A scientist claims he has found a source of power that uses water, produces very little waste, and costs a fifth as much as coal. The only problem? His theory contradicts quantum physics.
“If it’s wrong, it will be proven wrong,” said Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace USA. “But if it’s right, it is so important that all else falls away. It has the potential to solve our dependence on oil. Our stance is of cautious optimism.”
Indeed.
Wow. I don’t know how I missed it all these years, but you can mix Objective-C and C++ in OS X’s gcc with something approaching wild abandon. Not true wild abandon:Â you basically get two runtimes each doing their own thing, and the objects of each can’t inter-breed or anything weird like that. But you can mix the two dialects freely in expressions:
[ mInfoString appendFormat:@"Camera Location: ( %f, %f, %f )", mLoc.getX(), mLoc.getY(), mLoc.getZ() ];
Crazy!
In the past couple of days I’ve resurrected some Powerplant C++ 3D game-engine code I wrote as an undergrad. Seriously old-school. It’s now living in a Cocoa app. Yay, fun. =)
I’m doing this because, odd as it sounds, it may become part of my thesis. In architecture.
Now that I’m finally starting to learn Obj-C and Cocoa … so far I have mixed feelings. I don’t like the number of things done by convention, as opposed to compiler-assisted or -enforced. Constructors and destructors, for instance: I think the compiler is your friend and you should let it do as much work as possible, including running destructor code on automatic objects as the stack unwinds. Hard to do that when everything lives on the heap*. Also, strict type-checking is a good thing; I don’t see myself ever being convinced to the contrary. I’m also not yet convinced that Obj-C’s memory management conventions get me anything over C++. Seems like it’s less simple, not more.
But it’s early on and I’m still learning it, and I’m quite comfy with C++, so maybe I just don’t see the beauty of Obj-C yet. I am kind of digging the message-passing syntax. But that’s not particularly huge.
* Maybe that’s what autorelease does? If so, that’s an extra thing for me to remember to do, by convention. Well, obviously I have more to learn.
Is it me, or have the US media been rather quiet about the Pakistan earthquake even though the UN says the need for aid has exceeded that of last year’s tsunami? 73,000 are dead, 3.5 million need medical care, and 3.2 million have no shelter as winter approaches in the Himalyas.
… Yeah, so I’m going to rent Ep III this weekend, I guess.
It’s also hard to find easy ways to donate. I finally found information on PayPal donations to the President’s Relief Fund (President of Pakistan, that is) on the Embassy’s site. Link to actual PayPal button here, though it links to a “Rising Leaders” fund. *shrug* Maybe it’s just bad logistics. Where are Bush and Clinton? I guess they can’t do a relief gig for every disaster in the world.
Maybe I’ll just donate to Doctors Without Borders.
Star Wars: a 12-hour postmodern art film.
Every text depends on the balance between inspiration and authorial control, and Lucas makes that tension the principal subject of his film.
It’s true: the less control Lucas had over the films, the better they were, and the Force is Light to those who surrender to it and Dark to those who use it for their selfish ends. Episodes IV-VI? Light. I-III? Dark.
But I think the author of that article gives Lucas too much credit. Lucas started out Anakin and, drunk with power, became Darth Vader. There was no self-consciousness about it. You can do a post-modern reading of a wholly classical narrative. Does that make it post-modern, or just rich with interpretative possibility?
Whatever, it’s a fun article.
Just as the Light of Luke killed the Dark of his father, Lucas’ own creation has probably killed him. I haven’t actually seen Episode III yet. Perhaps Lucas redeems himself at the end and all that’s left is to light a pyre.