One of these things is not like the others

Fidelity periodically pushes a particular mutual fund. Recently it's their Fidelity Trend Fund. They usually put up a growth since inception chart:

I'm scratching my head over the Apple iPod appearing here. I mean they're nice and all. I have one. But alongside the lunar landing and the fall of the wall?

Brown Applied Mathematics Report Released

Just recently released through SIAM, the Brown Report discusses how the U.S. Department of Energy wants applied mathematics to evolve to fit the its needs. One of the panel members, J. Tinsley Oden, is the director of my applied mathematics program at U.T. The timing of the report is interesting — this past Friday we had several folks from Sandia on campus for a meeting as part of the PECOS center. The odds are pretty good that I'll spend next summer at Sandia.

Video Compression and Turbulence Don't Mix

At least not well. While trying to re-learn basic fluid mechanics I ran across some mid-60's instructional films made by the National Committee for Fluid Mechanics Films. The excellent material presentation and quality of the experimental setups has helped me regain some intuition. The retro-educational aspects are outstanding: black and white video, coke bottle glasses, professors in full suits, gesturing at concepts with a pipe, etc.

Sadly though, the films have been stored in the usual compressed way. For laminar flow visualization, this works fine. Unfortunately, the film on turbulence suffers from nasty compression artifacts that obscure the time-dependent, chaotic structure this video was designed to illustrate. It'd be interesting to know if there are domain-specific codecs that would adequately capture chaotic motion here, or if all compression approaches would suffer a similar fate. In theory, you probably could capture the isotropic small scale structure and then overlay that atop a normal video codec to get acceptable results.

Passed my Quals

Possibly the sweetest words I've read in a long time:

Congratulations! You have passed all three CAM Preliminary Examinations....

We saw Eddie Izzard last night at the Paramount Theatre. Damned good stuff. I'm very much looking forward to a DVD release of a specials.

Fortran Compiler Output

Intel 10 Fortran Compiler

remark: LOOP WAS VECTORIZED.
remark: LOOP WAS VECTORIZED.
...
remark: LOOP WAS VECTORIZED.
remark: LOOP WAS VECTORIZED.

Me

Oh swell, thanks. Err, I mean "remark: THANK YOU".