astomo.us

Two thoughts, in particular, stand out. In any sufficiently large field of study:
(a) there is no single person who is an authority, and
(b) at any given moment, there will be many people working independently on the same problem. To anyone who has done any type of research, these are self-evident truths. [...]

When presented with an Aphex Twin track, Karlheinz Stockhausen once commented: “I heard the piece Aphex Twin of Richard James carefully: I think it would be very helpful if he listens to my work “Song of the Youth,” which is electronic music, and a young boy’s voice singing with himself. Because he would then immediately [...]

The other day I was listening to AT’s “Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2″ and track #2 off the first disc got me thinking. In case you’ve never heard of R.D. James (aka Aphex Twin), he is an electronic musician. Occasionally he does something nerdy and/or snarky which cracks me up. For example [...]

Today I was reading the slides from Felix von Leitner’s talk on C compiler optimizations (given at the recent Linux Kongress). Basically his point is that there is no point in making your code confusing in an attempt to optimize it b/c usually the resulting object code will not be faster. I’m not [...]

When he was told that Apple Computer had just bought a Cray to help design the next Apple Macintosh, Cray commented that he had just bought a Macintosh to design the next Cray.
- According to Jim Gray (quoted by C. Gordon Bell in his “Seymour Cray Perspective”)

SIAM is holding a conference on parallel computing in Seattle next February. I’m pretty psyched about it mostly because I’ve been sinking a lot of time into GPU-based stream computing lately and from a cursory look at the program I’d say that GPGPU is going to be the subject of a lot of interest. [...]

In my last post I made an off-hand remark about writing tail-recursive code in Python. I thought that I would elaborate on this. Python’s creator, Guido van Rossum, has famously said that he’s not interested in implementing tail recursion in the language- much to the dismay/disgust of functional programmers everywhere. Im [...]