The Chaotic-Neutron

One nice short story after a long time. You’ve gotta read this.

Here’s a excerpt from the story.

You ever wonder why Google doesn’t cache it’s own searches?

They program around it.

No. That’s what you think. That’s what everyone thinks. But it started back when Google was just a thesis project, back when it was just a drop in the data sea. No one thought to stop it back then. That web site you had, the one you forgot about. Almost everyone’s got one of those, right? But Google doesn’t forget. Google’s studied that thing so many times that it’s studied its own caches of you. What do you figure happens, when a site gets so big that it’s bigger than the internet?

It’s still a part of the internet, though.

No. Now, the internet is a part of Google.

Cool !

I am not drunk and babbling gibberish. This is news. One fundamental theory which aims to make the use of trigonometry easier and more accurate. Proposed by Dr Norman Wildberger, a professor at University of New South Wales, this theory replaces angles to which we are so much used to by now, with a concept called as ‘spread’.

Here’s an excerpt from an article about this theory.

Established by the ancient Greeks and Romans, trigonometry is used in surveying, navigation, engineering, construction and the sciences to calculate the relationships between the sides and vertices of triangles.

“Generations of students have struggled with classical trigonometry because the framework is wrong,” says Wildberger, whose book is titled Divine Proportions: Rational Trigonometry to Universal Geometry (Wild Egg books).

Dr Wildberger has replaced traditional ideas of angles and distance with new concepts called “spread” and “quadrance”.

These new concepts mean that trigonometric problems can be done with algebra,” says Wildberger, an associate professor of mathematics at UNSW.

He has also written a book called ‘The Divine Proportions : Rational Trigonometry to Universal Geometry‘ by N J Wildberger. There is a chapter available for preview.

On first look, the concepts are straightforward in a logical sense. But i do not see how it simplifies and eliminates the calculations that are presently being done with sines and cosines. Well that’s just me and i could be wrong ! Maybe this is a revolutionary theory that is going to change how we look at things in the future.

Read an article today “Chemist Tries to Solve World’s Energy Woes” at Livescience. Chemist Dr. Daniel Nocera at MIT is trying to use the bountiful energy in sunlight to split water into its basic components, hydrogen and oxygen.

Well the research is still underway and is probably far from being complete but there could be some potential here. If it works, is practical and feasible, then in the future, we might be able to use something like this. Although i very seriously doubt the use of sunlight as a perpetual energy source for such a reaction, i would love to be proved wrong.

Here is an excerpt from the article where Dr. Nocera talks about future energy needs.

Nocera cites a calculation by Caltech chemist Nathan Lewis that power demands in 2050 will be so great that just to keep carbon dioxide emissions at twice preindustrial levels, a nuclear plant would have to be built every two days. There’s not enough room on the planet’s surface for other widely touted solutions such as wind and biomass to have much impact.

I seriously do not know on why people are so skeptical about the use of nuclear energy for producing power. It is much much safer and foolproof than it used to be; We can get almost limitless and perpetual energy if we produce fuel rods in Breeder reactors; It is environmentally friendly and clean. History has taught us a bad lesson about reactors but isn’t it time to move forward and think about how not to repeat the history by making advanced safety measures to avoid any kind of catastrophe. And safety is one of the important aspects that we are being taught. The end result is not just about producing power but to produce clean, safe power. And we are getting there …

I for one, strongly believe that reactors are the cleanest answer available to us to meet all the energy needs of the future. It is vital to realize this fact and start building reactors and reduce the usage of fossil fuels as much as possible before we end up imposing doom on ourselves soon. But oh well since economics and politics are involved in this earth saving venture, i know that we will wait until the situation that Norcera portrays in the excerpt is reached …

Well finally, after a long time, my .NET blog over at Dotnetjunkies is back up with an updated version of .TEXT. Not that i would have blogged non-stop with all the work i’ve been having all this time but right now, it really does make sense for me to blog again on some programming tips and tricks.

My bright side of my research, apart from the beautiful physics behind it all, is that it involves loads of programming. And i just recently decided to shift from MATLAB to .NET to get my research going. One of the main reasons behind that decision was ‘Speed’ ! Before you start shouting at me, yes, C++ would have been a more viable option, considering that i have lots of computation involving Matrices and Vectors but my benchmarks with some basic ported code from MATLAB did prove that the speed of C#.NET is good enough for now. I do not think that once the IL is converted into native image, with all the code and compiler optimizations inserted in at the right places, there will be a great difference in performance between C++ and C#.

So coming back to my point, i have learnt lots of algorithms, tips and bumped into some great software on the way while doing my research and believe that i can start writing again on my blog. Eventhough there were butt loads of comment spam before, i guess that the new version has a control over that and would now be a better place to write my programming experience from now on.

So watch out soon for my .NET post after almost exactly a year of hiatus.