BBC NEWS has a fascinating and fun article about the psychology of maths (by Professor Ian Stewart)

Man doing maths

Anger, relief and disappointment - that's what sums can do
Tears, tantrums and murder. Far from being a cold and rational exercise, maths can provoke the full range of human emotions, explains Professor Ian Stewart.

In these days when wearing your heart on your sleeve is seen as qualifying you to be a true human being, rather than some robotic control freak, scientists and mathematicians are often viewed as being far too rational to be truly human.

Especially mathematicians, who spend all their days doing boring sums in some remote world of the intellect.

Some news, guys: it's not true.

Not just that we don't spend our time doing sums, but also we possess entirely normal human emotions - and express them.

Agreed, mathematicians are seldom seen bursting into tears or shouting in the streets, but that's mostly because mathematicians are seldom seen. Or, more to the point, seldom noticed, because there are hundreds of thousands of mathematically qualified people in British society, working in a huge range of jobs.

Shouting matches

And it's true that the way mathematics is usually presented strips out the emotional element - but the same goes for banking, architecture, whatever.

Anyone who has ever been to a mathematics conference, or sat in a mathematics department common room, notices very quickly that not only are mathematicians emotionally committed to their subject, but the emotions often run high. Shouting matches are not unusual.

The only time mathematics has driven me to tears was when I was 10

There is an important difference, however: when two mathematicians are arguing at the tops of their voices, eventually one of them says: "Oops, sorry, I've just seen why you're right." And the two are once more the best of friends and go off to the pub together.

This reminds me of one of Richard Feynman's anecdotes of a meeting involving some of the world's greatest minds discussing work at the Los Alamos project - he mentions how items on the agenda were raised, circulated once around the panel and then resolved. He was impressed that there was no grand-standing and contradictions.

I also remember sitting watching a particularly vocal disagreement between a number of particularly vocal (male) physicists - what struck me was that women (the few that were their) were excluded form the discussion not only due to the sheer aggression (this in itself did not concern me, perhaps wrongly), but also the allusions were of a masculine & sporting nature and in fact they were treated as if they were not there (I am not referring here to being excessively deferential as men can when confronted by a woman). Certainly, in my industrial career, teams that do not involve a sizeable number of women, is a sure sign that something is wrong, but I digress).

It is wonderful to observe to people reaching an accord through argument. It happens a lot in science, and I suppose in politics and economics, where the rules of the discipline are accepted and respected. I guess in science, the winner stands in stark relief due to falsifiability.

On the subject of weird and wonderful languages (this follows Aptana and Cloud Computing), comes Haskell and Erlang (is this related to the mathematical distribution [1], or the soft real-time, declarative, functional language for concurrent, distributed systems by Ericsson Computer Science Laboratory [2] or a unit of traffic or Erlang traffic models [3]).

(Soon I will be speaking about "D"!)

I have played with Sun's Grid Engine (whatever it is called now) plugin to Netbeans - it seems to work quite will, but since I am not a US citizen I was not able to play with it on their cluster (ie Release mode).

I have been doing a lot of iPhone and php work recently (for my sins) and have been using Aptana - one of the things Aptana does is Cloud Computing. I took one of their example projects and deployed it to a cloud - http://compute-aptana-games-demo.aptanacloud.com/.

Parallel framework for statistical analysis package “R”Yes, I know that R doesn’t have quotes, but I thought that the non-R users out there might think it was a typo. Good news if you use R and yearn for easier access to parallel goodness: SPRINT

From Inside HPC

Angel Lopez posts an updated example of the fractal HPC Server example code

I updated my fractal example to support MPI.NET (Message Passing Interface with .NET) and parametric tasks in Windows HPC Server 2008. The example can be download from my ajcodekatas Google code:

http://code.google.com/p/ajcodekatas/source/browse/#svn/trunk/FractalExample

Nice example of HPC.NET programming that makes pretty pictures — in case you’re easily bored.

I have always wanted to do this but have never had time. Cool. My noddy toy was using mpi on a Tyan 16 node Personal Super Computer. I have a web interface, and a little javascript to set the zoom. It is not a lot of work to get working again, but I am tempted by the Microsoft option.

From Inside HPC

On Christmas Day, Microsoft published the details on a recent patent application geared toward pay-as-you-go computing.  The abstract details a situation where the supply chain heavily subsidizes the initial cost of computing equipment and in-turn, charges for time and the performance of the machine.  Microsoft notes that the end user could possibly end up paying more for the computer than the original sale price.  They argue, though, that users would benefit by increasing the “useful life” of the machine.

I think that this cloud based computing model is very useful for SMME's and I have a suspicion that it will become increasingly important, one way or another. For the time being, ignore the issue of patenting and think how it can help you, and I am sure that you will see that big installs will become a thing of the past.

Intellectual Property is normally neither intellectual nor property: very often simple-minded things are identified in an abstract program. While it is right that IP is questioned in many ways - for example patenting software is contentious: you can do it in the US but cannot do it in Europe. Nonetheless I do not agree that "open" is a useful or important alternative, which seems to be the argument punted in noseweek.

The CHPC have dramatically revamped their web site. Although it is quite flashy, it has a lot more information, looks a lot more professional and has removed some of the previous errors.

Of particular interest is information about the flagship projects.

Another interesting item is the CHPC meeting that happened in KZN.

One quibble, their slogan - "Enabling Science through cybertechnology" - is not meaningful.

Bjarne Stroustrup invented C++ while working at Bell Labs (before they got broken up by over zealous managers.

I found the link from Slashdot and links to »

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Smaller and smaller at FM Tech
December 3rd, 2008

Intel Core i7[Duncan McLeod Financial Mail] In 1965, Intel cofounder Gordon Moore famously wrote that the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles roughly every 24 months. But chip engineers could soon come up against the immutable laws of physics.

Intel’s iconic Pentium processor, introduced in 1993, had 3,1m transistors — the tiny switches that process the ones and zeroes of the digital world — and was capable of processing 100m instructions every second. At the time, the technology press was in awe of this incredibly powerful chip, which had 1 500 times the grunt of the first commercial microprocessor, Intel’s 4004 from 1971.

I found the Intel releases for the last 40 years (4004, 8086, 286, 386, 486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium 4, Pentium M , Core and i7 ) and calculated the doubling time to be 2.13 years. (Some people have too much time.) However I did not normalise it by the die size...