Tracking solar cells are an economic non-started except in certain applications.
Well, for that matter, solar cells in general are an economic non-starter except in certain applications.
I think you're a little too down on tracking.
The whole idea of inventing new designs is to change the economics; hand-waving preconceptions based on old designs are sheer obstructionism when aimed at an economical invention already demonstrated to work. The engineering and production of the tracking components is not so difficult as that of the solar cells themselves. The major components such as servo motors are standard and mass produced for other applications. The increased energy gathered by tracking and the much lower amount of expensive semiconductors needed offsets the additional cost of tracking, potentially making the whole thing much cheaper than traditional PV installations. The tracking does not have to be calculated like pointing a telescope either - cheap classical analog cybernetics with cheap sensors can do the job, though microcontrollers of course are more adaptable to tasks besides just pointing.
I think the assumptions and details of the application of the "classical optics" proof need to be spelled out a bit more. Does the argument cover non-imaging optics? What about optics where the light is concentrated at the edge of the sheet, as in the device in this article, thus having vectors that are in all directions within the plane of the device and a range of out-of-plane directions consistent with total internal reflection? I think the device to a large extent gives up specifying the directions from which the light arrives at the collector, thus being somewhat like the scattering exception to the phase-space argument. If so, this should relax the pointing accuracy needed.
Both were caused primarily by policies presented as deregulation, which in turn is presented as free markets:
mortgage crisis: repeal of Glass-Stegall, unwise and unregulated contracts between banks, free market in bond rating services
California power problems spot electricity market, manipulated by Enron
"Free markets" are a marketing term. Actual markets have rules, which are needed to define what is being traded and prevent fraud, but which are manipulated as much as possible by rent seekers.
For instance if you want to store other people's gold, you will have to pay them to borrow the gold. If you want the market to warehouse your gold you'll have to pay them storage fees. If you want to store your own gold, you'll have to pay the market warehouse a fee to release your gold from storage. You'll then have an assay fee and other fees to get it back in the warehouse.
Funny how the smaller entity always seems to pay, even in the very prototype of a free market.
I agree. I'd set the bar a little more strictly to be sure we're talking about real money and fiduciary or professional duty, though - otherwise we'll get the RIAA seeking the death penalty for having a few dozen songs offered for share. And I'd also note that execution is usually wasteful. The 13th amendment didn't actually outlaw slavery, in fact it specifically authorized slavery "as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted". So I'd award the victims ownership of the con-men, plus the money that would have been spent on the perps' incarceration.
Well, ATM was idiot-proof until they started rolling out the new-model idiots.
Seriously, no protocol is going to prevent problems when you try to put ten kilos of data in a five kilo sack. If they had provisioned the business lines at a higher QoS than the rabble have might have mitigated the disaster, but it's rare to see anything but UBR (unspecified bit rate) in practice. Most core networks run at much less than 50% capacity, often less than 10%, so the QoS has no real effect for networks that aren't ridiculously oversold. The Dutch telco was just greedy and incompetent even beyond normal telco greed and incompetence.
Hmm... at first I thought you meant SAR as Service Activation and Repair, which is (was?) a more frequent bottleneck than Segmentation and Reassembly, since building an ATM circuit (1 per DSL line) requires information and configuration of dozens of different systems; rebuilding circuits has become a standard troubleshooting step via scripts given to level 1 ISP call-center techs, and they have often come to treat it like rebooting a customer's computer. The segmentation and reassembly thing seems more like a failure to invest in R&D - it's a very low-complexity mechanical process that should be a cinch even with FPGAs. It does become a problem when the switch manufacturers want to give the ability to do complicated processing of the contents of cells, even down to the application layer. That is a Bad Idea. When the switches get too clever and you can't depend on them passing data through unaltered let alone know what they're doing to the payloads, the whole system becomes impossible to troubleshoot. Anyway, the uber-speed links are less important than one might think since telcos prefer several redundant links to one giant point of failure.
