Physical modelling in sound generation is decades old, there was lots of interest in it in the 90's with commercial hardware, but it has kind of died down. It's computationally intensive for one, which a GPU can help with, but it's also a bitch to actually use well for most real-world instruments. Bell-like sounds are common and can be quite interesting, wind instruments can be done fairly ok, bowed instruments are a bit meh compared to the real thing or samples.

The novelty is doing it on a GPU which means greater processing capacity, and also doing it in real-time which can be tricky with audio, partially because of latency when transferring data, but also because anything over 15ms is simply to be comfortably usable as an actual playable instrument. If you're just playing something back it's different of course, but then there's no real-time requirement in the first place.

I've made a simple and rather crude analog virtual synth running on a GPU using OpenCL, without any shared memory, that can in a pinch go down to a 1024-point buffer (in stereo) which is about 22ms, though not quite reliably. It's obviously much simple calculations, but it can easily do some thousand oscillators in stereo. The article says a 512-point buffer (11ms) is the smallest that they could make usable, which is pretty good.

I can see it being interesting in a game, different objects have different sounds and so on. Music playback is something else though. I always return to the problem of string instruments: how do you actually create the model, and more importantly the inputs? An actual violin has quite a few parameters that govern the sound. Consider the bow: pressure, angle (leaning), speed, position on the string, tension of the hairs (more tension creates slightly smaller contact area), static pressure on the strings (causing the bow and string to stick and then suddenly unsnap), exact time of contact. You'll have to either record all those from the live performance, I would guess a resolution of maybe 10 to 50ms might be good for some of the parameters, more for others. But then you can also pluck the string, and the strings and body resonate with each other, and even with nearby instruments, and you still have the whole left hand yet to be done.

It also doesn't remove the problem of imperfect speakers. Even if you separate out the instruments on their own speakers, each speaker still needs to reproduce the entire spectrum. And also, a speaker is physically a much smaller sound source than a large wooden resonator like a cello, which makes an acoustical difference.

In short, it's very cool but not a revolution. But also don't quote me on that.

Internet-pedantry, where either 1) pedantry is misapplied because the word in question does not have a single, precise definition to be pedantic over, and both the the original and the "pedant's" "pedantic" correction are correct or 2) pedantry is possible because the word does have a precise technical definition, but the "pedant" has no idea what that is and is wrong while the original usage was correct.

For how long are 15,000 watts expended? Power usage isn't meaningful in this context. Need a duration to get energy.

Religious teachings don't really affect population growth at all. At least not today. Religions and babies

That changes in CO2 levels always happen after global temps change and never before.

You're talking about Milankovitch cycles. Nobody is arguing that Milankovitch cycles are *caused* by CO2; that's a total red herring. They're *amplified* by CO2. The math doesn't work out if they're not, the cycle simply don't produce enough temperature variation without some kind of atmospheric amplification. That is to say, the sun heats up the earth a bit, and this causes more CO2 emission, which amplifies the effect several times over. The solar heating pulse comes first, followed closely by the CO2 pulse; together they reach the maximum temperature during the warm phase.

Which is actually a very disturbing thing, because it suggests that if we do something to heat our planet, the planet will multiply the effect.

Anyway, Earth already did our current CO2-dumping experiment in the past. It was called the PETM (Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum) - look it up. Its the last time Earth rapidly dumped large amounts of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere in a short period of time. It changed the world so much that we give the subsequent era a different name - the Eocene.

We're now creating the Anthropocene.

CO2 doesn't care what you believe about it. You are never actually going to be able to negotiate with it.

That does it, I now have a new life's goal - to build a supercooled sentient robot out of CO2 ;)

Or is CO2 someone's nickname, like a DJ or rapper or something? "CO2 don't care 'bout you!" "CO2 gonna heat y'all up!" "CO2 and Disco Stu gonna rock this house tonight!"

I'm thinking about buying a mountain up here near Reykjavík (if I can get the owner to agree to sell the land without the oversized, overpriced, ugly house that was built on it in the 1980s). Our climate has been warming a lot faster than most places further south. We even have a new tallest waterfall - no joke. The retreating glaciers have revealed a new waterfall taller than Glymur. Even Snæfell (literally "snow mountain"), the eternally snow-capped peak on Reykjavík's far horizon on clear days that's never melted in its history, revealed a bare peak for the first time last summer. It's kind of a weird sight. The whole glacier is supposed to be gone in only 20-30 years. I guess they'll have to rename the chillout music festival held there every summer - "Extreme Chill: Undir Jökli" (under a glacier) - to "Extreme Chill: Undir Fjalli" (under a mountain).

I choose the concesus. I never choose "one" expert unless I'm sure that expert is representing the concensus opinion of many scientists. If there's large segments with varying opinions, usually indicating a lack of data to explain which is more correct, then I remain agnostic. If there's one expert who disagrees with everyone else, I am leery of that expert's opinion, even if it's exactly what I want to hear.

If that expert turns out to be right, then that will eventually be reflected by the rest of the scientific community as the evidence becomes more and more convincing. As has happened over and over again.

Could this still mean I pick the wrong group of experts? Yeah.

Is that anything like a priesthood? No. That comparison is just stupid.

And for those of us who want to form our opinions based on science, but aren't climatologists, looking to the people who are and actually do study and understand climate science and asking them is wrong... how exactly?

For any other non-controversial field of science, this wouldn't be controversial either. Nobody says we're treating particle physicists like "priests" when we go with their best working picture of the microscopic universe with the understanding that this picture may change. How is that like a priest?

And for the record, while I do take what the climatologists say as a provisional truth, I would be delighted if they came out one day and said they were wrong all this time and it turns out there's nothing to worry about. So far, so bad.

Well, minus the one Youtube founder who was deliberately posting copyrighted material without permission to drive traffic early on.

Though the others did take pro-active steps by making him stop so on the whole, your statement is true.

Of course you stopped reading. Just like you stopped looking at reality as soon as it stopped conforming to your pre-conceived ideology. And of course you call trumping reality with ideology "intelligence". Even though this viewpoint has been tried and found woefully lacking. But that was only in reality!

I wish I was perceptive enough to see that reality is wrong when it contradicts what's in your head.

Of course they are part of the equation! Their behavior is extremely rational. Just not moral. Their goals are not what you think they should be. It's not to work for the betterment of their people. It's to maintain their hold on power over their people. This doesn't make them irrational. It does mean that as long as you equate rationality and morality and therefore assume that they are irrational that you will never understand them. And because you will never understand them (deliberately!) you will never deal with them effectively.

But failing before you even begin because of a conscious decision to replace reality with ideology is old hat for you, isn't it Mr. Iraq War Cheerleader? Is this you re-polishing your rhetoric in support of another war?

I am offended by your metaphoric comparison of pitbulls, wonderful creatures whose reputation was solely an artifact of those among whom they were popular, to something a beastly and vile as an Attorney General.

Fair enough, a cable was involved. They didn't lower it to the ground on a cable. They didn't lower it while in powered flight hovering above the ground. They did it to separate the rover housing from the descent stage so it would have room to deploy the airbags. Compare to the Curiosity EDL and the operation is quite different.

Alpha designers worked on Alpha at HP -- they produced several variants of the EV7 there. And the servers based on those chips performed better than HP's Itanium offerings, which was rather awkward for them.

Dirk Meyer went to AMD long before that. It was still DEC when he left. Dirk was the lead architect of the K7 (that success being a big part of how he ended up in a position to become CEO) which came out while Compaq was still making new Alphas.

But you're right that a great many jumped ship from Compaq.