eric_t

6 ms·

1.
by eric_t 6y ago
Associate professor in fluid dynamics here. There is typically a split between the people who want good looking simulations for movies/games, and those who need accurate results for engineering. For engineering, you need more effort on
2.
by eric_t 7y ago
I’m also teaching fluid dynamics, and use Blender quite a bit for geometry work. Would love to hear more about your use of Blender for visualization if you’re willing to share.
3.
by eric_t 15y ago
Hypothetical is the key here. Everyone can dream up a perfect system, but in the real world, it will have to make compromises, which means that it won't be perfect for everyone.
4.
by eric_t 15y ago
Here's the summation problem in Fortran, quite succinct, IMO: real, dimension(30000000) :: a call random_number(a) print *, sum(a) That's 30 million doubles, takes 0.04s on my machine.
5.
by eric_t 15y ago
real, dimension(30000000) :: a call random_number(a) print *, sum(a) That's 30 million doubles, takes 0.04s on my machine.
6.
by eric_t 15y ago
A great quote from George E P Box: All models are wrong. Some are useful.
7.
by eric_t 15y ago
If your kids are toddler-age and older, it is certainly possible. But when you have babies, I consider step 1 impossible. I do all of the steps he mentions except number 1, and I am tired.
8.
by eric_t 15y ago
Sounds great, until you have kids...
9.
by eric_t 16y ago
I think it's wrong to say "Amateurs, happy to accept small checks for snapshots of children and sunsets". It's more of a democratization of the tools needed to do a successful photo shoot. Anyone can buy a DSLR, the strobist movement means
10.
by eric_t 16y ago
Interesting. Is the code available somewhere? I looked at your SIGGRAPH paper, and that was very interesting. Have you seen the FiPy project? It's a full-featured finite volume code in Python, which is very easy to extend (they did struggle
11.
by eric_t 16y ago
OCaml is only really fast if you use the imperative features. The only high performance Haskell code I've seen is from the language shootout, and it looks pretty hairy as well. Also, note that my Fortran function actually _is_ pure, so the
12.
by eric_t 16y ago
In the Fortran code, this could be run on the GPU by simply surrounding the code by !acc region !acc end region with the PGI Accelerator. It would have to be a pretty big loop for it to pay off, though, since transfer to/from the
13.
by eric_t 16y ago
We use a lot of compilers. They all vary in ability to detect bugs, and optimization features. The fastest used to be Intel, but right now the Portland group compiler seems to be the best. These are both commercial, though. Of the free comp
14.
by eric_t 16y ago
No, as the paper says, explicit Euler integration is extremely unstable. Implicit Euler, as the paper uses, is stable but only first order accurate. If you're dealing with fluids with low diffusion compared to advection, some higher order R
15.
by eric_t 16y ago
I have a PhD in computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and have written several CFD codes in Fortran, C, Matlab and Python. I'm also a programming language geek, and have been interested in functional programming languages for quite some time.
16.
by eric_t 17y ago
If he now interviews a new set of couples, does his predictions according to the developed model, and it _still_ gives high accuracy, then we can call it science. The power of a good model lies not in how good it predicts what you know, but
17.
by eric_t 17y ago
A new and improved TeX?
18.
by eric_t 17y ago
The author makes a couple of assumptions that I don't agree with. The first is that success is measured by the amount of money you earn. For me it is much more rewarding to work on interesting and inspiring problems than having a huge incom
19.
by eric_t 17y ago
I disagree somewhat with your final statement. As long as we're talking about a creative job, it's not easy no matter what. As a scientist/researcher, you have to be every bit as creative as an artist or a musician, IMO. This is somewhat tr
20.
by eric_t 17y ago
This used to be the case, but universities are getting better at this. Usually it's pretty easy to spin off a company, where the university retains some ownership. It's a win-win situation, really, a university is a great place to foster id
21.
by eric_t 17y ago
If you think of your supervisor like a boss, that's wrong, IMO. You should pursue your own ideas in your own way, and your supervisor should do just that, supervise you and guide you as best as he can, then let you do what you want with his
22.
by eric_t 17y ago
It's a good roundup, but I think you missed the most compelling reason to do a PhD, at least it was for me. And that is that you get the opportunity to dig really deep into a problem for three year or more. And that is your only concern, no
23.
by eric_t 17y ago
There is a saying in the scientific community..."if you want to make sure that your competitor doesn't get any work done for the next two years, give him your code!". In all seriousness, though, a lot of labs view their in-house codes as a
24.
by eric_t 17y ago
I agree, extremely annoying. I just skipped to the last sentence in every paragraph.
25.
by eric_t 17y ago
The problem is that there is a whole industry created around Photoshop, all artists use it, it's taught in every college/course, and there are a million books written about it. For a startup to compete against that momentum would be extreme
26.
by eric_t 17y ago
I didn't find it hard at all, just not very interesting, so wasn't motivated to learn it (no offense). I think having more open-ended jam tracks would work better.
27.
by eric_t 17y ago
The police in Norway doesn't carry guns, that should give you an indication...
28.
by eric_t 17y ago
I do physics simulations, and can easily reach those times with a similar amount of input. And that is with highly optimized Fortran code. But yeah, a comparison with a pure Java or C++ implementation would have been great, both in terms of
29.
by eric_t 17y ago
Exactly. But this algorithm was fuzzy, so it gave you a list of the songs which most closely resembled the one you tried to sing.
30.
by eric_t 17y ago
It would be much better if you could hum or whistle a tune, and it would recognize it. I saw a PhD thesis once about this, with an actual implementation that worked pretty well. The only problem was that the database of songs was very small

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