Udderings

Usain Bolt takes to the decks for crowd in Paris (via...

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 18:05:05 -0400

Usain Bolt takes to the decks for crowd in Paris (via itnnews)

just a ridiculous man

Genes for Extreme Longevity

Sat, 03 Jul 2010 10:25:13 -0400

Genes for Extreme Longevity:

Pretty awesome, 150 genes to say whether you’ll live to 100.

Tyson Gay hates being in Usain Bolt's shadow

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 20:00:00 -0400

Tyson Gay hates being in Usain Bolt's shadow

The Most Entertaining Thing You Will See This Weekend - WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 20:36:30 -0400

The Most Entertaining Thing You Will See This Weekend - WFMU's Beware of the Blog:

WFMU’s blog provides a true gem.

ceallaigh: laurishly: holymoly: Ode to incredibly smart city...

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 21:13:46 -0400

ceallaigh:

laurishly:

holymoly: Ode to incredibly smart city transportation.

The public bicycle system in Montreal isn’t anything new to the world… except for us Americans. It’s apparently been around for over fifty years but only has recently been seen in the States as of 2006.

It basically works like this: you swipe your card and pay a $5 fee (Montreal’s price), take a bike, ride it around town, and drop it off at any of the hundreds of other stations around the city.

The result? Everyone is cycling. Everyone. For only $5/24 hours, $28/1 month and $78/one year, it just makes sense.

The Miami Beach Bike Sharing Program is supposed to launch in July.

Boston was supposed to launch in May, no bikes seen so far…

Hox genes and obsessive-compulsive disorder « Scienceatcolumbia

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 05:56:08 -0400

Hox genes and obsessive-compulsive disorder « Scienceatcolumbia:

Science sometimes amazes me.

Greatest 45 minutes ever in sports

Mon, 24 May 2010 22:36:51 -0400

Greatest 45 minutes ever in sports

"UO plan: aggressive but not reckless"

Sun, 23 May 2010 06:27:22 -0400

"UO plan: aggressive but not reckless":

Those of us who follow Track continue to be confused as to why the NCAA changed their system of qualifying for nationals. It’s just weird. Seeing how Oregon is approaching it is very interesting.

Pfizer, Washington University Announce Groundbreaking Collaboration

Wed, 19 May 2010 22:07:16 -0400

Pfizer, Washington University Announce Groundbreaking Collaboration:

Cool stuff, good for my old school.

"As soon as we became aware of this problem, we grounded our Street View cars and segregated the data..."

Sat, 15 May 2010 22:44:00 -0400

“As soon as we became aware of this problem, we grounded our Street View cars and segregated the data on our network, which we then disconnected to make it inaccessible. We want to delete this data as soon as possible, and are currently reaching out to regulators in the relevant countries about how to quickly dispose of it.”

- Official Google Blog: WiFi data collection: An update

This just made me laugh, I’m certain Google is just checking if there’s any legal reason preventing them from deleting this data, but the paragraph makes it sound like they have some hazardous materials that can’t be sent to the dump, so they need regulators to provide advice on how to get rid of it.

rentzsch.tumblr.com: [C4 release];

Fri, 14 May 2010 21:13:00 -0400

rentzsch.tumblr.com: [C4 release];:

Wolf Rentzsch’s talk about the need for better software engineering tools is fascinating to me due to the two different worlds I have lived in.

I grew my programming arts in the world of web programming. While you are limited in the techniques you can use in the user’s browser, you can do whatever you want on a server. If you want to build the backend in Haskell or PHP, that’s your choice, it is wonderfully free.

But now I’ve moved into a world where Apple’s Section 3.3.1 is just the norm. In scientific HPC, you quickly run into a problem. Almost any major supercomputing cluster you want to use only supports three languages, Fortran, C, and C++. Sure, you can create your own servers in Amazon’s EC2 or something if you’re at a company, but in academia where you are looking to use the resources provided for free by your institution or in your grants, you are majorly restricted. We once thought about moving our library from C to Objective C, but it just was not an option because there are no Objective C compilers for the systems I work on.

Today, rentzsch posted a clarification for what he means by software development innovation. Among those, I see:

It’s about less code.
It’s about faster development time.
It’s about distributed computing.
It’s about pervasive multicore.

Apple’s clang has provided me the first two of these. You can have side effects in C that are unclear. Deleting C code I believe is useless, but I didn’t write makes me nervous. The static analyzer within clang is excellent. Clang allows me to delete useless code with confidence. A surprising amount of time, I have to look at programs written by other labs with no contact to the author. People often leave in lines of code that are related to old versions of algorithms and ill fated branches. This may not seem to matter, but frequently older compilers can’t figure out that these things can be optimized out and run useless operations millions of times in inner loops. It also makes my development faster because I don’t have to dive into as much stuff to figure out what the algorithm is doing. In the end, I never compile the code on supercomputers using clang, but it is of extreme importance in development.

