Science, Technology & Health: March 2008 Archives
Progressive Insurance has ponied up $10 million to sponsor the Automotive X PRIZE. Awesome! Here's Progressive's explanation of the competition.
The Progressive Automotive X PRIZE is a multiyear competition in which $10 million in prize money will be awarded to teams that design clean, production capable vehicles that meet all of the following requirements:
- Exceed 100 mpge or the equivalent (Some cars might not be fueled strictly by gasoline, so they would need to produce a gasoline equivalent of 100 mpge.).
- Meet strict emission requirements.
- Can compete in rigorous stage races that test real-world driving conditions.
- Be safe, affordable, and desirable.
I love the prize paradigm for encouraging research, and it's great to see an Evil Corporation like Progressive make this of leap of faith. I hope they get a lot of recognition and respect for it.
Despite my earlier assurances, some scientists (?) think the Large Hadron Collider may destroy the planet.
The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.
If there ever were alien civilizations in the universe, maybe the reason we don't see any evidence of them is that they all destroyed themselves with dangerous supercolliders!
I generally don't like developing in Linux. I find all the obfuscated, inconsistent "conventions" confusing and arcane, and I don't really understand why some few people are so devoted to a computing platform based on 40-year-old technology.
So anyway, I'd been banging my head trying to figure out why a shared object wasn't being loaded when I brought some libraries to machine B from machine A. They ran fine on A, and compiled and linked just fine on B. But they wouldn't run on B, and I couldn't figure out why. LD_LIBRARY_PATH was exported properly (set to ".") but the shared object wasn't loaded. After Googling for a while I discovered yet another unintuitive environment variable you can set that causes some debugging information to be displayed by the various dl* functions: LD_DEBUG. Gee, it's so obvious!
So I exported LD_DEBUG=libs and found that the shared object I was trying to load was itself referring to some libraries on the old machine...?!?! Or at least it thought it was (the objects it wanted were actually linked in statically). I rebuilt the shared object and everything worked just fine from there out... but who really knows why? I sure don't.
Linux is extremely difficult to develop on, and I avoid it like the plague. Linux-devotees (and I know quite a few) can make whatever elegance/power arguments they want, but the simple fact of the matter is that the mental overhead involved with developing on Linux is substantial, and the learning curve is steep. I'd rather use my brain to do actual work than to decipher and untangle impenetrable webs of Linuxisms.
