Try searching for:
"electricity consumption of " + someCountryName
I stumbled on this when trying to calculate the amount of energy used refining Aluminium in the US.
In case you were wondering, using Google’s (via the CIA) figure of 3,660,000,000,000 kWh and a usage rate of 5% according to Nature’s Building Blocks by John Emsley, the final figure comes out to 186 billion kWh devoted to aluminium production annually.
Last Thursday the Matrix math club and Pi Mu Epsilon here at the University
hosted Eric Weinstein, founder of Mathworld.
For those who don’t know, Mathworld is an (excellent) online encyclopedia of mathematics from Wolfram Research.
His talk was interesting, and a good time was had by all.
He spoke about how Mathworld got started, first as a giant word document of class notes. He went on to talk about how he then put all those notes onto a website “Eric’s Treasure Trove of Mathematics” when that internet thing was getting started. How he got sued, taken down, and then then a year later (2000), how it returned as the site we know and love today.
We also got a nice preview of Mathematica 6.0. I’m no Mathematica user, but I saw a few things that impressed me. Mathematica now supports anti-aliasing (the jaggly lines it draws currently have always been a turn off for me). Smooth Shading (makes surfaces much nicer). And also a cool little deally where you (as far as I can tell) treat graphics as objects (or whatever they are in Mathematica) – so their no longer static and stuff like that… cool.
There were also some other nifty tidbits as well – he commented a bit on his role as an advisor to the CBS TV series Numb3rs (I haven’t seen it myself but I hear it’s good). I also found out that in the not so distant future we should be able to expect a Mathworld podcast (awesome) and that (surprisingly) the entire site is, by-in-large, still a one person show.
Oh – yea, almost forgot, I got this nifty Mathworld shirt too! – rock on.
As noted on my projects page, last year I worked on an inspired little app, LaserLine.
Last week Joey Hagedorn (LaserLine’s progenitor) shared some of his recent brainstorms for the next iteration of LaserLine (he’s already started building new and improved hardware), and I must say I’m rearin’ to go.
Seeing as spring break is starting soon, and I’ll have a whole week’s worth of free time (well almost) I think I’ll try and devote a sizable chunk of it to refreshing that old code.
Ok, so this post is sooo past due…
Anyways, before I get started:
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So yea, if you hadn’t heard already – I got a MacBook.
It arrived two weeks ago today (1.5 weeks ahead of schedule). So why so late for the unboxing pictures? well… my original plan was to have some really groovy before-and-after pictures to go along with them – but that hasn’t quite worked out.
You see…a while back (last semester) I took a few pictures of my previous setup, and they turned out really nice – the lighting that day was excellent. The sad part is that there haven’t been any days where I’ve managed to get the same lighting in my room (busy schedules and gloomy weather don’t quite seem to work). So after giving the sun “just one more day” for the past 2 weeks, I figured things were becoming a tad ridiculous. There ya’ go, I’ll finish excusing myself.
How has the MacBook been so far? Simply put – it’s been amazing.
…I’ll be a bit more detailed with the next post.
