Comparing Matlab and Mathematica

Comparing Matlab and Mathematica - by walkiria - Helium: "The comparison between Matlab and Mathematica is NOT numeric versus symbolic as some claim. It is 'high level complete system' versus 'low level core with specialist toolboxes'. Mathematica can do all the numeric math and matrix work that Matlab can do, as fast and as accurately. Matlab is almost strictly a subset of the functionality of Mathematica."

RutherfordGate: Historian Responds to President Obama’s Hayes Slur

RutherfordGate: Historian Responds to President Obama’s Hayes Slur -- Daily Intel: "It's not unusual for President Obama to criticize his Republican predecessors from time to time, but this morning, he targeted his scorn not at George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan, but ... Rutherford B. Hayes. As Politico reported: Speaking about the need to develop new sources of American energy in Largo, Md., Obama used our 19th president as a failure of forward-thinking leadership. "One of my predecessors, President Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone: 'It’s a great invention but who would ever want to use one?'" Obama said. "That's why he's not on Mt. Rushmore." "He's looking backwards, he's not looking forward. He's explaining why we can't do something instead of why we can do something," Obama said.  Burn.  We thought it was a bit unsporting of Obama to attack President Hayes, who is quite unable to respond. So we called up the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Fremont, Ohio, where Nan Card, the curator of manuscripts, was plenty willing to correct Obama's ignorance of White House history. Just as soon as she finished chuckling.  "I've heard that before, and no one ever knows where it came from," Card said of Hayes's alleged phone remark, "but people just keep repeating it and repeating it, so it's out there."  Wait, so Hayes didn't even say the quote that Obama is mocking him for? "No, no," Card confirmed. She then read aloud a newspaper article from June 29, 1877, which describes Hayes's delight upon first experiencing the magic of the telephone. The Providence Journal story reported that as Hayes listened on the phone, "a gradually increasing smile wreathe[d] his lips and wonder shone in his eyes more and more.” Hayes took the phone from his ear, "looked at it a moment in surprise and remarked, 'That is wonderful.'" In fact, Card noted, Hayes was not only the first president to have a telephone in the White House, but he was also the first to use the typewriter, and he had Thomas Edison come to the White House to demonstrate the phonograph. "So I think he was pretty much cutting edge," Card insisted, "maybe just the opposite of what President Obama had to say there.""

Abandon MATLAB

Why write this? « Abandon MATLAB: "Well, MATLAB was obviously an improvement over FORTRAN for working scientists and engineers, in much the same way that Perl was an improvement over Sed, Awk and shell. So MATLAB was pretty good, in the ’90s, I suppose. Today, it’s an ancient language..."

Here's what's wrong with Windows 8 | ZDNet

Here's what's wrong with Windows 8 | ZDNet: "Summary: Windows 8 is a massive gamble for Microsoft, and right now I can see the potential for it to fail harder than Windows Vista did.

I’ve been using the Windows 8 Consumer Preview since its release back at the end of February, and having used it extensively on a number of several physical and virtual systems, I can now put my finger on what I think is wrong with Microsoft’s latest incarnation of Windows."

 

The Tau Manifesto by Michael Hartl | Tau Day, 2010

No, really, pi is wrong: The Tau Manifesto by Michael Hartl | Tau Day, 2010: "The Tau Manifesto is dedicated to one of the most important numbers in mathematics, perhaps the most important: the circle constant relating the circumference of a circle to its linear dimension. For millennia, the circle has been considered the most perfect of shapes, and the circle constant captures the geometry of the circle in a single number. Of course, the traditional choice for the circle constant is π—but, as mathematician Bob Palais notes in his delightful article “π Is Wrong!”1, π is wrong. It’s time to set things right."

Classic Nintendo Games Are NP Hard

Classic Nintendo Games Are NP Hard: "You may have have thought that games like Mario, Donkey Kong and so on were hard at the time you were playing them, but you probably didn't guess that they were NP-hard. NP-hard problems are in a sense the ones that are most difficult to solve by computational means because the time it takes to find a solution tends to increase so quickly with the size of the problem that it just isn't practical to perform the computation. Now we have some results from computer scientists at Universite Libre de Bruxelles and MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) that many classic games contain within them an NP-hard problem. It is a bit like the discovery of a black hole at the center of every galaxy. Should either fact be surprising?"

Pi Goes to Washington

TeachPi.org: "Only 112 years after its last appearance on a legislative floor—the doomed bill in the Indiana statehouse that offered nine different values for the number—Pi made a surprise appearance in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2009.

March 14 fell on a Saturday in 2009, but that didn‘t stop things from heating up in the week leading up to it. On Monday, March 8th, Representative Bart Gordon of Tennessee introduced House Resolution 224, officially called “Supporting the designation of Pi Day, and for other purposes.” As the chairman of the House Committee on Science and Technology, Gordon’s intent was clear: to use the holiday as a platform for making a statement about the importance of math and science education in America."