Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Tuesday, October 8, 2002

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Gartner Predicts: Return to Distributed Systems: "Bandwidth that's becoming more affordable than computing will spur a return to distributed systems, including grid computing, over the next several years, said Gartner Inc. analyst Carl Claunch at Gartner's annual Symposium/ITxpo..." [Google Technology News]

Testing Mathematica -- Comment()
I collected my posts about Mathematica 4.2 into a story titled Mathematica 4.2 for Mac OS X. If I have the time I'll write down additional impressions and observations about the software.

You may want to compare these experiences with my review of Matlab 6.5.

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Great apes fall victim in headlong drive to mass extinction: "Every single species and subspecies of great ape on the planet now teeters on the edge of dying out, part of the acceleration of the dinosaur-style mass extinction now under way." [Google Technology News]

Screenshots of Mathematica 4.2 -- Comment()
I made some additional screenshots of Mathematica 4.2 on Mac OS X. Here is help on minimization, and an example from the graphics gallery.

I also tested the new version by retrieving a Mathematica package for hyperbolic geometry I wrote about five years ago. Everything seemed to work, so here is a screenshot of hyperbolic geometry in the unit disk. This package was a pain to write, because there was a serious bug in Mathematica when drawing arcs of a circle. Fortunately the package still works.

Testing Mathematica 4.2 for Mac OS X -- Comment()
I just received and installed Mathematica 4.2 for Mac OS X, which I ordered almost four months ago. A long wait!

The installation was easy: just copy a directory from the cd to the hard disk. Registration was also easy, although the long password was tedious to type in.

Mathematica behaves quite nicely on my 450 MHz G4 Macintosh. The user interface seems to be fitted into the Mac OS X environment. Here is a first screenshot of testing the software:

Recommended: Wikipedia -- Comment()
Wikipedia is "a collaborative project to produce a complete encyclopedia from scratch. We started in January 2001 and are already working on 51830 articles..."

I browsed through the mathematics and biology categories and was impressed. This is good work! Now I have a link to Wikipedia on my favorites toolbar in OmniWeb.

What is available in Wikipedia? For example, the entry on optimization is a bit unfinished, but the basics are there, and the structure of the entry is quite competent. A few more topics to include, and this part of the encyclopedia will be a fine reference.

The central part of Wikipedia is the editing system, which lists the changes and the authors. A sort of honor list of contributors.

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Curried radiation burns: "Curcumin, the chemical that makes curry yellow, turns out to be a good compound for treating radiation burns resulting from cancer therapy." [Boing Boing Blog]

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Britons awarded Nobel prize for work on genes: "Two Britons and an American were awarded the Nobel prize for Medicine yesterday for studies of a tiny transparent worm that have revealed how genes sculpt the shape of bodies." [Google World News]

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Pint sized planet discovered: Quaoar: "Astronomers announced the discovery of an 800-mile-wide planetoid in the solar system. It's the largest object anyone has found since the discovery of Pluto. It also has ther most inpronounceable name of any object since pharmaceutical companies started giving new drugs impossible-to-pronounce generic names in order to make their trade name more valuable." [Boing Boing Blog]

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Boing Boing Blog writes that NTT DoCoMo have released a paper on the use of human flesh as a networking medium:

A device attached to a PDA can send and receive weak electrical signals through people, with human bodies as communications circuits, the paper said, citing sources close to the companies.
Apparel and handbags have their own conductivity, allowing an electrical connection to a PDA that can remain in one's pocket, the paper said.
In this way, people can exchange e-mail addresses, names and phone numbers while shaking hands, with the data automatically written into both their PDAs, the paper said.