ATM networks are expensive only because of the low volumes of units sold and the carrier-grade specifications for switches. DSL modems still often have native ATM capability built in, and aren't terribly expensive. The carrier-grade stuff might be a lot cheaper if it only implemented the 5-10% of the ATM spec that actually gets used.
I'm not sure where you get the idea that ATM is inefficient at bulk data transfers. The overhead is constant, the operation is deterministic, it's great for streaming, it allows effective use of more of the nominal bandwidth than anything besides maybe SONET. You could use full duplex Ethernet with jumbo frames, but I believe the effective performance would be worse than an equivalent bandwidth ATM link for everything but bulk transfers
Darwinism is not synonymous with scientific evolutionary theory. Nor is neo-Darwinism. Darwin was wrong for the most part about speciation occurring gradually, for example. (Punctuated equilibrium is more the rule than the exception.) The loud dogmatists don't understand evolution or genetics; they operate on some kind of cartoon version of the theories that leading researchers have. And even the leading researchers will usually discount evidence they don't like and frequently present speculation as proven fact.
The truth is that pseudo-scientific dogmatic Darwinists have long claimed that heritable characteristics could not be acquired, and that to say otherwise was Lamarckian heresy. They have been proven wrong repeatedly over the past decades, and even more conclusively in this latest research.
What I mean by passive detection systems is anything like an optical camera which does not need to emit anything to see something. I am not sure what technologies could be used
...a revolutionary underwater electronic imaging technique currently under development by a dozen Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) scientists is promising to shed new light into the ocean's murkiest depths.
The technique, known as the Acoustic Daylight Ocean Noise Imaging System (ADONIS), uses the ambient noise present in the ocean- created by everything from passing ships, breaking waves and popping of bubbles- to create images of objects in the water.
SQL looks like SQL because it's based on set theory. As an exercise, invent your own language that's as powerful (read: also based on a strong theoretical basis) but simpler. See you in a couple of decades!
OK, I went back in my time machine and gave the query-by-example spec to this guy at IBM back in the mid-'70s.
It's based on set theory but it doesn't require typing nearly as much because it isn't a language as such, but instead a means of specifying queries that uses the computer to keep track of and display in human-preferred form what fields and operations are relevant to a given table or joined set of tables.
Computer languages let you specify anything you can type. Nearly all the things you can type are errors. Human-appropriate interfaces moving beyond the simple character stream so ingrained in programming languages- simple things like columns and grids - can not only make things easier without losing flexibility, they can prevent specifying most wrong or impossible commands. Geometrical relations are more fundamental and intrinsically mathematical than symbolic relations, and brains are better at geometry and physics than they are at algebra and arithmetic, so why not give a nod to the human side of the human-computer interface bottleneck when it's not hard to do?
QBE grids are nothing more then a UI abstraction of the underlying SQL SELECT statement.
Well they are both direct abstractions of the the underlying algebra so neither one is necessarily more fundamental. QBE is easier because all the variations on SELECT are a mouse click or keystroke or two away. The amount of typing is typically 1/10 that of SQL and the opportunities for error are similarly reduced.
While it sounds like the Access QBE - SQL translator is a good way of generating parts for more complicated SQL work, Access was to decent QBE something like what MS Word formatting was to WordPerfect's "reveal codes". (Perhaps things have changed since I used them.) Nothing wrong with instant decaf if you like that sort of thing, but it's not quite real coffee.
"Chalcogenide" sounds more like an alien war crime to me -
"You stand or sit or squish whatever it is you're doing with those tentacles, ahem, you stand charged with 1st degree Chalcogenide of a cixz of innocent Glugyws. How do you plead?
"Gleeble poot zoooom pop! Zorn digqsstdfft pop!"
[Judge bangs photonic ultra-gavel]
"Don't try to diffract me! I don't care whether their Abbe numbers were lower than your specification! You are accused of having them Schott! No spreading dispersions on the victim's indexes will be tolerated, even in in-camera proceedings!"
