Harmohit

This sounds really good! If the largest population and probably the largest manufacturer in the world goes green, that is going to be really good for climate change.

I hope India follows suit.

As another comment mentioned, this website does look like Time Cube at first sight.

However, the explanations of the second law of thermodynamics on the second page are quite decent and written in a humorous way. Of course it is not fully accurate because it does not use any math but I think it does a good enough job of explaining it to the lay person.

The explanations about human life at the third page are analogous at best. The situations that the author describes are similar to the workings of the second law but not a first principles outcome of it.

I am surprised I have not seen LabView mentioned in this thread. It is arguably one of the most popular visual programming languages after Excel and I absolutely hate it.

It has all the downsides of visual programming that the author mentions. The visual aspect of it makes it so hard to understand the flow of control. There is no clear left to right or top to bottom way of chronologically reading a program.

I didn't know there is such a thing as a metallurgical microscope. What makes them different from biological microscopes? And what is there primary purpose? I am assuming they don't make microscopes just for dissecting chips.

If we define a computer in very broad terms: a system used to emulate/simulate another system, could we call a wind tunnel a computer? It is a system that is used to infer what would happen high up in the atmosphere or on the race track. Taking it a step further, do animals used for drug testing count as computers? They are used to infer any potential adverse effects in a human body.

Although quite specialized, I think these things would still classify as a computer.

This is so cool! "Dissecting" a processor like this could be a fun educational activity to do in schools similar to dissecting a frog, but without the animal rights issues.

I enjoy reading posts like this. Very thorough description. I am wondering if someone has insights into how the publishing model for more traditional publishers like Wiley and Elsevier work. Those guys are selling books for more than $200. Does the author get more money from their sales or is it all absorbed by the publisher?

This article does a great job at explaining interval arithmetic. However, the introduction says

>Instead of treating each as exactly 7 feet, we can instead say that each is somewhere between a minimum of 6.9 feet and a maximum of 7.1. We can write this as an interval (6.9, 7.1).

Yes we can use an interval to express an uncertainty. However, uncertainties in physical measurements are a little bit more complicated.

When I measure something to be 7 plus minus 0.1 feet, what I am saying is that the value of the measured variable is not known for sure. It can be represented by a bell curve centred on 7 and 95% of the area under the curve (95% probability) that the true value lies between 6.9 and 7.1. The value of the measured variable is much more likely to be 7 than 6.9. There is also a small chance that the value lies outside of the 6.9 to 7.1 range.

In an interval, there is no probability distribution. It is more like an infinite list of numbers.

In practice, interval arithmetic is seldom used for uncertainty analysis for scientific experiments.

I wonder if open source software can play a role in this. Maybe we can have an open source algorithm for determining credit ratings and private companies only provide a secure database of ratings.

It will also offer the lay person insights into how the credit rating is exactly determined. They can know what is causing their rating to be less than desired and take appropriate action, instead of watching a random youtube video titled "5 ways to quickly improve your credit score".