Satellites, missiles, Calculus and XMLHttpRequest
So the world and the news this morning are all talking about the successful destruction of a US spy satellite. Apparently the satellite was channeling its inner three year old by refusing to stay where it was told (i.e. orbit) and threatening to take its ball and go home in a huff (i.e. bring its fuel tank full of a toxic witch’s brew back down to the earth.)
I would venture it safe to say that the insurance industry wasn’t looking forward to claims which read:
Act of God
Act of US espionage program gone awry
Technologically it was a very interesting event. The news outlets are calling it “hitting a bullet with a bullet” but that might be a tad on the over simplication side. It’s more like hitting a big, fast object full of explosive fuel with another big, fast object full of exposive explosives. Oh, and instead of aiming with a sight on the end of a barrel they used a super duper expensive Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser.
The most amazing part to me is that this event wasn’t even the most notable technological thing in the news yesterday. It came in a strong second to be sure, and that’s nothing at all to be ashamed of, but the bigger news was that there is an AJAX version of Mathematica coming. Hard core numerical computation that used to make the college lab computers beg to be put out of their misery now done by way of Javascript? That’s just crazy.
I know I know, I might be overstating things here just a tiny bit. But Mathematica (or more correctly its competitor Maple) really saved my bacon in college Calculus. I mean, I’ll be honest here, the chances of Hydrazine napalm falling from the heavens and landing on me are really, really remote. The chances of me tanking out of Calculus without having the lab projects to prop up my pitiful exam scores are so high that no casino in Vegas would dream of taking a bet on it.
On the plus side, with this new version of Mathematica students everywhere will be able to slog the misery that is Calculus so that someday they too can build anti-ballistic missiles that we can then use the next time a government spy satellite throws a temper tantrum. Who would have ever thought in a million years that we would be saved by Javascript?
Heh, I remember Mathematica. Calculus II, III, and IV were all required to be taken in tandem with Calculus Lab I, II, and III (imaging matching up Calc II with Lab I, III with II, etc. They made you take a test just to see if you could understand the number mismatches before you could even register). Anyways, although the labs were required with the lecture, they were completely independent. Therefore when I scored pitifully on a Calc III exam and dropped the course, I could still remain in Calc Lab II. My point in this comment is to explain that I had such a great lab instructor for my last quarter that he posted the solutions to all of the labs online, thus enabling me to get an A for the lab with little to no work.
Comment by Jonathan — February 21, 2008 @ 12:50 pm
Regarding the online version of Mathematica, they better speed up if they want to compete with SAGE (http://www.sagemath.org/)
Comment by Paul — February 21, 2008 @ 1:26 pm
Dude, and all that time I thought you were doing well in math because you were cheating off of my work. Pesky Maple.
I’m glad Paul mentioned SAGE — I’ve been using it to crash my machine a lot over the past few months (although I’m using the huge virtual machine download — not nearly as elegant as AJAX, but hey — I’m lazy). Mathematica cost, if I recall correctly, 12 times the going value of my soul in college, and that counts the minute amount of gold in my fingernails. I doubt it’s gotten much less expensive. Maple was like half that. SAGE actually comes in at less than the cost of fingernail _clippings_, so that’s real progress.
I wonder if an embedded version of SAGE could guide missles? Hmmm…
Comment by ChipMonkey — February 22, 2008 @ 1:08 pm
[...] Original post by Grant [...]
Pingback by Satellites, missiles, Calculus and XMLHttpRequest — February 23, 2008 @ 8:02 am
your page looks pretty good on the iPhone
Comment by Jonathan — February 24, 2008 @ 1:54 pm