I've done this one:

Lake Lugano, Switzerland

It's a beautiful trip over the Alps from Zurich to Lugano, then you take a sharp turn over the lake and dive between the mountains to land here. It's pretty neat.

This is similar to what I do.

I use a Mac only because I am expected to do things with Office (OpenOffice/LibreOffice just doesn't cut it) and Outlook is great. Though, I do all of my development/research on a Linux VM or Linux cluster. I only have OSX because of Office.

I would drop OSX in a heartbeat if I could have Office on Linux. Though, it has to have a flawless Outlook, too.

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.

I am a computer scientist. While many people wouldn't consider it a "science," (I doubt it most of the time, theoretical CS, IMNSHO, is just applied math) I help a lot of fundamental basic sciences (non-CS) research.

My specialization is high performance (supercomputers) computing and scientific visualization and analysis. This translates to helping scientists run simulations, large-scale data wrangling, and helping to analyze scientific and simulation data. I'm more on the application side, rather than hardware side. So, I act as a facilitator to the domain scientists and the guys building the supercomputers, because I talk both "languages," or at least I try to.

I do like it, and as I mentioned before, the only part that isn't fun is writing papers (but that needs to be done so others can see your research) and getting funding. I'm not completely all "soft money," so I do have some stable money that I can rely on. Also, I'm currently overfunded, so I am doing just fine in terms of paying myself.

I tend to agree with most other scientists that there isn't enough funding. There are scientists at my lab that are unfunded and go onto overhead.

Though, I'm not sure the solution is to guarantee funding for everybody. There's an incentive to do well on each soft money research project to show that you are competent and can successfully complete the next research grant. So, I speculate that we might not be as productive, but that's probably wrong.

More likely, I would be just as productive with steady funding and it would be beneficial to the whole society to guarantee funding for research, rather than having to constantly sing for your dinner. So much research time is spent just looking for the next dollar. Most people like being useful or productive, even if funding was guaranteed, and there would likely be more scientists if research funding was steady.

Sometimes, dictatorship is the right answer.

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.

Thanks! I'm not there currently. I did consider it as a place I wanted to return to after I was done with my degrees, but I ended up someplace just as good. While it's not space science, we still do a lot of fundamental science for the public good.

I try to keep track of my scientist friends that helped me, but some of them have moved on from JPL. I did have a chance to meet Sally Ride, too, as she was part of one of the projects I worked on as a high school student and undergraduate. I'm so grateful to them and what they did for me. I guess you can say I was a success story of science education.

I think all of the JPL missions are great; I don't know if I really have anything profound to say other than I find the images and new science that they are discovering about Mars just really phenomenal. It makes me proud that I used to be part of the organization.

For me, it's always been an intrinsic part of my life; I always recall being deeply interested in science and the world around us. Probably, the genesis of it for me is PBS and many shows like Nova and 3-2-1 Contact. Plus, growing up with the space shuttle doing regular trips helped a lot, too. I wanted to be an astronaut.

The biggest moment in my life that solidified it all was when I was in high school and was able to get into a special national program that brought together high school students with scientists. I eventually ended up at Goddard for the summer, and then I got invited back for followup programs several summers afterward: working at JPL with scientists and the astronauts at Johnson.

Many things have happened after that, but I'm really grateful for the experience. It helped a small town Ohioan to get out and see the world, and helped make me who I am today.

If nothing else, the spin attack FX was pretty cool.

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 am guilty of publishing in paid journals as well, but it's kind of a trap for my area of research. Well, not really a trap, but we would need critical mass on switching over. (Though, it's pretty common in our community to post the papers on our websites, "illegally"- which you can find with Google Scholar)

For us, conference proceedings are more important than journals; but, to give a talk at the important conferences, that are sponsored by the publishers, it ends up in the publisher's journal.

As it stands, to be seen by others in the community, we need to publish in these journals and conferences.

Not to say that we couldn't do it, it would need inertia to switch over. Yes, it can be done, but it won't happen over-night and I get that it starts with us.

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 was looking through New Mexico forts, and of course we have things like Fort Bliss and White Sands, but I thought this one was interesting:

Hacienda de los Martinez The Hacienda de los Martinez is one of the few northern New Mexico style, late Spanish Colonial period, "Great Houses" remaining in the American Southwest. Built in 1804 by Severino Martin (later changed to Martinez), this fortress-like building with massive adobe walls became an important trade center for the northern boundary of the Spanish Empire. The Hacienda was the final terminus for the Camino Real which connected northern New Mexico to Mexico City. The Hacienda also was the headquarters for an extensive ranching and farming operation. Severino and his wife Maria del Carmel Santistevan Martinez raised six children in the Hacienda. Their eldest son was the famous Padre Antonio Martinez who battled the French Bishop Lamy to preserve the Hispanic character of the Catholic Church in the territory. The Padre was a dynamic social reformer who created the first co-educational school in New Mexico and brought the first printing press to Taos. After Mexican Independence from Spain in 1821, Severino Martinez and his family became active in trading with the Americans who were bringing badly needed trade goods in by the Santa Fe Trail. Today the Hacienda's twenty-one rooms surrounding two courtyards provide the visitor with a rare glimpse of the rugged frontier life and times of the early 1800s. Additionally, regularly scheduled demonstrations present the continuing traditions of northern New Mexico.

I find northern New Mexico and Rio Grande Valley history incredibly interesting.

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.

Research.

My day-to-day languages to get things done are C/C+ + and Python. My language of preference is Python.

Too many languages to list that I have tried or done something with, but C/C+ + and Python are the ones that have stuck with me as the most useful. I have a soft place in my heart for JavaScript/ActionScript/ECMAScript.

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 a researcher at a laboratory. I enjoy what I do, but I just wish I didn't have to seek funding and write papers. That's the unfun part.

Otherwise if I didn't do what I did, I would like to do art, music, and/or independent games or board games. Or be an astronaut.

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!

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