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NASA

Dying Man Shares Unseen Challenger Video 266

longacre writes "An amateur video of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion has been made public for the first time. The Florida man who filmed it from his front yard on his new Betamax camcorder turned the tape over to an educational organization a week before he died this past December. The Space Exploration Archive has since published the video into the public domain in time for the 24th anniversary of the catastrophe. Despite being shot from about 70 miles from Cape Canaveral, the shuttle and the explosion can be seen quite clearly. It is unclear why he never shared the footage with NASA or the media. NASA officials say they were not aware of the video, but are interested in examining it now that it has been made available."

Comment Use OO for the Objects, Procedures for the loop (Score 2, Interesting) 621

The applicatations that you listed primarily deal with physical systems, so they are very well suited to OO, where an object can be used to represent some real-world thing. Molecules, machine parts, elastic elements, or magnetic domains are all things that have behavior, state and identity, so they are perfect cantidates for objects.

But, the physical simulations are also iterative, so the code will have a loop, and loops feel like procedural code. That is not a conflict -- you are allowed loops in OO code! Your simulations would likely have a loop that iterated over time, space, temperature, or energy, and for each iteration, you would examine the state of each object in the system and call some methods on them to simulate their behavior.

For instance, if you were building a solar system simulator, each planet would be an object, with properties for position in space and mass. Your loop would iterate over time and over each planet. For each planet in a time step, calculate the force on the planet due to other planets, and move the planet in response to the forces. ( More likely you would use an adaptive iterator and use another loop to do several iteration steps per planet per timestep. ) The benefit of OO here is that it makes it easy to organize your code and move simple things like F=Ma, 3d vector manipulations and your Runge-Kutta integrator out of the main algorithm. Plus, your code is easier to read, since you don't nned a lof of comments for things like planet.mass() or planet.move(vector)

OO makes physical simulations much easier because it allows you to organize the program according to the physical structure of the system, and those object remove a lot of basic code from the algorithm, so the algorithm becomes simpler and easier to work with.

I have built simulations for packet networks, simulated anealing, Ising glasses, Newtonian mechanics and finite element analysis in both OO and procedural style, and OO worked so well that I would never consider writing any of them in procedural style again.

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