Feb 28th and 29th links of interest
Feb 28th:
- Distant future of the Sun and Earth revisited
- Sawzall (programming language) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- CMPS 253: Advanced Programming Languages: Concurrent Programming and Transactional Memory
- For The Love | Rock, Paper, Shotgun: Doing Science To Words
- MBL develops infrastructure and portal for Encyclopedia of Life
- Rope, a python refactoring library …
- YouTube - Upcoming Changes to the JavaScript Language
- 99 Wikipedia Sources Aiding the Semantic Web » AI3:::Adaptive Information
- Wikipedia:Wikipedia in academic studies - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Here’s part of the abstract for Distant future of the Sun and Earth revisited:
We revisit the distant future of the Sun and the solar system, based on stellar models computed with a thoroughly tested evolution code. For the solar giant stages, mass-loss by the cool (but not dust-driven) wind is considered in detail. Using the new and well-calibrated mass-loss formula of Schroder & Cuntz (2005, 2007), we find that the mass lost by the Sun as an RGB giant (0.332 M_Sun, 7.59 Gy from now) potentially gives planet Earth a significant orbital expansion, inversely proportional to the remaining solar mass.
According to these solar evolution models, the closest encounter of planet Earth with the solar cool giant photosphere will occur during the tip-RGB phase. During this critical episode, for each time-step of the evolution model, we consider the loss of orbital angular momentum suffered by planet Earth from tidal interaction with the giant Sun, as well as dynamical drag in the lower chromosphere. We find that planet Earth will not be able to escape engulfment, despite the positive effect of solar mass-loss. In order to survive the solar tip-RGB phase, any hypothetical planet would require a present-day minimum orbital radius of about 1.15 AU.
Emphasis mine.
Here’s the text of the course overview for CMPS 253:
The free lunch is over. It lasted fifty years.
During that time, Moore’s law meant that our programs go faster when we buy a next-generation processor. Moving forward, while next-generation chips will have more CPUs, each individual CPU will be no faster than the previous year’s model. If we want our program to run faster, we must learn to write parallel programs.
Parallel programs execute in a non-deterministic way, so they are hard to test, and bugs can be almost impossible to detect, reproduce, or fix. Many years of experience has shown that writing a correct parallel programs is typically substantially harder than writing an equivalent sequential program.
In this course, we will survey the state-of-the-art in parallel programming, and the programming languages that support these efforts. We will pay particular attention to the emerging and active field of transactional memory, which adapts many ideas from database transactions to general purpose programming languages. We will also review more traditional lock-based programming, as well as alternative techniques based on functional programming, speculative execution, etc.
I’ve “applied” for membership to the class Google Group (linked from the course page) so that I can peruse the archives. Haven’t been approved yet.
Update (April 14th 2008): I just checked the class Google Group page again only to get an error message telling me that the group doesn’t exist. It was formerly at groups.google.com/group/ucsc-cmps-253-spring-2007. Kind of lame.