This seems to be cynical job descriptions...

If I play along with the cynicism: Researching methods for visualizing and analyzing large-scale scientific data that will never get used because "real scientists" don't trust computer scientists (computer science is easy) and will just write their own shitty, serial, ad-hoc code, anyways.

If I go with my "honest" job description, just truncate it: Researching methods for visualizing and analyzing large-scale scientific data.

Flemenco Guitar by Mito

I'm not sure he has downloadable music, but you can see his stuff on his videos.

I don't know if the author is claiming on inventing something new, but using springs for graph/label placement has been used for a while in the infovis community. There's a lot of other graph placement algorithms if you are interested.

Same here, especially with something like git.

No one has to see my changes until I push them, and if I really care that I make too many local commits (I don't) could clean them up with git rebase.

My favorite is the "standard" VESA font on most PCs when they boot and the linux terminal before you go to runlevel 6. I'm sure there are slight differences between graphics cards, but they all look similar to me.

I've ripped it before and converted it to a TTF for use in gnome-terminal. Right now I'm just using one of the standard monospace available in X.

There's several examples that I know of that were the one-off prototype code written by the physicists that turned into production code. They were used for years but would take hours to run.

We look at it and fix it for them. Usually takes less than a week. Now, the codes now run in minutes instead of hours. That's a lot of wasted scientist time.

Though, I get that it's hard to get software engineers or computer scientists on the grants, anyways, because no one wants to pay for them, even if there is a large computational portion of the research.

At any rate, there's a lot of crappy code written in all of the sciences. It's not just bioinformatics.

My personal feeling is there is hubris across many of the sciences that writing good code is "easy." I've offended many physicists when I have suggested that they might want a computer scientist or software engineer help write their code.

We use a lot of software rendering (Mesa OpenGL or Manta raytracer) - and for our purposes, large models with more primitives than screen pixels - raytracing is faster (for us) for the O(pixels) rather than O(primitives). Plus, the multicore CPU handles large models better than a GPU.

Of course, there are lots of caveats and different use cases (gaming is totally different from our needs). For example, we still use a lot of Mesa OpenGL anyways, just because it's easier to use most of the time than a raytracer.

Semi-tangential but there's a blag that I like to read time to time How Games Saved My Life.

Not a movie, but the climax episode 4 of FLCL (and climax of episodes 5 and 6).

I love that homerun swing scene! (I set the bookmark earlier for context, the music doesn't get full swing until 19:15) The Pillows music, Gainax animation, and that scene just give me goosebumps.

Personally after the PC release, I've beaten Hexagon, Hexagoner, and Hexagonest. I haven't made any attempts at Hyper modes yet.

I'm pretty sure I could beat Hyper Hexagon, if I sat down one day to do it. Hyper Hexagoner and Hexagonest would require practice for me.

Specifically, high performance computing and scientific visualization.

It's fairly typical across all computer science research, though. Well, at least the conference focus. It might be different for the theoreticians because they are closer to mathematics.

I remember playing LSL as a kid and how daring I thought I was to play it without my parent's knowledge.

Many years later, I'd rather play King's Quest or Space Quest if I am going to revisit classic Sierra adventure games.

I snowboard. I'm learning as an adult, on my third season, because I never had an opportunity as kid growing up in Ohio. Now, the ski hill is only 15 minute drive (northern New Mexico), so it's a great opportunity.

I chose snowboarding because I thought I'd rather break a wrist or tailbone than destroy a knee. Plus, I thought it might translate to skateboarding or surfing someday.

I have mixed feelings on this.

While I am glad they are seeing to keep up to date with technology, the US Post Office is a really important center of activity and community service for America, especially rural America.

It may be out of the scope of this discussion, but I still worry about cutbacks, removal of offices, and basic services. It's not zero-sum, but the way that Congress hamstrings the USPS, I fear something has to give, until they are afforded more freedom in how they conduct business.

I don't want them to lose their community service focus and become completely business oriented, which may require a change in their relationship with Congress and their operating mode.

Couldn't help but wonder if the same educators and scientists that worked on KidSat worked on MoonKAM, because of the similarity of the naming and it being part of the Sally Ride Science. Looks like it must be: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISS_EarthKAM https://moonkam.ucsd.edu/

Really cool to see the educational project still going.

When I was an undergraduate, I helped write the whitepapers and wrote version 2 software of KidSat that controlled the camera, when it used to be in the space shuttle.

That's what most senior scientists do. Give talks and seek out funding for junior scientists. I'm still relatively junior, but I already feel the pinch of losing of active research time. It's kind of the circle of life in research.

