Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
It's been a long time since many computers ran DOS or even Windows 3.1. Given the changes in hardware, it would be difficult to get most any recent PC to run one or both. Yet every time we have a major software upgrade, we lose some of the capabilities we had in the past. It's …
Continue reading "Partying Like It’s 1987: Running WEAP87 and SPILE (and other programs) on DOSBox"
Anyone who blogs has persistent commenters. Last year my "top" commenter was one David Lloyd-Jones, a Canadian who took exception to a great deal of what I wrote (although not everything he read). Lloyd-Jones found me via my series of my business dealings in China in the early 1980's. He himself has had an interesting …
An academic paper with a rather unusual history is that of the Israeli mathematician Ami Harten's “High Resolution Schemes for Hyperbolic Conservation Laws.” First published in the Journal of Computation Physics in 1983, it was republished in 1997 in the same journal, and is often cited with the later date. At the time of republishing …
Continue reading "Proof of Harten's Lemma re the Convergence of TVNI Finite-Difference Schemes"
Every New Year's Day, I try to get away from the usual run of topics and tackle something of longer-term interest. Last year it was gun control; the only thing that prevented this from becoming a larger player on our political stage was the ineptitude of the administration that wants to expand it. This year's …
Continue reading "I Do All the Talking, and He Does All the Thinking"
Yes, a new gas tax can help our transportation system: The program is the federal Highway Trust Fund, which pays about half the yearly tab to build and maintain the nation’s roads, bridges and rails. At the moment, the loudest advocate for fixing it responsibly is a liberal Democrat, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (Ore.). This month …
Continue reading "To Fund Transportation, We Must Get Past the Shell Game"
Readers of this blog may remember that I did an interview with the legendary Abu Daoud almost two years ago. As is the case with my academic career (I'm both student and faculty at the same time) not only can I dish it out, but I can take it too: the current issue of Pile …
About a year ago I did a piece on the French scientist and engineer Adhémar Jean Claude Barré de Saint-Venant, whose combination of scientific prowess and Christian conviction made for an interesting career in Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary France. When he died in 1886, Karl Pearson, as well-known an enemy of Christianity as, say, Richard Dawkins …
Let me begin this post by stating the following: I hate touchscreen based interface systems on PC's and laptops. For tablets and smartphones (iPads and iPhones for you Mac Cult types) and simple interface (POS) applications, they're great, use them all the time. But systems like Windows 8 and Canonical's Unity interface drive me batty. …
Continue reading "Tales from @TheUbik: The Lord of the Flies is the Lord of the Touchscreen"
One of my colleagues at the SimCenter: National Center for Computational Engineering threw out the question of what PhD topic to choose. My response was as follows (he's from Iran, thus my reference to the 1979 Revolution): The ideal of the PhD topic--which has been held in front of me ever since undergraduate days before …
Like everyone else, it's slow: Deputy Town Manager Tom Bradford brightened Tuesday’s meeting of the Town Council’s Ordinances, Rules and Standards Committee with news that North End residents have inundated the town with requests to have power, cable and phone lines buried on their respective streets. Their interest appears to have been sparked by two …
Continue reading "Going Underground With Electrics, the Palm Beach Way"
Positive Infinity 