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Collection of Fluid Dynamics Papers and Videos

Posted by Stephen Waits Sun, 05 Mar 2006 05:06:46 GMT

Check out Ron Fedkiw’s Page over at Stanford for a fantastic catalog of FD papers and videos. I seem to recall going to a talk of his at SIGGRAPH a few years ago. Bedazzling.

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Intro to Buddhism

Posted by Stephen Waits Sun, 05 Mar 2006 05:02:02 GMT

I am intrigued, more than any other “religion”, with Buddhism. I’m really not a believer in the whole Church concept – I think it’s too open to corruption. The people attending often need it though, and the people running it seem happy to oblige.

Buddhists don’t proselytize; instead, they are contempt with themselves and their studies. They’re definitely in it for the right reasons.

If you’re interested in learning more, check out this Five Minute Introduction to Buddhism. For a little more detail, read the longer Introduction to Buddhism.

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A better search engine?

Posted by Stephen Waits Sun, 05 Mar 2006 04:54:07 GMT

Take a peek at factbites. It’s a search engine that provides encyclopedia-like facts along with your search results. The catalog isn’t huge, but the “factbites” it returns are pretty neat!

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Energy Questions

Posted by Stephen Waits Sun, 05 Mar 2006 04:51:26 GMT

Here’s a page at Stanford that answers many common Energy Questions, such as this:

Q. Isn’t the world running out of energy.

A. No. Nuclear and solar energy are each adequate for the next billion years. That’s right; billion not just million or thousand. Bernard Cohen published the facts about that.

This page assumes the law of conservation of energy. If you don’t understand that, look at law of conservation of energy. Here’s how you can tell if you don’t understand. Several times I have received in email the following idea for powering cars with hydrogen from water. Run the car on hydrogen obtained by splitting water by electrolysis using the car’s generator to get the electricity. If you can’t quickly explain why that idea can’t work, you need to follow the above link.

.. and this:

Q. Should we go all out to economize the use of oil to make it last longer?

A. Probably not. Too many regulations are likely to be more harmful than letting the prices rise as the reserves get scarcer and as demand from the developing world grows. 2002 August: In saying this I’m disagreeing with political opinions including those dominating the scientific community and the Government financed energy studies community.

And, no, I can’t vouch for the validity of any of this – I read it on the Internet.

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Sudoku Time

Posted by Stephen Waits Sat, 04 Mar 2006 00:35:00 GMT

3/3 in 5:44.

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Annotate your Rails Model Files

Posted by Stephen Waits Fri, 03 Mar 2006 17:28:53 GMT

Pragmatic Dave as created a plugin that will automagically add the appropriate table schema at the top of each of your model files!

Anyone who has worked with Rails and a database, even a tiny bit, should instantly recognize the usefulness of this simple little thing!

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