that contains malware (virus, trojan,
etc.), how do you report it? I had a devil of a time finding
out. A friend had forwarded a suspicious email to me. The
email contained a link. The link indicated that it would take you
to a text file that explained a finding about a chance of an asteroid
hitting the Earth next year. the file ended with .txt.exe,
obviously a bad thing.
So I downloaded it, using Linux, of course (the .exe would not be able
to do anything without me affirming that the file was to be opened with
WINE, which I did not plan on doing). I…
j7uy5 | March 30, 2009The New England Journal of Medicine has four open-access articles of
the topic of electronic medical records (EMR). One article
reports on a survey of the characteristics of EMR in use, and the
extent to which they have been adopted within US hospitals. The
second discussed the barriers to the more widespread adoption of
EMR. The third compares and contrasts the two models of EMR:
stand-alone personal systems, and integrated systems. The fourth
addresses the question of how to make the best use of the money
devoted, in Obama's economic stimulus plan, to the promotion of EMR.
Use of…
j7uy5 | July 6, 2008Responding
to the innate human desire to have the faster browser possible, I am
almost happy with Firefox 3. But not quite. Thus,
the
experiment: compile from source. This is accomplished as
follows:
0.
Kubuntu does not come with the packages necessary to build from source,
by default. You must install a bunch of stuff first.
Fortunately, this is easy. To install the
prerequisites
necessary to build Firefox from source, open a terminal and type:
apt-get build-dep firefox
1. Download the Firefox source code
href="ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.0/linux-i686/…
j7uy5 | July 1, 200840% of Internet users do not upgrade their browsers to the most secure
version. Internet Explorer users have the worst record, with
more than half having failed to update.
OK, people, do your patriotic duty and get with the upgrades!
Then we can see the National Threat Advisory go down to blue,
for the first time in history.
(source:
href="http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080701-40-of-surfers-dont-bother-with-browser-security-updates.html">Ars
Technica)
j7uy5 | June 16, 2008
I scarcely need to mention it, but today is the big day: Firefox 3 is
out, so be sure to download
it. The Mozilla folks are
href="http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/firefox3">shooting
for a world record for the most downloads in a single day.
href="http://www.internetnews.com/software/article.php/3753196/Will+Linux+Users+Miss+Out+on+Firefox+3.htm">Will
Linux Users Miss Out on Firefox 3? Silly article.
Download the source. Configure, make, make install.
Just order a pizza first, because compiling it from source takes a
while. But so does eating a pizza.
Actually…
j7uy5 | March 26, 2008On 26 March 1874, the great poet
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Frost" rel="tag">Robert
Frost was born.
Perhaps it is not so notable, but 26 March 2008 is the first
href="http://documentfreedom.org/News/20080220" rel="tag">Document
Freedom Day.
Early in the development of computer technology, the world decided to
take the well-traveled road: the road of proprietary document formats.
This path led to endless headaches, unnecessary costs, and
the
inability of people to use their machines to their full potential.
It created obscure vectors for the spread of viruses…
j7uy5 | March 11, 2008It amused me today to see two blog posts, both about users switching
from Gentoo
to *buntu.
rel="bookmark"
title="Permanent Link: Why I am making the switch from Gentoo to Kubuntu">Why
I Am Making The Switch From Gentoo To Kubuntu
href="http://fxjr.blogspot.com/2008/03/bye-gentoo-welcome-ubuntu.html">
Bye Gentoo... Welcome Ubuntu
Gentoo is the most complicated version of Linux, but also the most
customizable. It enables the user to squeeze the greatest
performance out of their machines.
Like the authors of the two posts, I recently switched. I had
been using Sabayon,
a…
j7uy5 | January 20, 2008Usually when we think of
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_medical_record">electronic
medical records (EMR) as being
three-dimensional, we think of the relational aspect of databases.
Researchers at IBM, however, are testing a different concept.
The idea is to have a rendered 3D representation of the anatomy of the
patient, and to use that as a basis for the record. This is
reported in IEEE Spectrum.
href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/jan08/5854">Visualizing
Electronic Health Records With "Google-Earth for the Body"
By Robert N. Charette
January 2008
href="http…
j7uy5 | January 6, 2008I know I've been a bit lax with this blog lately, but just
in case anyone still cares, and has a mobile device (such as a Palm
Pilot, smart phone, etc.) you now can get the RSS feed for Corpus
Callosum on your device. You have to use the
href="http://www.avantgo.com/">AvantGo service.
If you want, follow the AvantGo link, and download the software, then
install it on the computer you use to sync your mobile device.
Then go through the setup as directed by AvantGo.
Then come to CC and click on the AvantGo button in the left
sidebar (where it says Quick Add-Feed Links). That's it (…