Viewing profile — eric_t

Associate professor in fluid dynamics here. There is typically a split between the people who want good looking simulations for movies/games, and those who need accurate results fo…

I’m also teaching fluid dynamics, and use Blender quite a bit for geometry work. Would love to hear more about your use of Blender for visualization if you’re willing to share.

Hypothetical is the key here. Everyone can dream up a perfect system, but in the real world, it will have to make compromises, which means that it won't be perfect for everyone.

Here's the summation problem in Fortran, quite succinct, IMO: real, dimension(30000000) :: a call random_number(a) print *, sum(a) That's 30 million doubles, takes 0.04s on my mach…

real, dimension(30000000) :: a call random_number(a) print *, sum(a) That's 30 million doubles, takes 0.04s on my machine.

A great quote from George E P Box: All models are wrong. Some are useful.

If your kids are toddler-age and older, it is certainly possible. But when you have babies, I consider step 1 impossible. I do all of the steps he mentions except number 1, and I a…

Sounds great, until you have kids...

I think it's wrong to say "Amateurs, happy to accept small checks for snapshots of children and sunsets". It's more of a democratization of the tools needed to do a successful phot…

Interesting. Is the code available somewhere? I looked at your SIGGRAPH paper, and that was very interesting. Have you seen the FiPy project? It's a full-featured finite volume cod…

OCaml is only really fast if you use the imperative features. The only high performance Haskell code I've seen is from the language shootout, and it looks pretty hairy as well. Als…

In the Fortran code, this could be run on the GPU by simply surrounding the code by !acc region !acc end region with the PGI Accelerator. It would have to be a pretty big loop for …

We use a lot of compilers. They all vary in ability to detect bugs, and optimization features. The fastest used to be Intel, but right now the Portland group compiler seems to be t…

No, as the paper says, explicit Euler integration is extremely unstable. Implicit Euler, as the paper uses, is stable but only first order accurate. If you're dealing with fluids w…

I have a PhD in computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and have written several CFD codes in Fortran, C, Matlab and Python. I'm also a programming language geek, and have been interes…

If he now interviews a new set of couples, does his predictions according to the developed model, and it _still_ gives high accuracy, then we can call it science. The power of a go…

A new and improved TeX?

The author makes a couple of assumptions that I don't agree with. The first is that success is measured by the amount of money you earn. For me it is much more rewarding to work on…

I disagree somewhat with your final statement. As long as we're talking about a creative job, it's not easy no matter what. As a scientist/researcher, you have to be every bit as c…

This used to be the case, but universities are getting better at this. Usually it's pretty easy to spin off a company, where the university retains some ownership. It's a win-win s…

If you think of your supervisor like a boss, that's wrong, IMO. You should pursue your own ideas in your own way, and your supervisor should do just that, supervise you and guide y…

It's a good roundup, but I think you missed the most compelling reason to do a PhD, at least it was for me. And that is that you get the opportunity to dig really deep into a probl…

There is a saying in the scientific community..."if you want to make sure that your competitor doesn't get any work done for the next two years, give him your code!". In all seriou…

I agree, extremely annoying. I just skipped to the last sentence in every paragraph.

The problem is that there is a whole industry created around Photoshop, all artists use it, it's taught in every college/course, and there are a million books written about it. For…