Of course, senior scientists become more respected and have more clout to do big picture or "50,000'" research. Though at this point, the senior scientist doesn't necessarily have time to do the detailed research or worry about the minutia anymore. They have become a manager at this point.

For university professors, it's even worse for them and one of the reasons I didn't become a professor. From the very start, they are expected to seek out funding for graduate students, and the graduate students are the ones that write the papers. Of course, there are the superhuman professors and rock-star senior scientists that still are able to first-author papers, but that's fairly rare for the majority.

I suspect this is the way of life for many trades and professions, but it still doesn't make me any less sad that it will become increasingly harder for me to do the research myself. I like to make artifacts, see the "gee-whiz" when something new works, or the "eureka" of a new discovery.

EDIT: I just wanted to mention this is of course a totally US perspective on research. I believe European professors don't have to worry about this as much, but I could be incorrect.

I'm not sure I get the game? Is it supposed to be parody of some edutainment game?

Bioware games remind more and more of badly written Japanese interactive romance fiction.

Is seems all so mechanical and checking the box. Gotta fill that matrix!

Slightly off-topic question: For people that compose music and/or do chiptune composition, are there any good tutorials for music composition (not the technical details)?

I've been trying to do some chiptune composition in my spare time with Rymtik Retrobits, a tracker off the Nintendo DS store. I know enough about keys (major and minor through instrument playing as a kid), but never had any training in composition or music theory.

Just looking for some pointers to cover basics, mostly.

Thanks!

Yes. Tyresse I think is rolled up into Rick and Dale in the TV show.

Rick is much more white knight in the TV than the comic (though, I haven't watched season 3 yet, and I've only read up to issue 10 in the comic).

T-Dog is actually more like Dale in the comic.

Someone can correct my analogies if they have better parallels.

Thanks for the info. I was wondering if that was New Mexico, and it is; Pie-Town.

First time I've ever gotten on an online leaderboard for anything: I'm number #4 campaign mode. Probably would be #1, but someone has figured out a way to either farm or exploit the point system for spots 1, 2, and 3.

And was #5 on endless mode, currently bumped down to #8; but it looks like someone figured out how to exploit or farm points in that mode, too.

Very cool find. Reminds me a lot of cellular automata/game of life.

There's a neat CA/game of life tool for those unaware of life: http://golly.sourceforge.net/

The main problem I have with C is there isn't STL and Boost. Templates and generic programming are pretty darn useful.

That said, I write a lot of C-like code in C+ + . (How does one escape two + in a row in Hubski markup?)

The first thought I had was to combine it with the Kinect and Dance Central to have the whole room illuminated like a club.

I think it would be neat for filling in the periphery of vision, since that doesn't need very high fidelity (we only see blobs and colors in our periphery).

I agree. I've always had difficulty understanding complex numbers and the Fourier transform. This makes it so much more clearer to me.

There is another explanation that describes it like the spirograph method, but the animations make it so much easier to understand. I still like the spirograph explanation because the average of the spirals is the power of that frequency.

(Very) Short review of three that I played last night:

Nitronic Rush- I think I would like this if I had an XBox360 controller. It looks really fun, but it just doesn't play well with the keyboard. I tried to get my PS2 controller to work (with my USB adapter and Joy2Key) but that didn't work very well either.

I couldn't figure out any way to get it to work with my gamepad by default, it seems to only work with 360 controllers, which is a real shame.

Celestial Mechanica - I enjoy Metroidvania games, and this has elements of that and VVVVVV, which I am a big fan of as well. My main complaint is that it was far too short (beat it in under 2 hours) and the vertical scroll is poorly implemented. I suppose it's the sort of game that you are supposed to do speed runs with (and no-death runs), but I don't do speedruns.

Abobo's Big Day Out - This game I feel is only there to appeal to nostalgia. While each segment is fun in it's own right (I liked the Legend of Zelda segment), it makes me want to go play each original NES game rather than this. For what it is (a tribute) it does it well, but I wouldn't go and play it for the gameplay. Play the originals.

I haven't tried the two survival horror games in the bundle. I'll probably try the Ascension one first (that is if I can get an unbroken zip file), since I am a big fan of the Resident Evils prior to 4 and Silent Hill. I'm not sure if I'll try imscared, because I'm not a fan of the Amnesia/Slender type survival horror games.

There could be all sorts of neat ways to implement the procedural content.

While it might be harder with a GA, I was thinking that it might be neat to be able to share the seed. That way that people could, if they wanted to, play the same instance and share secrets for that instance.

Kind of like the "password" system in the fictional .hack where 3 words seed the content so you can share the same zone between players and the WonderMail system in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon.