smithwd - Slashdot User

90% of the Universe Found Hiding In Plain View 279

Posted by timothy on Thursday March 25, 2010 @04:20PM from the that-tricky-universe dept.

The Bad Astronomer writes "As much as 90% of previously hidden galaxies in the distant Universe have been found by astronomers using the Very Large Telescope in Chile. Previous surveys had looked for distant (10 billion light years away) galaxies by searching in a wavelength of ultraviolet light emitted by hydrogen atoms — distant young galaxies should be blasting out this light, but very few were detected. The problem is that the ultraviolet light never gets out of the galaxies, so we never see them. In this new study, astronomers searched a different wavelength emitted by hydrogen, and voila, ten times as many galaxies could be seen, meaning 90% of them had been missed before."

Submission + - Whatever happened to programming? (wordpress.com)

Submitted by

Mirk

on Saturday March 06, 2010 @06:46PM

Mirk writes: "In a recent interview, Don Knuth wrote: "the way a lot of programming goes today isn't any fun because it's just plugging in magic incantations — combine somebody else's software and start it up." The Reinvigorated Programmer laments how much of our "programming" time is spent pasting not-quite-compatible libraries together and patching around the edges."

Space Photos Taken From Shed Stun Astronomers 149

Posted by timothy on Saturday January 23, 2010 @04:03AM from the love-the-gold-mylar dept.

krou writes "Amateur astronomer Peter Shah has stunned astronomers around the world with amazing photos of the universe taken from his garden shed. Shah spent £20,000 on the equipment, hooking up a telescope in his shed to his home computer, and the results are being compared to images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. 'Most men like to putter about in their garden shed,' said Shah, 'but mine is a bit more high tech than most. I have fitted it with a sliding roof so I can sit in comfort and look at the heavens. I have a very modest set up, but it just goes to show that a window to the universe is there for all of us – even with the smallest budgets. I had to be patient and take the images over a period of several months because the skies in Britain are often clouded over and you need clear conditions.' His images include the Monkey's head nebula, M33 Pinwheel Galaxy, Andromeda Galaxy and the Flaming Star Nebula, and are being put together for a book."

Astronomers Discover 33 Pairs of Waltzing Black Holes 101

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday January 04, 2010 @04:59PM from the teach-them-to-foxtrot dept.

Astronomers from UC Berkeley have identified 33 pairs of waltzing black holes, closing the gap somewhat between the observed population of super-massive black hole pairs and what had been predicted by theory. "Astronomical observations have shown that 1) nearly every galaxy has a central super-massive black hole (with a mass of a million to a billion times the mass of the Sun), and 2) galaxies commonly collide and merge to form new, more massive galaxies. As a consequence of these two observations, a merger between two galaxies should bring two super-massive black holes to the new, more massive galaxy formed from the merger. The two black holes gradually in-spiral toward the center of this galaxy, engaging in a gravitational tug-of-war with the surrounding stars. The result is a black hole dance, choreographed by Newton himself. Such a dance is expected to occur in our own Milky Way Galaxy in about 3 billion years, when it collides with the Andromeda Galaxy."

Comment Re:Lego Mindstorms (Score 1) 799

by smithwd on Monday December 28, 2009 @12:24AM (#30568278) Attached to: How To Teach a 12-Year-Old To Program?

My son started on scratch from MIT when he was 7 or 8. Scratch is similar to Lego Mindstorm - in that it is a simple visual programming languages PLUS it is free. He spent a lot of time developing simple games on it. From there, we went on to buying Lego Mindstorm after he demonstrated interest and basic competencies in Scratch. However, when he was 9, he started finding these simple visual programming languages to be too limiting.

We then tried a simple C-like language for use with a Lego Mindstorm - but this was too much for him to learn at once.

After some research, I downloaded a trial version of Phrogram - which I wound up buying and he used for quite a while. It is derived from Kids Programming Language (KPL) and targets teaching programming to high school aged kids. The language comes with an IDE with a compiler and debugger - and makes it fairly simple to do 2D and 3D graphics games. My son loved this language and has been writing software in it for about 8 months. However, he has recently been finding the Phrogram development libraries to be rather limiting and was getting frustrated with it - particularly in lack of GUI libraries.