But not in favor of big pharma. Smallpox vaccination goes back to the mid-1700s.
Big pharma outright wastes huge amounts of money, and a lot of even their more legitimate expenditures are actually there as barriers to entry that they lobbied the FDA to put in place. Big pharma isn't usually interested in vaccines - too low a price, too little profit per unit, too little repeat business, and too much liability from crazoids and real victims alike. It's a pity, since vaccinations are the best spent healthcare dollars besides water-supply disinfection.
This book is about the GRE subject exam, not the general math test. This test is intended only for college senior math majors.
This book is not listed here as a test prep book but as the only book I have ever seen that clearly explains a wide range of true higher mathematics. High school students should be able to progress more in understanding the essence of undergraduate math for math majors by reading this book than any other they could read.
Good book. Everyone should get credit for reading anything Rudy Rucker has written. More high weirdness than math, though. ___ Here's a bunch of really good stuff:
Rather than just reading a book, installing the following software and working through the following tutorials should be worth beaucoup extra credit:
Geometric Algebra (GA) is one of the most exciting developments in Mathematical education and Mathematical Physics. It presents in a unified mathematical language vectors, complex numbers, quaternions, spinors, and more.
GA handles rotations easily (because it includes the quaternion algebra) and also provides a mathematical description for projective geometry. Because of this, GA is being used more and more by Computer Science (virtual reality modeling, simulation, computer vision) and Robotic Engineers (arm/body movements)....
Geometric Algebra is also called Clifford Algebra.
In this tutorial we give an introduction to geometric algebra, using our GAViewer software. In the geometric algebra for 3-dimensional Euclidean space, we graphically demonstrate the ideas of the geometric product, the outer product, and the inner product, and the geometric operators that may be formed from them. We give several demonstrations of computations you can do using the geometric algebra, including projection and rejection, orthogonalization, interpolation of rotations, and intersection of linear o set spaces such as lines and planes. We emphasize the importance of blades as representations of subspaces, and the use of meet and join to manipulate them. We end with Euclidean geometry of 2-dimensional space as represented in the 3-dimensional homogeneous model.
I don't think the GP was not disagreeing with your point that much regular C code does not make presently sense to run on a GPU (although CUDA is a kind of C), but pointing out that moving CPU functions to the GPU could make things a lot easier for programmers writing general-purpose / non-graphical code running on GPUs.
We have had Intel and others putting graphics functions on CPUs for a long time - now we're going to see more CPU-type stuff on GPUs. The raw execution speed will probably be lousy for CPU instructions on the GPU die, but it should save writing/compiling code for two different chips and much of the bus and interprocess lags involved in coordinating the CPU / GPU computations.
There's a reason education sucks, and it's the same reason it'll never ever be fixed - it's never going to get any better, don't look for it, be happy with what you got, because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now. The wealthy big business interests that control things, and makes all the important decisions.
The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners.
They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear.
They've got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying - lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else.
But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.
You know what they want? Obedient workers - people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.
And, now, they're coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it.
They'll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club.
By the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think, and what to buy.
The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good honest hard working people: white collar, blue collar it doesn't matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard working people continue (these are people of modest being) - continue to elect these rich douchebags who don't give a fuck about you. They don't give a fuck about you - they don't give a fuck about you.
They don't care about you at all - at all - at all, and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care.
That's what the owners counted on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white, and blue dick that's being jammed up their assholes everyday, because the owners of this country know the truth.
It's called the American Dream cause you have to be asleep to believe it.
-George Carlin
(Listen to him - the power of the words heard is so greater than read, it's the difference between seeing a punch and taking one.
Slashdot Mirror
Or you could get hot water as a side benefit of the need to cool the solar cells.
Tracking solar cells are an economic non-started except in certain applications.
