I think I need to set a limit of three quotes at the bottom of my home page. Some of the old ones are too good (IMHO, of course) to just throw away. Herewith.
And: the "personal notes" are getting on past their sell-by date.
Personal Note 1. Many of you know that I had major back surgery in May. The operation was a complete success, for which I am deeply grateful, but I need some more time to regain full stamina and endurance and to gain more effective balance control. My main doctor says that when I do, around the first of the year, Ill be "as good as I was at 50." Great news, if true. I've gotten through three weeks of classes without major problems other than the anticipated fatigue. It's going to be a fine semester.
Personal Note 2. Quantum Monte Carlo at Home (below) is a grid computing initiative to harness unused cycles of tens of thousands of computers to solve problems in quantum chemistry. This takes me full cycle: my first program, in 1953, used the Monte Carlo method to solve a problem in neutron diffusion in a nuclear reactor for General Electric. I had an article in Scientific American about it in April, 1955. This was on the IBM 701 in the original IBM building at 57th and Madison. It had the equivalent of 32K bytes of memory, a 12 microsecond clock time, and rented for $15,000 per month--in 1953 dollars, obviously. Less than one millionth the computing power of my laptop, at maybe a thousand times the cost. I love computing!
Connecting the two Personal Notes: My unused cycles are working on protein folding of a bone morphogenetic protein. Connection: this stuff was put in my back during surgery to promote bone growth, as the vertebrae are now, as we speak, fusing together.
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change." — Charles Darwin
The quotation that sold a million of my Fortran books: "When an assigned GO TO is in the range of a DO, the statements in the nest to which it may transfer must all be in the exclusive range of a single DO, i.e., among those statements in the range of a DO which are not in the range of any DO in its range." -- Programmer's Reference Manual to Fortran, IBM, 1957.
There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, which demanded that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same. -- Norman Mailer, The Deer Park.
Everybody has a bad day now and then: "The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change." — Early FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers.
A grudge should be nursed as long as the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs--but no longer. — Attributed Weeeelllll, that's not funny. And it's not good personal psychology.
" . . . Composite image including reflection, transparency, detailed shadows, ambient occlusion and 4x4 jittered multisampling, totaling up to 288 rays per pixel. The car model comprises 1.6 million polygons, . . ." [This computation is done for every pixel in a high-res image, at interactive speeds, like 60 frames per second, i.e., for game programming. — From an IBM paper on ray tracing in image processing. My first computer needed 60 microseconds just to add two fixed-point numbers. It would have needed weeks to do the processing for one pixel in an image, although Prof. Wolberg says that with current video cards such a comparison is nearly meaningless; they have in effect a hundred very powerful parallel processors, etc. Given such a card, he doesn't find this an especially impressive amount of calculation. But I am still impressed!]
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