anothermuse - Slashdot User

Battlestar Galactica Hosted At the UN 252

Posted by timothy on Thursday March 19, 2009 @03:02PM from the bizarro-world-doesn't-quite-begin dept.

TheDopp writes "The United Nations hosted the cast and crew of Battlestar Galactica Tuesday evening in New York. Clips of the show were shown as discussion points during the event, touching on the morality of Suicide Bombers in war, Abortion and the use of torture on enemies of the state. At one point during the event an attendee mentions 'the "Old Man" launched into a passionate speech about casting off the idea of race as a cultural determinant, and said we were one race, the human race. His voice echoed throughout the chamber growing louder until — I kid you not — he was yelling, "So Say We All," and the crowd answered right back. Hell, even I yelled it, I was in the fraking United Nations with Adama, the gods themselves could not have stopped this moment.' The full video of the event is located on the UN website."

Comment Post-Clippyism (Score 1) 263

by anothermuse on Friday January 02, 2009 @04:52PM (#26304097) Attached to: The Secret Origins of Microsoft Office's Clippy

The movie "Until the End of the World" has an entertaining scene where a Russian search agent took on the shape of a Bear that was prowling around 3D representation of different buildings, which in turn represented different agencies and thus different databases, while muttering in a bearish voice: "Searching ... stiiiillllleee searching". This was in 1991. It was hilarious! There were other avatars, as well, and they all had different personalities that matched the person using them. This is not, some irritating marketing guy deciding what persona that you would like, along with the rest of the world. Think Tamaguci with a difference; collaborative filtering on a personal scale.

For instance, my avatar would be a cockroach that I could squash with a satisfying crunch - before it would wait and skitter away. Even better if I could fry it with my iPhone G4's sonic iLighter. But, that's merely my own preference. Your preferred skin may be a bash window, Paris Hilton in prison stripes, or both.

To each their own.

Comment Fine grained control-flow (Score 1) 620

by anothermuse on Saturday December 06, 2008 @07:39PM (#26015915) Attached to: Time to Get Good At Functional Programming?

The traditional multi-threading technique is where you set a programmer at his computer and tell him parallelize stuff. The functional programmer will certainly identify parts of the code that can be executed in parallel, but I am not sure that is better than any other thread markup.

Perhaps multi-core is an intermediate step towards fine grained parallelism. Self-assembling carbon nanotubes sprayed on with ink-jets may suggest novel approaches to problem solving.

For instance, take the sorting problem, mentioned earlier in this thread. Instead of a sequence of unsorted numbers, you beam them onto a substrate all at once. Lets say that the substrate contains nodes that are arranged where any two vertically arrange nodes are min-max sorted to two horizontally arranged nodes like so:

...node... ../....\.. max....min ..\..../.. ...node...

Now, with some additional magic of redundancy and spin, a vertically arranged unsorted list could by sorted into a horizontally arranged list in O(N) time (albeit in a N^2 space). There is no separation of CPU and memory. Instead, you have a Cellular Automaton that is arranged along an octahedral lattice.

So, which language would best describe such a sort? I don't know. It seems that each language is an attempt to express a range of applications within a domain of op codes in the most compact way possible. Perhaps FP will better fit large-grained parallelism. But, I'm not sure what would best express the mindset of FPGA's, cellular automata, and the neural model of McCulloch and Pitts.

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