Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Pol Potpourri


  • Cluster computing during an Earthquake? That's what Sun was testing with an interesting video about the results (notice that the test results are shown on Windows platforms, not a Sun operating system).
  • Nice to hear some sane thoughts on a difference between Macs and Windows boxes...even if it concerns the rather mundane details of each of them deals with rendering fonts.
  • There's been lots of talk lately about people pissing off judges. Not just the sheriff defying the judge in Paris Hilton's case, but also in the Scooter Libby case. I think this footnote he stuck in is brilliant, and, unless you've been reading Talking Points Memo as I've recommended, you've probably heard nothing of it.
  • FSP gets asked "Didn't the senior co-authors read this thing?" concerning one of her submissions. I've asked the same question a number of times, but not about simple editing. No, I've challenged a couple of the ostensible leaders of a small field concerning overly general applications of simple theorems. I'm still left wondering if they're really as stupid as both their original manuscript and their responses indicate. I suppose they're just used to bullying referees or something. I'm comforted by two facts: (i) their papers didn't get accepted and (ii) they don't know who I am, but I know who they are.
  • The Cavs are so outclassed. As the strange dude on ESPN says (paraphrasing) "The Cavs are a good team in the JV league that is the Eastern Conference." I like LeBron, but he needs help on defense and offense. It may be sacrilege to some, but MJ needed help as well.
  • Federer lost and I'm happy. I don't really have anything against him, but I figure his rivalry with Nadal is best preserved if Nadal maintains his reign at the French Open. And oh yeah, though I hate to root against records being broken, I love Sampras so if Federer never wins it, it'll be tougher to say Federer is better than Sampras. And if anyone dares mention Agassi in the comments...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Uncle Al has a nasty math crunch running all alone 30-50 days 24/7 a whack in his AMD Athlon FX55. The real truth is that source code compiled and run AMD FX55 gives 1.4X the throughput of compiled and run Intel Pentium Extreme. The FX55 booted Knoppix or a hot Mac gives 1.4X the throughput of WinXP/FX55. Wintel vs. Linux/AMD is a difference of two in throughput! Wintel loses.

A large part of the world truly stinks.

(Anybody who has high end hardware sitting idle or a bored cluster is invited to give it a crunchy filling: organiker (symbol) lycos (period) com Only the CPU and RAM are kept busy.)

Anonymous said...

So what is it about Agassi ? ;-)

Anonymous said...

I promise to mention Agassi only in passing...

I think the reason I like Sampras and have a hard time liking Federer is that, at the time, it didn't seem like such a foregone conclusion that Pete would ALWAYS win EVERYTHING. There were some other players around (Andre was one for a time) who would still beat Sampras if he didn't bring his A game. Of course he usually did, but still... there was always a sense of some sort of struggle.

And maybe it's becuase I don't pay as much attention to tennis now as I did 10 years ago, but I just don't see that whenever I watch Federer play. He just... wins. And I don't know if it's because he's just THAT good, or because nobody ELSE is that good, but I find the current situation in men's tennis pretty boring as a result.

Angry said...

Agassi just demonstrated a real lack of class way-back-when. He called Pete boring and likened him to a monkey (Pete's pretty hairy). And then he advertised Canon cameras (I used to be a Nikon person) with *his* shirt off! What does he know about cameras and what's he doing with his shirt off? I know, I know, not the biggest deal in the world, but sports need villains and he's joined Roger Clemens and Karl Malone on that list.