Well, for that matter, solar cells in general are an economic non-starter except in certain applications.
I think you're a little too down on tracking.
The whole idea of inventing new designs is to change the economics; hand-waving preconceptions based on old designs are sheer obstructionism when aimed at an economical invention already demonstrated to work. The engineering and production of the tracking components is not so difficult as that of the solar cells themselves. The major components such as servo motors are standard and mass produced for other applications. The increased energy gathered by tracking and the much lower amount of expensive semiconductors needed offsets the additional cost of tracking, potentially making the whole thing much cheaper than traditional PV installations. The tracking does not have to be calculated like pointing a telescope either - cheap classical analog cybernetics with cheap sensors can do the job, though microcontrollers of course are more adaptable to tasks besides just pointing.
I think the assumptions and details of the application of the "classical optics" proof need to be spelled out a bit more. Does the argument cover non-imaging optics? What about optics where the light is concentrated at the edge of the sheet, as in the device in this article, thus having vectors that are in all directions within the plane of the device and a range of out-of-plane directions consistent with total internal reflection? I think the device to a large extent gives up specifying the directions from which the light arrives at the collector, thus being somewhat like the scattering exception to the phase-space argument. If so, this should relax the pointing accuracy needed.
Both were caused primarily by policies presented as deregulation, which in turn is presented as free markets:
mortgage crisis:
repeal of Glass-Stegall, unwise and unregulated contracts between banks, free market in bond rating services
California power problems
spot electricity market, manipulated by Enron
"Free markets" are a marketing term. Actual markets have rules, which are needed to define what is being traded and prevent fraud, but which are manipulated as much as possible by rent seekers.
For instance if you want to store other people's gold, you will have to pay them to borrow the gold. If you want the market to warehouse your gold you'll have to pay them storage fees. If you want to store your own gold, you'll have to pay the market warehouse a fee to release your gold from storage. You'll then have an assay fee and other fees to get it back in the warehouse.
Funny how the smaller entity always seems to pay, even in the very prototype of a free market.
we shoot straighter
That's what's referred to as "gun control" here in Texas.
I agree. I'd set the bar a little more strictly to be sure we're talking about real money and fiduciary or professional duty, though - otherwise we'll get the RIAA seeking the death penalty for having a few dozen songs offered for share. And I'd also note that execution is usually wasteful. The 13th amendment didn't actually outlaw slavery, in fact it specifically authorized slavery "as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted". So I'd award the victims ownership of the con-men, plus the money that would have been spent on the perps' incarceration.
Well, ATM was idiot-proof until they started rolling out the new-model idiots.
Seriously, no protocol is going to prevent problems when you try to put ten kilos of data in a five kilo sack. If they had provisioned the business lines at a higher QoS than the rabble have might have mitigated the disaster, but it's rare to see anything but UBR (unspecified bit rate) in practice. Most core networks run at much less than 50% capacity, often less than 10%, so the QoS has no real effect for networks that aren't ridiculously oversold. The Dutch telco was just greedy and incompetent even beyond normal telco greed and incompetence.
Hmm... at first I thought you meant SAR as Service Activation and Repair, which is (was?) a more frequent bottleneck than Segmentation and Reassembly, since building an ATM circuit (1 per DSL line) requires information and configuration of dozens of different systems; rebuilding circuits has become a standard troubleshooting step via scripts given to level 1 ISP call-center techs, and they have often come to treat it like rebooting a customer's computer.
The segmentation and reassembly thing seems more like a failure to invest in R&D - it's a very low-complexity mechanical process that should be a cinch even with FPGAs. It does become a problem when the switch manufacturers want to give the ability to do complicated processing of the contents of cells, even down to the application layer. That is a Bad Idea. When the switches get too clever and you can't depend on them passing data through unaltered let alone know what they're doing to the payloads, the whole system becomes impossible to troubleshoot. Anyway, the uber-speed links are less important than one might think since telcos prefer several redundant links to one giant point of failure.
