Tuesday, March 31, 2009

A good math review

It's been a while, 6 years, since I last played with vectors, surfaces tangent planes and extremas. In light of this I wound up going through this relatively simple but comprehensive review of calculas III, go through it if you need to brush up on these topics.
http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/Classes/CalcIII/RelativeExtrema.aspx

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Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Why didn't I think of that?

Sometimes you come across a new idea or technology and your first reaction is "That's so obvious, why didn't I think of that?" These ideas range from the Google search engine to Velcro. The latest idea that found my ingenuity lacking was OnLive, TiVo for games. Actually I'm not really sure how Tivo works, never having owned it. I don't think it's available in Saudi Arabia but I read about how OnLive works and I think it's genius. Depending on their pricing models and the quality of service they offer they stand to make a killing. I wonder how they will eventually make it work, will they load the games into the PC's ram and then transfer data as needed or will it be more like a remote desktop thing where all the processing will be done on the remote machine and your machine will just be used to log in and view it. I think they should offer both models, higher end PC's should be able to share more of the processing load while lower end PC's will just act as portals accessing the servers processing capabilities. For more information go to
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/gaming/2009-03-24-onlive_N.htm

In other news, I am reading up on Support Vector Machines & the Monte Carlo method, I don't know how the two would work together but I have some ideas on making them work. My next blog posting will probably serve as an intro to one of the two subjects.

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Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Dirty Stratosphere

We Indians aren't known for our sense of hygiene, Let's face it, as a group we are not the cleanest. An example one pair of my gym socks, in college, were at one point so dirty that they were molded into the shape of my foot and could stand on their own because of all of the embedded salt in them.
So it comes as no real surprise that Indian scientists found bacteria and fungus growing on the weather balloon they sent up to the stratosphere. It's also heartening to know that they didn't name it after a deity, Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru or some other icon of India, and instead choose to name one of the newly discovered bacterium after the noted astrophysicist Fred Hoyle. It's good to acknowledge greatness in other parts of the world besides our own.
In other news, Singulariy University has started accepting applications. The concept of a university offering a graduate level course in future studies and planning seems intriguing. I would love to see what kind of solutions they come up with for the worlds problems. Things like rice that can grow without water in the deserts of Saudi Arabia, a cheap method to create electricity generating solar panels, a solar water purification system, a cheaper method for mass transportation, real time language translation devices, light sabers, personal relocation devices ("beam me up Scotty") etc. My opinion is, obviously, skewed by the fact that I am a techie and have a vested interest in two countries, India and Saudi Arabia. The former being one of the world's most populous and the latter being the one gifted with the most open space and the most potential for generating solar energy.

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