Chad Weider

Try [searching](http://www.google.com/search?q=electricity+consumption+of+US) for:

"electricity consumption of " + someCountryName

I stumbled on this when trying to calculate the amount of energy used refining [Aluminium](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium) in the US.

In case you were wondering, using Google’s (via the [CIA](http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rankorder/2042rank.html)) figure of 3,660,000,000,000 kWh and a usage rate of 5% according to [Nature’s Building Blocks](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0198503415/qid=1144809465/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/104-7536840-2492720?s=books&v=glance&n=283155) 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](http://www.math.uiuc.edu/PME/) here at the [University](http://www.uiuc.edu/)
hosted [Eric Weinstein](http://mathworld.wolfram.com/about/author.html), founder of [Mathworld](http://mathworld.wolfram.com).

For those who don’t know, Mathworld is an (excellent) online encyclopedia of mathematics from [Wolfram Research](http://wolfram.com).

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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web) thing was getting started. How he got [sued](http://mathworld.wolfram.com/about/erics_commentary.html#lawsuit), 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](http://www.wolfram.com/products/mathematica/index.html) 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](http://www.cbs.com/primetime/numb3rs/index.shtml) (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](http://store.wolfram.com/view/misc/popup/mathworld-tshirt-pp.html) too! – rock on.

So recently I’ve had a few questions coming in about the whole licensing/code usage thing… And so I figure probably *is* about time that I make some sorta post clarifying that stuff.

Anyway, getting straight to the point, all the content here (unless otherwise noted) is open, and under the [Creative Commons](http://creativecommons.org/) [Attribution License](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/). That is to say, anybody can use my work for any reason – I only ask that they give credit where credit is due.

However, I am more than sympathetic with developers who are not too keen on marring that nice, simple, straightforward about box with attributions and the like (I am one of them). So I am more than willing to waive that whole attribution thing (No, that doesn’t mean money – just asking nicely is good enough for me).

The big thing is that I want developers to be able to focus their efforts on what makes their app unique – not expending all their time making it conform. To the extent I can make that possible, I feel that I’ve helped.

As noted on my [projects](/projects) page, last year I worked on an inspired little app, [LaserLine](http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/macwarriors/projects/laserline/).

Last week [Joey Hagedorn](http://joeyhagedorn.com/) (LaserLine’s progenitor) shared some of his recent brainstorms for the next iteration of LaserLine (he’s already started [building](http://www.joeyhagedorn.com/category/laserist/) 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](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060521996/sr=8-1/qid=1142401672/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-1479412-7800751?%5Fencoding=UTF8) [almost](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596000480/qid=1142401729/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/104-1479412-7800751?s=books&v=glance&n=283155)) I think I’ll try and devote a sizable chunk of it to refreshing that old code.

Today is [Pi Day](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi_day), Have a wonderful Pi Day, Everyone.