ATM networks are expensive only because of the low volumes of units sold and the carrier-grade specifications for switches. DSL modems still often have native ATM capability built in, and aren't terribly expensive. The carrier-grade stuff might be a lot cheaper if it only implemented the 5-10% of the ATM spec that actually gets used.
I'm not sure where you get the idea that ATM is inefficient at bulk data transfers. The overhead is constant, the operation is deterministic, it's great for streaming, it allows effective use of more of the nominal bandwidth than anything besides maybe SONET. You could use full duplex Ethernet with jumbo frames, but I believe the effective performance would be worse than an equivalent bandwidth ATM link for everything but bulk transfers
ATM really is more reliable for backbones than routed protocols. Problem is, it just works. Fewer jobs with stuff that just works.
Darwinism is not synonymous with scientific evolutionary theory. Nor is neo-Darwinism. Darwin was wrong for the most part about speciation occurring gradually, for example. (Punctuated equilibrium is more the rule than the exception.) The loud dogmatists don't understand evolution or genetics; they operate on some kind of cartoon version of the theories that leading researchers have. And even the leading researchers will usually discount evidence they don't like and frequently present speculation as proven fact.
The truth is that pseudo-scientific dogmatic Darwinists have long claimed that heritable characteristics could not be acquired, and that to say otherwise was Lamarckian heresy. They have been proven wrong repeatedly over the past decades, and even more conclusively in this latest research.
As Grace Hopper said, "A ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are built for"
A lady better known for COBOL than poetry...
That quote is more likely to be:
"A ship in harbor is safe -- but that is not what ships are built for."
John A. Shedd, Salt from My Attic, 1928
but many other sources claim William Shedd, a 19th c. theologian, and some claim Grace Hopper, but none give references that I have seen.
What I mean by passive detection systems is anything like an optical camera which does not need to emit anything to see something. I am not sure what technologies could be used
Good idea.
http://extreme.ucsd.edu/Research/AcousticDaylight/AcousticDaylight.html
...a revolutionary underwater electronic imaging technique currently under development by a dozen Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) scientists is promising to shed new light into the ocean's murkiest depths.
The technique, known as the Acoustic Daylight Ocean Noise Imaging System (ADONIS), uses the ambient noise present in the ocean- created by everything from passing ships, breaking waves and popping of bubbles- to create images of objects in the water.
Google "Acoustic Daylight" for more.
Doesn't Saudi Arabia still use solar time?
CLM may mean:
Cthulhu Love Manouever ...or permutations thereof.
Crazed Licentious Muppet
Coccyx Liberating Moose
Custom Lined Meerschaum
Coconut Lapidary Mount
Carnivorous Lemur Molester
Chilton's Lada Manual
Cretaceous Labradorite Mineralology
Chicken Lusting Madmen
Customer Lip Management
Cheeky Little Morons
SQL looks like SQL because it's based on set theory. As an exercise, invent your own language that's as powerful (read: also based on a strong theoretical basis) but simpler. See you in a couple of decades!
OK, I went back in my time machine and gave the query-by-example spec to this guy at IBM back in the mid-'70s.
It's based on set theory but it doesn't require typing nearly as much because it isn't a language as such, but instead a means of specifying queries that uses the computer to keep track of and display in human-preferred form what fields and operations are relevant to a given table or joined set of tables.
Computer languages let you specify anything you can type. Nearly all the things you can type are errors. Human-appropriate interfaces moving beyond the simple character stream so ingrained in programming languages- simple things like columns and grids - can not only make things easier without losing flexibility, they can prevent specifying most wrong or impossible commands. Geometrical relations are more fundamental and intrinsically mathematical than symbolic relations, and brains are better at geometry and physics than they are at algebra and arithmetic, so why not give a nod to the human side of the human-computer interface bottleneck when it's not hard to do?