So more research on languages. He recently switched to working with Process, which is a simple Java-based language and associated development environment with more extensive library support. However, it lacks an integrated debugger. I believe that stepping from Process to Java is probably a pretty small step, but we have not gotten there yet.

My son has not gone back to learning C/C++ yet, but I think he will get there eventually. He is only 10 - and he will have plenty of time to get there at his own pace.

I had looked at Python and Lisp for him - but I wanted something that was a little more kid friendly. My son loves to show off his projects - and they have all been visually oriented with 2D or 3D interfaces. So picking a language with strong support for graphics is important for him.

Most of his learning has been unsupervised. He spends a lot of time looking at code examples, borrowing ideas from these examples and building from there, I do spend time helping him figure out code bugs, etc. - but he has been self motivated in terms of what sorts of applications he develops.

As you look at different language options, you need to consider a number of things - why do they want to learn to program? Are the language and development libraries well documented and organized in a way that a kid can use? Are there a lot of examples to work with? Do things work reliably and predictably? (For example, a buggy environment such as the C-based environment for Lego Mindstorm was a big negative.) Is it easy to get some kind of visual reward or feedback (e.g., easy to compile and test a program and see it working)?

And - remember - positive feedback and encouragement coupled with lots of patience are probably the most important part of his educational process.

An Open Source Compiler From CUDA To X86-Multicore 71

Posted by timothy on Wednesday December 23, 2009 @03:06PM from the abstraction-gains-a-layer dept.

Gregory Diamos writes "An open source project, Ocelot, has recently released a just-in-time compiler for CUDA, allowing the same programs to be run on NVIDIA GPUs or x86 CPUs and providing an alternative to OpenCL. A description of the compiler was recently posted on the NVIDIA forums. The compiler works by translating GPU instructions to LLVM and then generating native code for any LLVM target. It has been validated against over 100 CUDA applications. All of the code is available under the New BSD license."

The Limits To Skepticism 1093

Posted by kdawson on Saturday December 12, 2009 @10:32PM from the sometimes-you-just-gotta-say dept.

jamie found a long and painstaking piece up at The Economist asking and provisionally answering the question: "Does the spirit of scientific scepticism really require that I remain forever open-minded to denialist humbug until it's shown to be wrong?" The author, who is not named, spent several hours picking apart the arguments of one Willis Eschenbach, AGW denialist, who on Dec. 8 published what he called the "smoking gun" — it was supposed to prove that the adjustments climate scientists make to historical temperature records are arbitrary to the point of intentional manipulation. The conclusion: "[H]ere's my solution to this problem: this is why we have peer review. Average guys with websites can do a lot of amazing things. One thing they cannot do is reveal statistical manipulation in climate-change studies that require a PhD in a related field to understand. So for the time being, my response to any and all further 'smoking gun' claims begins with: show me the peer-reviewed journal article demonstrating the error here. Otherwise, you're a crank and this is not a story. And then I'll probably go ahead and try to investigate the claim and write a blog post about it, because that's my job. Oh, and by the way: October was the hottest month on record in Darwin, Australia."

Zombie Pigs First, Hibernating Soldiers Next 193

Posted by samzenpus on Monday December 07, 2009 @07:06PM from the fattening-up-on-brains dept.

ColdWetDog writes "Wired is running a story on DARPA's effort to stave off battlefield casualties by turning injured soldiers into zombies by injecting them with a cocktail of one chemical or another (details to be announced). From the article, 'Dr. Fossum predicts that each soldier will carry a syringe into combat zones or remote areas, and medic teams will be equipped with several. A single injection will minimize metabolic needs, de-animating injured troops by shutting down brain and heart function. Once treatment can be carried out, they'll be "re-animated" and — hopefully — as good as new.' If it doesn't pan out we can at least get zombie bacon and spam."

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