The latest issue of Communications of the ACM includes an article (The Reality of Simulated Actors) that estimates that it will be 20 years of computing power advances before we'll see digital actors truly capable of verisimilitude. 20 years == 4 orders of magnitude. One can't help but wonder if grid …

Just finished reading the August 2002 issue of Scientific American and, once again, was dismayed at how this magazine that I grew up adoring has declined. There's an article by a scientist who states that his alternative equation for gravity explains the whole "missing mass" problem with the universe. Okay …

"We modeled the [unmanned aerial vehicle's] controller after the PlayStation 2, because that's what these 18- and 19-year old Marine have been playing pretty much all their lives. If a Marine can use Microsoft Word, he can get this plane to fly." -- Major John Cane, Marine Corps Airfighting Lab, as …

Macintosh, not just evil, but Communist! "Furthermore, the Darwin OS is released under an "Open Source" license, which is just another name for Communism. "

If you do video editing on Windows XP, don't install the DirectX 8 SDK. It appears to install a debug version of the libraries (I think, most importantly, quartz.dll) that screws up, at the very least, ULead MediaStudio Pro and Scenalyzer. Probably other video editing software, too, because I …

Grrr... my optimization example is suddenly not showing major differences between steps 1 and 2 (which should be showing about a 40% speedup).

Ever since I've come back from PNG, I've been trying to finalize the book. So far, this has been formatting and making sure that the programs run as directed. All I can think of, though, is how much I want to go back to PNG. Argh!

Saw Rivers and Tides last night, a documentary on the environmental artist (as in, site specific art) Andy Goldsworthy. It's an exceptional documentary about an exceptional artist. It's incredibly rare for a major artist to come across in a documentary in an approachable manner. I guess the movie will not …

A review of A New Kind of Science in New Scientist makes the excellent point that one of the huge problems with it is that it doesn't make disprovable claims. One thing that's been interesting is that the reviews of ANKoS have been quite mild, while its flaws are obvious …

Wolfram's A New Kind of Science is execrable. It's 1100 pages based on a point that everyone interested in the subject already knew: simple cellular automata can have arbitrarily complex behavior. Given that CAs and Turing Machines are the particle accelerators of computer science, and given the heavy buzz related …