“Error” indeed. I know people caught up in this. There isn’t much information but it seems anyone registering to vote, or perhaps anyone who changed their address, at the DMV in the last year or so is not actually registered to vote. No notifications to people who filled out the forms and thought they were registered. I’m also told people have received new drivers licenses with their correct addresses but the voter registration rolls still have their old addresses listed. This would cause people showing ID to vote to be rejected at polling places.
As I have said before I was unceremoniously “scrubbed” from Texas voter rolls in the 2000s, so this isn’t a new thing. But it has never been properly investigated. People really need to go to jail for this. Originally from the Texas Tribune but picked up by several news outlets today.
In the last post I mentioned that I had a job that took a week to run on a workstation in 1989. I was wondering how long it would take on a modern machine. I had the old Ada code stashed away, so with a little doctoring I was able to put together a single processor version. I was also able to install an Ada compiler called Gnat.
Gnat was a little picky and wanted specs and bodies (an Ada thing) in separate files with specific extensions. I also ripped out all the multiprocessor and load balancing, which was pretty easy. I actually had it running in a few minutes. Getting a bitmap to display properly took a few more minutes.
The interesting part: ran in maybe 3 seconds on a small x86 and maybe 10 seconds on a Raspberry Pi 5. Below are a Hally and a Newton bitmap in black and white. Also included the source in a zip file.
Last week we went to the Sandia Heights Artist’s Studio Tour. Lots of great stuff but I really enjoyed seeing some computer generated “fractal” art by Collin Delker. Really nicely colored 3D stuff. I did some similar work back in early 1989 when I was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota and working at Honeywell’s Systems and Research Center.
Since I was at Honeywell in the group that designed the Ada language, that was what I used for the implementation. I did it all in one morning as I recall. I ran it on my Sun 3 workstation not realizing it would take a week to get the final result. I didn’t have any reason to think the code would work the first time (it never does). I ran some scripts to convert the raw data not a bitmap and was surprised by what came out.
I was calculating the convergence of the 7th roots using Halley’s Method and zoomed in on the turbulent area at the convergence boundaries. Since the data was only 256 colors I had to map the colors to the millions of possibilities. At first I just stole colormaps for other GIF bitmaps but it was hit and miss. I made a rainbow-like spectrum that was the most interesting.
Instead of waiting a week for my results I started splitting the work across several other desktop workstations and running the job in the evening when they were usually idle. I also parlayed this into a project for Sudha Yalamanchili‘s graduate class in Parallel Processing at UMN.
I did some more complicated polynomials which took even longer to run, but produced some great images, even when colored with a limited palette.
I added some load balancing since some parts were more complicated than others and were taking longer to finish. One morning I came in to work and found out my job was still running. But it had gone wild and drove up the load on nearly every workstation in the lab. Nobody could even log in. The sysadmin was waiting for me in my office. He had tried to kill it but it kept re-spawning work. He asked me how to kill it off. I told him I didn’t know. I was sure I would be looking for a new job by afternoon.
But it completed in a few minutes and it turns out Bob (the sysadmin) hadn’t told anyone I was the culprit. I showed him what I was doing. Soon the whole office wanted to see my pics. My boss never mentioned it to me and I remained employed at Honeywell. I even got an A in Yalamanchili’s class. But that was more or less the end of my work in this area, though I did continue to specialize in high performance computing for the rest of my career.
Our primary car for the last decade or so is an EV. But we have a ten year old gas Miata that has about 18k miles on it. So I literally fill it up a few times a year. I was getting worried about future availably of gas and decided to fill up just in case.
I went to Bernalillo which is pretty much the only place on I-25 to buy gas between Albuquerque and Santa Fe. There are maybe a half dozen stations with a couple that are truck stops that cater to big rigs. The first place I tried, a Speedway, had no gas at all. I crossed the street to large Circle-K and it looked like close to half the pumps were closed. I did fill up, at almost $5.25 a gallon. Total bill was over $40. For a Miata that wasn’t even on empty. Someone put this little sticker near the prices on my pump.
A story from a few months back. It’s back in the news because she has decided to sue. It’s a story of AI technology being misused, which is easier to do than ever. Worth a read if you think “couldn’t happen to me”.
One place Climate Change Denial will hit a brick wall is in insurance. And it looks like this is one of many fronts (including fire, drought and floods) that will challenge the insurance business. Is anyone ready for this? From Insurance Business.
Dillon Amaya, an oceanographer at North Carolina State University, said the wave alone could raise sea levels along the coast by 6 to 12 inches for months at a time, on top of roughly a foot of sea level rise the state has already seen from climate change and a separate, ongoing marine heat wave.
Is this going to be the Peak Oil we have heard about for so long? High prices from the Iran War are driving down consumption, but it is also pushing electrification.