The last two components of disctributed computing and pervasive multicore are very much the world I live in. In April of 2010, I used 34,702 hours of supercomputer time. This in a month where there were only 720 hours, so on average, I was using 48 cpus constantly. This is on a mix of Blue Gene supercomputers (purely distributed) and dual quad core intel machines (shared memory). That means lots of MPI and OpenMP. Sure, Apple’s operating system comes with these, but Apple’s recent addition of blocks is an awesome proposal at a language level where it could be adopted by the compilers on future systems. While it may be years before I see the impact, blocks make it possible for simplifying a lot of future scientific code. That said, this is a world where C99 is only now starting to come into wide acceptance, so it may be a while.

In summary:

I totally agree with rentzsch that what Apple is doing with Section 3.3.1 probably hurts innovation around software development tools for the iPhone OS
I disagree that Apple has not been innovating in these areas, particularly in recent times

If you now put napping as an interest on facebook, the page you...

Thu, 13 May 2010 07:23:09 -0400

If you now put napping as an interest on facebook, the page you are linked to is probably not what you meant at all:

Primarily, nap is the raised (fuzzy) surface on certain kinds of cloth, such as velvet. Nap can refer additionally to other surfaces that look like the surface of a napped cloth, such as the surface of a felt or beaver hat.

Starting around the 14th century, the word referred originally to the roughness of woven cloth before it was sheared. When cloth, especially woollen cloth, is woven, the surface of the cloth is not smooth, and this roughness is the nap. Generally the cloth is then ‘sheared’ to create an even surface, and the nap is thus removed.

"The hero of the Times Square bomb attempt was an immigrant. A Muslim. Senegalese newcomer Aliou..."

Mon, 10 May 2010 20:01:17 -0400

“The hero of the Times Square bomb attempt was an immigrant. A Muslim. Senegalese newcomer Aliou Niasse was the first to notice the smoldering car and draw attention to it. He had no time left on his cell phone and realized his English probably wasn’t up to the task, so he got a passerby to call 911. In Arizona the cops would have hauled him off to jail while the car exploded.”

- Some Assembly Required (via AZspot) (via marco)

I feel the need to point out he’s one of three possible heroes. I’ve yet to see any story that was definitively able to say whether he, Duane Jackson, or Lance Orton should get credit, not that it should matter.

The Cigarette Butt Test

Sun, 09 May 2010 11:50:16 -0400

Sometime recently, John Gruber linked to an article on the staff that keeps Disney Parks clean. This reminded me of certain other places, like the DC Metro System, which repaints and cleans stations with much more regularity than other systems, and it really shows. Boston is horrid in comparison.

But my favorite thing has to do with my apartment building. If you walk up and down my block, you’ll see a lot of people who smoke. In front of most buildings, there is literally a layer of cigarette on their grass. But not in front of the three buildings owned by my landlord. Our front lawns are pristine. It isn’t because noone in our buildings smoke or throw butts on the ground, but because they’re always picked up by the next day. This sort of ethic seems to carry over into the maintenance inside. Any requests I’ve had have been quickly filled. They’ve been much better than the other places I have lived.

Thus, my “Cigarette Butt Test” for apartment buildings. If you see a lot of cigarette butts in the front lawn, the landlord doesn’t care about appearances and he probably won’t care about problems in your apartment either. If there’s very few or none, you’ve got a good landlord.

merlin: How about a vaccination for how my dashboard...

Thu, 06 May 2010 06:17:01 -0400

merlin:

How about a vaccination for how my dashboard increasingly feels like LiveJournal with an Associate’s Degree and five espressos?

People should probably argue about that a lot while I’m out of town.

This was the only post on my dashboard right now that felt like livejournal. Thanks a lot Merlin. Now I’ll go back to my actual dashboard which most consists of explodingdog.

Growth Hormone Makes Sprinters Faster in First Athlete Study - BusinessWeek

Tue, 04 May 2010 20:13:54 -0400

Growth Hormone Makes Sprinters Faster in First Athlete Study - BusinessWeek

Update: Pirate Bay calls buyout rumor false - Boston Business Journal:

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 21:55:58 -0400

Update: Pirate Bay calls buyout rumor false - Boston Business Journal: :

I felt like after commenting on the “sale” of Pirate Bay yesterday, I should let people know it was a lie. I guess. I don’t know how companies can get away with false announcements…

Michael Gerson - A test of Arizona's political character

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 21:48:33 -0400

Michael Gerson - A test of Arizona's political character:

You know your state’s gone off the deep end when even Bush’s speechwriters are chiding you.

The Biggest Kennedy Myth - The Daily Beast

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 21:17:11 -0400

The Biggest Kennedy Myth - The Daily Beast :

This is an amazing piece of investigative work into the origins of the Joe Kennedy being a bootlegger rumor.

Cambridge startup hooks The Pirate Bay - Boston Business Journal:

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 21:15:27 -0400

Cambridge startup hooks The Pirate Bay - Boston Business Journal: :

Someone seriously paid $10 million for this? Anyone who used The Pirate Bay would never touch a legal file sharing version. Some people have weird ideas.