A Systems Analyst's thoughts on science, technology, programming, business, and occasionally politics.

Education or Ineducation

November 8, 2009 at 4:22 pm | In Business, Politics, Science | No Comments
by Chris Davenport

I’ve been bugged for years over this problem of inventing things that already exist.

For example, I may spend a great deal of time working on a concept, and arrive at an inventive solution, only to discover, when telling someone else about it, that it’s already been invented.

I myself have done that to others, told them their ideas already exist. I know Jeffy’s come up with a few.

After my most recent encounter with this problem, while working with a NAT traversal technique, I became annoyed at my education.

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New CPU Instruction

April 28, 2009 at 9:12 am | In Science, Technology | No Comments
by Chris Davenport

I’m going to propose a new CPU instruction. Purely theoretical for now, but interesting to talk about. At least I hope so.

My new CPU instruction is going to load into EAX the value of EAX from 10 seconds in the future.

Crazy talk, I know. But I’m going to ignore the “you can’t do that!” aspect, because that’s just silly rejectionism. Instead, I’m going to think about how to actually implement the instruction.

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Colors

September 30, 2008 at 5:13 pm | In Science, Technology | No Comments
by Chris Davenport

Purple is an odd concept.

We see it as a combination of red and blue… because we have roughly RGB retinas… but then we see 50%R 50%G as yellow, when there’s a real yellow that just triggers 50%R 50%G.. We can’t see the difference though.

But there’s no frequency of light that corresponds to purple. Makes the color wheels seem a little goofy, honestly. And suddenly bothers me to find purple on manmade rainbows, when real rainbows have indigo and violet, neither of which have any red in them.

EDIT: I recently discovered that the red cones in your eye actually do have a second peak in their response to color. Instead of a nice bell curve centered around red, it tails off more slowly in the high-frequency (green/blue) direction, and has a second, much lower hump above blue. This is why some people may see some purplish colors there, it’s signal confusion.

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