This post was cross-posted from software-carpentry.org in case you’ve been wondering what your inSCIghtful panelists are up to when they’re not making podcasts. This week, Anthony, Katy, and Milad were doing this : Software Carpentry brought a boot camp to the University of Chicago with collaboration from the FLASH Center at the University of Chicago’s Computational Institute and The… [Read more…]
March 31, 2012
by Anthony Scopatz
the thought process of a computational scientist To appease the PI, our hero – the dashing, young scientist – faces down the following problem with moxie normally reserved for Marie Curie. In 2D or 3D, we have two points (p1 and p2) which define a line segment. Additionally there exists experimental data which can be… [Read more…]
March 19, 2012
by Anthony Scopatz
Listen to the podcast For episode 26, a group of Hacker Within alums visited PyCon 2012 in Santa Clara, CA. We discuss some of the very exciting developments in the world of scientific computing in Python, including such projects as Pandas, NumPy, PyTables and the incredibly well received new IPython web notebook. Today’s old hats include: Jean-Christophe… [Read more…]
March 9, 2012
by Anthony Scopatz
A couple of weeks ago Milad (animal) and I engaged in a lively discussion at the NIF User Group Meeting banquet on the nature of free & open source. Specifically in contention was FLASH, the code we both work on for the University of Chicago. At the NIF User Group Meeting and elsewhere, FLASH has… [Read more…]
Listen to the podcast On episode 25, we discuss the Advanced School For Scientific Software Development, an educational effort in Trieste, Italy supported by the International Center For Theoretical Physics (ICTP) under the aegis of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). This workshop was organized… [Read more…]
Bruce Dawson wrote a very popular white paper on comparing floating point numbers. A few days ago, he posted an update with corrections and a great, easy-to-follow discussion of the topic. The problem addressed is determination when two floating point numbers are effectively equal. As you may have experienced, the “==” or “!=” operators are… [Read more…]
As a follow-up to our episode on ParaViewWeb, we present visualization of the WordPress statistics for episode page views of our blog. While most listeners subscribe to our RSS feed, the blog page views provide a glimpse into the time course of episode attention. Hat tip goes to Anthony Scopatz for tracking down a method… [Read more…]
February 16, 2012
by Anthony Scopatz
Happy Birthday inSCIght! A huge thanks to all of our moderators, hosts, guests, friends, and colleagues who have helped define the podcast & scientific computing in the past year. And of course, thanks to you – the stalwart listener – who has borne with us and given us a reason to continue producing shows. Here… [Read more…]
Listen to the podcast On episode 24, we discuss ParaViewWeb, software for interative, 3D browser-based web visualization based on a client-server architecture. We go over the technologies that make this possible, including JavaScript, WebGL, Java Applets, Flex, and JSON-RPC. The role of this next-generation collabortive visualization technology is discussed along with its challenges including high-bandwidth… [Read more…]
February 5, 2012
by Anthony Scopatz
Related to a post from last week about a petition against Elsevier, the U.S. Congress House of Representatives has put forth HR 3699 – the Research Works Act (RWA). The innocuous name belies the insidious intent. This bill would severely limit the flow of scientific and technical over the internet if it was in any way associated… [Read more…]
April 5, 2012
by katyhuff
1