Four short links: 3 April 2017
Topology Toolkit, Stream Processing, Koomey's Law, Xerox PARC
- Topology ToolKit — open source library and software collection for topological data analysis in scientific visualization.
- Heka — an open source stream-processing software system developed by Mozilla. It is a heavily plugin-based system. Common operations such as adding data to Heka, processing it, and writing it out are implemented as plugins. Heka ships with numerous plugins for performing common tasks.
- Koomey’s Law — the number of computations per joule of energy dissipated has been doubling approximately every 1.57 years. This trend has been remarkably stable since the 1950s (R2 of over 98%) and has actually been somewhat faster than Moore’s law. Jonathan Koomey articulated the trend as follows: “at a fixed computing load, the amount of battery you need will fall by a factor of two every year and a half.”
- What Made Xerox PARC So Special? (Alan Kay) — his Quora answer is great. The idea was that if you are going to take on big important and new problems, then you just have to develop the chops to pull off all needed tools, partly because of what “new” really means, and partly because trying to do workarounds of vendor stuff that is in the wrong paradigm will kill the research thinking.