QBE grids are nothing more then a UI abstraction of the underlying SQL SELECT statement.
Well they are both direct abstractions of the the underlying algebra so neither one is necessarily more fundamental. QBE is easier because all the variations on SELECT are a mouse click or keystroke or two away. The amount of typing is typically 1/10 that of SQL and the opportunities for error are similarly reduced.
While it sounds like the Access QBE - SQL translator is a good way of generating parts for more complicated SQL work, Access was to decent QBE something like what MS Word formatting was to WordPerfect's "reveal codes". (Perhaps things have changed since I used them.) Nothing wrong with instant decaf if you like that sort of thing, but it's not quite real coffee.
"Chalcogenide" sounds more like an alien war crime to me -
"You stand or sit or squish whatever it is you're doing with those tentacles,
ahem, you stand charged with 1st degree Chalcogenide of a cixz of innocent Glugyws. How do you plead?
"Gleeble poot zoooom pop! Zorn digqsstdfft pop!"
[Judge bangs photonic ultra-gavel]
"Don't try to diffract me! I don't care whether their Abbe numbers were lower than your specification! You are accused of having them Schott! No spreading dispersions on the victim's indexes will be tolerated, even in in-camera proceedings!"
SQL and all its pointy-headed progeny are the real problem with databases, not the relational vs. newMarketingBuzzwordDuJour arguments.
Database operations do not need to look like code or algorithms, the only reason they do is to provide jobs for database programmers.
Over 15 years ago Paradox's query-by-example was light-years ahead of today's soul-killing SQL crap.
SQL is not going away, though, any more than its idiot older brother Mumps (M, Caché).
But not in favor of big pharma. Smallpox vaccination goes back to the mid-1700s.
Big pharma outright wastes huge amounts of money, and a lot of even their more legitimate expenditures are actually there as barriers to entry that they lobbied the FDA to put in place. Big pharma isn't usually interested in vaccines - too low a price, too little profit per unit, too little repeat business, and too much liability from crazoids and real victims alike. It's a pity, since vaccinations are the best spent healthcare dollars besides water-supply disinfection.
That's a hill of pennies, alright.
But 127,000 pages at nearly $1,000,000,000 = nearly $7,000 per page. Wow.
A couple more I forgot to add:
http://www.amazon.com/Godel-Escher-Bach-Eternal-Golden/dp/0465026567
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
by Douglas R. Hofstadter
The big one - worth triple points.
http://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Math-Test-Graduate-Prep/dp/0375762671
Cracking the GRE Math Test, 2nd Edition
by Steve Leduc
This book is about the GRE subject exam, not the general math test. This test is intended only for college senior math majors.
This book is not listed here as a test prep book but as the only book I have ever seen that clearly explains a wide range of true higher mathematics. High school students should be able to progress more in understanding the essence of undergraduate math for math majors by reading this book than any other they could read.
You can always fill it out with Sphereland.
Good book. Everyone should get credit for reading anything Rudy Rucker has written. More high weirdness than math, though.
___
Here's a bunch of really good stuff:
Mathematics for the Million by Lancelot Hogben
http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Million-Lancelot-Thomas-Hogben/dp/0393063615
Review
"It makes alive the contents and elements of Mathematics" -- Albert Einstein"
http://www.amazon.com/Infinity-Beyond-Lillian-R-Lieber/dp/1589880366/
Infinity: Beyond the Beyond the Beyond (Paperback)
by Lillian R. Lieber (Author), Barry Mazur (Foreword), Hugh Gray Lieber (Illustrator)
http://www.amazon.com/Einstein-Theory-Relativity-Fourth-Dimension/dp/1589880447/
The Einstein Theory of Relativity: A Trip to the Fourth Dimension (Paperback)
by Lillian R. Lieber (Author), David Derbes (Foreword), Hugh Gray Lieber (Illustrator)
http://www.amazon.com/Quantity-Real-Imaginary-History-Algebra/dp/0452288533/
Unknown Quantity: A Real and Imaginary History of Algebra (Paperback)
by John Derbyshire
http://www.amazon.com/Fractal-Geometry-Nature-Benoit-Mandelbrot/dp/0716711869 The Fractal Geometry of Nature
by Benoit B. Mandelbrot
http://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/0140092501
Chaos: Making a New Science
by James Gleick
Rather than just reading a book, installing the following software and working through the following tutorials should be worth beaucoup extra credit:
Geometric Algebra (GA) is one of the most exciting developments in Mathematical education and Mathematical Physics. It presents in a unified mathematical language vectors, complex numbers, quaternions, spinors, and more.
