Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Friday, March 19, 2004

Ordering music from the net -- Comment()
Today I ordered a cd of Fado Em Mim by Mariza. I must say that ordering a cd, waiting it to arrive, and importing it to iTunes and iPod is a nuisance. I hope Apple opens the iTunes Music Store soon in Europe!

-- Comment()
File Sharing Increases CD Sales: "ARIA have released figures that show for 2003, album sales have reached an all time high. In fact, according to Peter Martin, who recently went on Australian radio, before file sharing and CD burning they were selling 10 million less." [Slashdot]

Modeling dissipative acoustics with Elmer -- Comment()
I made an animation (using Snapz Pro 2.0) of Elmer displaying the solution to the tutorial example 9, which discusses modeling dissipative acoustics. The model describes propagation of sound waves in a circular tube. Here are the results (in QuickTime format):

I'm wondering if there is a Mac OS X tool for making movies out of still images. Snapz Pro works ok, but it would be nice to be able to compose the movie from still images output directly from Elmer. So, you could do something like the following in Elmer:

do i 100 301 {math s=2*pi*($i-100)/200; 
  math p=cos(s)*Flow.7-sin(s)*Flow.8; 
  display; screensave t$i.ppm;}

Here we generated 201 pictures into files t100.ppm ... t301.ppm.

Update: GraphicConverter can generate the animation easily. (Command File/Export Slideshow to Movie...) I re-generated the movie with GraphicConverter, using the highest quality and 24 pictures per second (see here).

-- Comment()
Updated version of Elmer is now available. The update corrected a problem in ElmerFront: when rectangle elements should have been used, the software generated triangles instead. Now this is fixed.

Getting broadband (sort of) -- Comment()
I today ordered a 512/512 kbit/s broadband connection to my apartment to replace the current 128 kbit/s ISDN connection I have used for two years. Broadband is not cheap in Finland, but I finally decided that the benefits are greater than the price.

I do hope the broadband prices start falling soon. In any case, 512 kbit/s is not really broadband. Nothing less than 10 Mbit/s should be called broadband. But "broadband" is really a marketing term, not a technical one.

-- Comment()
Blog Libel Threat towards Gavin Sheridan by John Gray: "I must retract a remark made on my blog last November, and to publish an apology, within three weeks. [...] I am not seeking a campaign for vindication, but I will attempt over the next number of days to detail the story, the ins and outs of internationl legal jurisdiction, the possibility of being sued from another country - and what exactly constitutes defamatory remarks." [via Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

For more details about pseudoscientific charlatans, check out The Doctor Is Out: "Little wonder that the public is ill-informed about empirically supported treatments when most of their knowledge of mental health issues comes directly from the likes of 'Dr. Phil' McGraw, radio show host 'Dr. Laura' Schlessinger (whose doctorate is in physiology and not psychology or psychiatry), relationship 'expert' John Gray (who holds no professional license), and motivational guru Tony Robbins (a practitioner of the pseudoscientific Neurolinguistic Programming)."

-- Comment()
Microsoft Versus Europe: War of Attrition Continues: "The European antitrust chief, Mario Monti, just released this statement saying that negotiations with Microsoft over its continued anticompetive behavior failed to achieve a settlement." [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

-- Comment()
Bush's war on truth: "The president insists on distorting John Kerry's words. But a simple check of the record exposes his con game." [Salon.com]

A new visiting researcher -- Comment()
Today in my group starts a new visiting researcher, a Ph.D. student. We already had a visiting post-doc. Both researchers study numerical methods and mathematical modeling using Elmer as the main tool. This kind of knowledge transfer between us and universities (and in some cases industry) has worked out really well.

-- Comment()
The coming crisis in computational science by Douglass Post: 'A key figure of merit is the "time to solution", the time between the identification of a problem and the delivery of validated and analyzed computational solution. For the reasons quoted earlier, the "time to solution" is growing in many cases, not decreasing.'

-- Comment()
I noticed that Quadric Surfaces at the web site of American Mathematical Society (AMS) shows my animation of quadratic functions:

First I was suprised, but then I remembered AMS asking permission to use the graphics.