A site devoted mostly to everything related to Information Technology under the sun - among other things.

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Introductory Material on Quantum Computing

A Rosetta Stone for Quantum Mechanics with an Introduction to Quantum Computation @ http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/0007/0007045v1.pdf

An Introduction to Quantum Computing for Non-Physicists @ http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/9809/9809016v2.pdf

The Temple of Quantum Computing @ http://www.toqc.com/TOQCv1_1.pdf

Monday, April 28, 2008

What Is Wrong with Recycling?

http://gizmodo.com/384417/bioplastics-environmentally-unfriendly-contributin

Nature's Beauty































Goods from China to California

Perishable goods from China to California in 4 days.

There are 15,000 containers and a 207' beam! The crew-size for a ship longer than a US aircraftcarrier which has a complement of 5,000 men and officers.

Country of origin - Denmark
Length - 1,302 ft
Width - 207 ft
Net cargo - 123,200 tons
Engine - 14 in-line cylinders diesel engine (110,000 BHP)
Cruise Speed - 31 knots,
Cargo capacity - 15,000 TEU(1 TEU = 20 ft container)
Crew - 5000 people First Trip - Sept. 08, 2006
Construction cost - US $145,000,000+
Silicone painting applied to the ship bottom reduces waterresistance and saves 317,000 gallons of diesel per year



























Tuesday, April 22, 2008

X-Plane

X-Plane is the most thorough, flexible, and realistic flight simulator available for personal computers,and is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux platforms. Find it @ http://www.x-plane.com/

Hand Art













Sunday, April 20, 2008

Le Laboratoire

This site: http://www.lelaboratoire.org/ius.html is a new creative space dedicated to experimental collaboration between artists and scientists located in the heart of Paris.

It is mostly in French.

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Ponderisms

Can you cry under water?

How important does a person have to be before they are considered assassinated instead of just murdered?

Why do you have to "put your two cents in".. But it's only a "penny for your thoughts"? Where's that extra penny going to?

Once you're in heaven, do you get stuck wearing the clothes you were buried in for eternity?

Why does a round pizza come in a square box?

What disease did cured ham actually have?

How is it that we put man on the moon before we figured out it would be a good idea to put wheels on luggage?

Why is it that people say they "slept like a baby" when babies wake up like every two hours?

If a deaf person has to go to court, is it still called a hearing?

Why are you IN a movie, but you're ON TV?

Why do people pay to go up tall buildings and then put money in binoculars to look at things on the ground?

Why do doctors leave the room while you change? They're going to see you naked anyway.

Why is "bra" singular and "panties" plural?

Why do toasters always have a setting that burns the toast to a horrible crisp, which no decent human being would eat?

If Jimmy cracks corn and no one cares, why is there a stupid song about him?

Can a hearse carrying a corpse drive in the carpool lane ?

If the professor on Gilligan's Island can make a radio out of a coconut, why can't he fix a hole in a boat?

Why does Goofy stand erect while Pluto remains on all fours? They're both dogs!

If Wile E. Coyote had enough money to buy all that ACME crap, why didn't he just buy dinner?

If corn oil is made from corn, and vegetable oil is made from vegetables, what is baby oil made from?

If electricity comes from electrons, does morality come from morons?

Do the Alphabet song and Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star have the same tune?

Why did you just try singing the two songs above?

Why do they call it an asteroid when it's outside the hemisphere, but call it a hemorrhoid when it's in your buttocks?

Did you ever notice that when you blow in a dog's face, he gets mad at you, but when you take him for a car ride, he sticks his head out the window?

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Actor Model of Concurrency

Erlang implements the Actor Model of concurrency. Learn more @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model and @ http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/tov/erlang-talk/

A Step Toward the Star Trek Holodeck

The EU project “CyberWalk” developed an omni-directional treadmill, which together with markerless tracking, optimized control and several perceptual tricks enables humans to walk through Virtual Worlds in a natural and unconstrained fashion.

The platform consists of several belts which form an endless torus. The belts can be actuated and generate motion in one direction (X), the whole torus can rotate and generates motion in a second direction (Y). As the two motions can be controlled independently, any resulting motion can be generated to re-center a person.

The actual implementation offers 3.5 to 4.6 m of walking space and will be sized up to 5.5 times 4.6 m, speeding up to 2 m/s (person starts jogging).The platform can be easily sized up by its modularity. The theoretical span is almost unlimited by an innovative construction (patent pending). As size matters with regard to the maximum allowable accelerations on a human on the platform, this implementation can be considered as a breakthrough in the history of motion platform construction. Fields of application:

The "holodeck": The user is equipped with a Head Mounted Device (HMD) which shows the virtual reality. The HMD is tracked with a motion tracking system, on the one hand to generate the video data for the stereo vision of the HMD, on the other side to calculate the deviation of the user from the platforms center. This deviation is used to recenter the user. By respecting acceleration limitations and other restrictions, this process will not be noticed by the user. Many different applications are possible, from a walk to a new designed urban area to the research of an order picking process in an innovative environment.

Cyberwalk Project @ http://cyberwalk.kyb.tuebingen.mpg.de/
or @ http://www.amm.mw.tum.de/index.php?id=250

AMD CTM

This is a free interface for interacting with AMD's GPU products (similar to NVDIA's CUDA). It is available @ http://ati.amd.com/companyinfo/researcher/resources.html

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Ascribing Mental States to Machines

This famous paper by John McCarthy may be found @ http://www.agent.ai/doc/upload/200406/mcca79_1.pdf

Web Sites of John McCarthy

I found these Web Sites by John McCarthy quite interesting:

John McCarthy's Home Page

PROGRESS AND ITS SUSTAINABILITY

Have You Abused XML Today?

The Common Business Communication Language (CBCL) is a proposal by John McCarthy that foreshadowed much of XML. The language consists of a basic framework of hierarchical markup derived from S-expressions, coupled with some general principles about use and extensibility. Although written in 1975, the proposal was not published until 1982, and to this day remains relatively obscure.

Here is a transaction in CBCL:

(REQUEST-QUOTE
(YOUR-STOCK-NUMBER A7305)
(UNITS 100)).


and in XML

<REQUEST-QUOTE>
<YOUR-STOCK-NUMBER> A7305 </YOUR-STOCK-NUMBER>
<UNITS> 100 </UNITS>
</REQUEST-QUOTE>

I do not see any benefit in the XML format, do you?

About Me

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I am a senior software developer working for General Motors Corporation.. I am interested in intelligent computing and scientific computing. I am passionate about computers as enablers for human imagination. The contents of this site are not in any way, shape, or form endorsed, approved, or otherwise authorized by HP, its subsidiaries, or its officers and shareholders.

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