GA handles rotations easily (because it includes the quaternion algebra) and also provides a mathematical description for projective geometry. Because of this, GA is being used more and more by Computer Science (virtual reality modeling, simulation, computer vision) and Robotic Engineers (arm/body movements). ...
Geometric Algebra is also called Clifford Algebra.
Geometric algebra software GAViewer for all major OSes: http://geometricalgebra.org/gaviewer_download.html
http://www.science.uva.nl/ga/files/GABLE15plus.pdf
In this tutorial we give an introduction to geometric algebra, using our GAViewer software. In the geometric algebra for 3-dimensional Euclidean space, we graphically demonstrate the ideas of the geometric product, the outer product, and the inner product, and the geometric operators that may be formed from them. We give several demonstrations of computations you can do using the geometric algebra, including projection and rejection, orthogonalization, interpolation of rotations, and intersection of linear o set spaces such as lines and planes. We emphasize the importance of blades as representations of subspaces, and the use of meet and join to manipulate them. We end with Euclidean geometry of 2-dimensional space as represented in the 3-dimensional homogeneous model.
http://www.science.uva.nl/ga/tutorials/CGA/
This tutorial introduces the conformal model of 3D Euclidean geometry, to date the most
Did they hack the ATM machines after stealing the PIN numbers?
I have to go work in some CSS style sheets for a web site that links ISBN numbers to UPC codes. I hope they don't make me redundant.
I don't see how they could.
I don't think the GP was not disagreeing with your point
Oops - I meant "I don't think the GP wasn't not disagreeing with your point" ;)
or for the less caffeinated among us:
"I don't think the GP was disagreeing with your point"
I don't think the GP was not disagreeing with your point that much regular C code does not make presently sense to run on a GPU (although CUDA is a kind of C), but pointing out that moving CPU functions to the GPU could make things a lot easier for programmers writing general-purpose / non-graphical code running on GPUs.
We have had Intel and others putting graphics functions on CPUs for a long time - now we're going to see more CPU-type stuff on GPUs. The raw execution speed will probably be lousy for CPU instructions on the GPU die, but it should save writing/compiling code for two different chips and much of the bus and interprocess lags involved in coordinating the CPU / GPU computations.
The Real Owners George Carlin:
There's a reason education sucks, and it's the same reason it'll never ever be fixed - it's never going to get any better, don't look for it, be happy with what you got, because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now. The wealthy big business interests that control things, and makes all the important decisions.
The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners.
They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear.
They've got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying - lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else.
But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.
You know what they want? Obedient workers - people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.
And, now, they're coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it.
They'll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club.
By the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think, and what to buy.
The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good honest hard working people: white collar, blue collar it doesn't matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard working people continue (these are people of modest being) - continue to elect these rich douchebags who
don't give a fuck about you. They don't give a fuck about you - they don't give a fuck about you.
They don't care about you at all - at all - at all,
and nobody seems to notice.
Nobody seems to care.
That's what the owners counted on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white, and blue dick that's being jammed up their assholes everyday, because the owners of this country know the truth.
It's called the American Dream cause you have to be asleep to believe it.
-George Carlin
(Listen to him - the power of the words heard is so greater than read, it's the difference between seeing a punch and taking one.