Posted in haskell, open source, science on September 19th, 2009 5 Comments »
I just released version 0.3.3 of the Haskell statistics library, which contains a very fast pseudo-random number generator.
The generator is an implementation of George Marsaglia’s MWC256 multiply-with-carry PRNG, which has a period of 28222 (for this reason, it’s sometimes referred to as MWC8222). It produces high-quality uniformly distributed pseudo-random numbers extremely quickly.
Here is a brief [...]
Posted in haskell, open source, science on September 12th, 2009 5 Comments »
A few weeks ago, I decided that I'd like to focus for a while on getting a 1.0 release of the Haskell text library ready. That work has gone fairly well so far. I've focused on making sure that I like the API, and that a few key functions have good performance characteristics.
One such function [...]
Posted in reading, science on December 20th, 2007 No Comments »
Here is an absolute treat: a long, lively interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, conducted on one of my favourite blogs, BLDGBLOG.
At its best (the Three Californias trilogy, Antarctica), Robinson’s writing is at once haunting and beautifully evocative of a sense of place.
Posted in reading, science on December 12th, 2006 No Comments »
Local scientists, ancient reptiles, volcanic eruptions, and Antarctica! All in one story! Really, this article was written precisely and exactly for me.
In brief, a paleontologist from Berkeley (across the Bay from me) was involved in a spectacular find: an almost complete skeleton (cartilage and all) of a juvenile plesiosaur, buried in 70 million year old [...]
Posted in reading, science on December 6th, 2006 No Comments »
Some time ago, I read a Nature review (subscription required) of Doug Macdougall’s “Frozen Earth“. As is the way of such things, after I ordered my copy, the book suffered several months of neglect before I finally had a chance to pick it up. However, once I started reading it, I quickly became engrossed, and [...]
