How The World's Most Powerful Visualization Lab Turns Hard Data Into Scientific Cinema | Popular Science
The mountain of data that is piling up is meaningless if it can’t be represented in a way that makes sense, not just to scientists but to the public. While astrophysics remains the AVL’s forte, Cox’s renaissance teams are eager to tackle more diverse projects. Right now they are most thrilled about moving into the geosciences, and soon she hopes they will move more actively into visualizing the life sciences as well. Eventually, she wants to mesh the humanities and sciences into sweeping visualizations that take the whole world into account.
via popsci.com
Planetary Formation Animation
via youtube.com
I think this was originally rendered for the Hubble IMAX show. The two sequences are composites; the first half was simulated with Enzo. Rendering was done by the Advanced Visualization Lab at NCSA. Gorgeous!
Jeff Barr’s Blog » Building Sage (Open Source Math) on Amazon EC2
A quarter or two ago my son Andy took a rather unique course at the University of Washington. In his Math 480b: Programming for the Working Mathematician course, Andy learned about a number of important topics including the Unix command line, Python programming (including classes, exceptions and decorators). In the second half of the quarter they learned about the Sage open source math system.
via jeff-barr.com
Fragmentarium
Fragmentarium is an open source, cross-platform IDE for exploring pixel based graphics on the GPU.
This looks like fun, in the view of Processing JS and so on.
What Went Wrong at Borders - Peter Osnos - Business - The Atlantic
It was also in the mid 1990s that Amazon launched as an online book retailer and Borders made what, in retrospect, was a serious strategic mistake. Instead of beginning to develop its own initiatives on the incipient Internet (which Barnes & Noble did, with limited early impact), Borders went international, building a substantial chain in the United Kingdom and opening stores as far away as Singapore
via theatlantic.com
Great piece on what happened with Borders.
myliblog: Amazon lending program - what should libraries do in response?
A self-published author recently forwarded this email to me. It's intriguing on several levels.
A short and sweet blog entry from a Librarian about the new Kindle lending program. Interestingly enough, I'd never heard of OverDrive before, but it's interesting to see how libraries may be responding to eBooks.
(n.b. I received a Kindle for Christmas.)
