On 2/12/14 11:51 AM, "Douglas Eadline" <deadl...@eadline.org> wrote:
> >FYI, I liked it, found some things a little forced to >squeeze in some references to Feynman's other work. > >I still recall seeing him in the televised hearings >demonstrating the frozen sealant and thinking that >is such a brilliant and simple demonstration of >the issue. A trap that technologists (including myself) fall into is getting fascinated by the technology when explaining something to non-specialists. We go on about sophisticated variable rate coding schemes that allow approaching the Shannon Limit with minimum computational resources and iterative maximum likelihood decoders with parallel processing, and what they want to hear is "HD video on your cellphone" Feynman was very good at working at multiple levels of explanation, and that is not easy. So while Feynman could probably hold his own talking to a bunch of mechanical engineers talking about elastomer nonlinear behavior over temperature, he knew that a simple demonstration of that behavior was more appropriate for that audience. He did get flak for being a bit of a showman for that "stunt", but I think that's the same thing that occurs for "science popularizers" like Asimov or Sagan. It's almost like a hold over of the "amateur tradition" from Victorian times: Gentlemen do not seek attention, it is vulgar. I've had the opportunity over the last few months to spend a lot of time explaining a moderately complex technology to an interested but non-technical audience. As a result, I've got a heck of a lot more respect for people who can do it well. (google/bing "jim lux NASA heartbeat") Interesting to this group, we DID use HPC in developing FINDER: FDTD EM propagation models. However,I don't talk about Rayleigh scattering and dispersive heterogenous media and model/experiment correlation. I have a physical model that I can hold in my hand to show what's going on, albeit somewhat inaccurate in scale. I think it's important that if we want people to spend money on high performance computing and other nifty technology, we've got to make it tangible to them in a desirable way. Sadly, many of my acquaintances think that HPC is mostly used for high frequency trading (evil bankers in the 0.001%) and (recently) Automatic scanning of phone call and email content (evil government snooping), and don't think in terms of "better fuel economy for your car". Computational chemistry and biology are also big users of HPC, but I avoid talking about those, because that can trigger the whole genetic engineering/big Pharma discussion. _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
