This is nothing compared to Fringe's typewriter hacked to communicate with a parallel universe through a mirror.

Those results are from google.com. The Brazilian TLD for Google is google.com.br. I just did a quick search on both now and for the .com TLD I got 52.7% vs 47.3% for Rousseff, and for the .com.br TLD 54% vs 46%. Official polls run by several different media agencies were giving Rousseff with 60%+ of valid votes.

On the first turn of our major elections, when we voted for Senators, Governors and Congressmen, something similar happened. For my state a certain Senator candidate had 17% on previous public surveys and it was ranking 3rd. After the results were out he was elected with 36% and he was the 1st.

Here in Brazil such surveys and predictions are quite dangerous, to some extent they are used as manipulative tools. Most people are unfortunately uneducated and ignorant in issues concerning politics and economy and those people are likely to vote on the candidate which seems to be winning, just so they don't "lose" their vote (yes, this is not an uncommon reasoning around here, insane as it may sound). Worst of all perhaps is the fact that we are obliged to vote, it is an imposed duty. Our democracy is still an infant, and I think we are yet to reach adolescence. Some rough years to come.

The winner is out, and it is Rousseff with 55.65% vs. 44.35% from Serra. Google got closer than any other prediction.

Today Brazilians are electing their new President. It is the second turn of our elections so we get to choose between the two candidates for the presidential chair which were most voted in the first turn that occurred one month ago.

The candidates are Jose Serra (current opposition) and Dilma Rousseff (candidate supported by the current President). According to a simple "volumetric" serach on Google, Serra has 47% and Rousseff has 53%. These predictions are somewhat similar to what polls and public opinion surveys have been showing (reckoning only the valid votes). Tonight we will have the final results and I will be amazed if this Google prediction so to speak turns out to be more accurate than official polls.

True, but the video made me feel kinda sad. Despite being completely ignored by most people he lives in this world in his head where the current president would subject himself to a dark and moldy basement in order to get a half-assed hologram taken. Other than that, when was this documentary made? I thought someone would mention 3D TVs and stuff like that near the end when he says the world is dimensional but we seem to be content with representing it as flat.

Dr. Merkwürdigliebe was the first name that crossed my mind.

In my opinion, yes. I am an undergrad Physics student (senior) and had my first contact with Fortran in my third semester, in a course called Computational Physics I. We learned the basics of Fortran 77/90 and how to solve some numerical problems using it. We also simulated some interesting problems that amazes undergrad students such as chaotic oscillators, Magnus effect in action and a few other simple yet curious systems. I had already some programming experience, but most other students didn't. They got it quite quickly and I think this is due Fortran's simplicity.

Even if you are never going to use Fortran in your own projects, you will stumble on it now and then if you are going seriously into applied and theoretical research field. NASA, for example, has tons of production code written in Fortran and even new codes are written on it. Many many Physics and Chemistry groups around the world have their most important codes in Fortran, and sometimes they use clever hacks to make the code faster, so a minimum understanding of it is necessary. I work with a Computational Chemistry group and much of the code they still develop, even for new applications, is Fortran. It is good and solid code, they are very experienced on it, and they are not willing to change to another technology so easily.

As a first language I don't know if Fortran is the best, maybe Python or Java would be my choice in this case, but it is definitely worth learning.

You obviously know nothing about living in Brazil during the 90s.

Nowadays I mostly play only Go, both on the computer using KGS and on real boards when I am lucky enough to find people willing to play it. As a kid I used to spend a long time playing with my SNES, and later with N64, but then gaming consoles started getting way too expensive to fit in my budget, then I would only play on computers. Then a few years later I gave up Windows and started using exclusively Linux and BSD on my personal computers. I lost games, but found programming. Now, 10 years later, I look back and see it as a worthy deal.

The same way the DoD payed for the Cray supercomputers, gamers are paying for the GPUs. Science dropped by and said thanks.

OpenCL will hopefully help to set a solid ground for GPU and CPU parallel computing, and since it is not technically very different from CUDA, porting existing applications to OpenCL will not be a challenge. Nowadays with current massively parallel technology the hardest part is making the algorithms parallel, not programming any specific device.