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Saturday, May 23, 2009

The Mathematics of War

In the clip below, physicist Sean Gourley breaks anthropology's grip on irregular warfare's strategic evolution and introduces the mathematical contribution to winning -and preventing- 21st century conflicts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emn28FrJ6CI&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Edefensetech%2Eorg%2Farchives%2Fcat%5Fstrategery%2Ehtml&feature=player_embedded

Dr. Gourley and his team demonstrate the existence of a power law, indicating that the process in question (war in this case) is not random. But, then again, War as Organized Violence cannot be random - human minds are organizing it.

This type of power law shows up in many physical systems: distribution of galaxies and second order phase transitions are instances that come to my mind.

That the power law has the same exponent across multiple wars is more interesting since it indicates that war has got its own universality class.

The new question is to extend this analysis backwards in time to historical wars and see how the exponent has changed during human history (if at all).

Moreover, one could try to calculate the same exponent for non-human species that practice organized violence such as certain species of ants. It would be interesting to find out if the exponent is species-specific or not; i.e. if non-human and human species organize violence in the same manner.

Of course, in the coming wars against extra-terrestrials, this type of knowledge would be quite helpful.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha is a "computational knowledge engine," that doesn't search the Web for facts, as Google and most other search engines do.

Instead it mines limited databases and then performs computations on those facts, yielding original data, rather than links to existing Web pages.

Find it @ http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Haskell 6.10.2

Haskell is an advanced purely functional programming language. It may be found @ http://www.haskell.org/.

There is an Eclipse Plug-in available for it @ http://eclipsefp.sourceforge.net/

Scala 2.7.4

Scala is a general purpose programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way and integrates features of object-oriented and functional language.

The downloads are available @ http://www.scala-lang.org/downloads and the Eclipse Plug-in may be found @ http://www.scala-lang.org/node/94.

FAN

Fan is an object-oriented, functional programming language designed to cross compile to both the Java and .NET platforms. Find it @ http://fandev.org/

Robotic Toys

Check out this interactive 6-in-1 educational solar-powered robot kit from Owi Robots ($ 13) @ http://www.owirobots.com/cart/index.php?l=product_detail&p=105.

Monday, May 11, 2009

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Picture Technology

This is a photograph from the 2009 Inauguration, in which you can see the face of each individual in the crowd in focus.

You can scan, double click and zoom to any section of the crowd. . . wait a few seconds… and the focus adjusts ...

The picture was taken with a robotic camera at 1,474 megapixel.

http://gigapan.org/viewGigapanFullscreen.php?auth=033ef14483ee899496648c2b4b06233c

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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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