So, at my new job, a bunch of my coworkers are "designer-programmers." Usually these are people who have training in art or design and who teach themselves how to program (often quite well). As one might expect, many of them shifted into C++ and OpenGL after first whetting their appetites with processing.org (which I will simply call "processing" from here on).

Every once in a while I'll run into a quick one-off scripting task whose output (or input!) is an image or a video asset, and my first instinct will be to start looking up scripting language wrappers around things like PIL and ImageMagick. Whenever I express a thought in this vein, invariably, one of the designers will say "Why don't you just use processing?" or "Processing can do that!"

And it turns out that they're right. I have conceded that, even without a strong knowledge of processing, processing is a better tool for quickly programmatically generating images and video than many of the more conventional scripting languages out there (including Ruby and Python). There are two reasons for this. The first of these is that processing gets out of your way, and lets you call visually-related API functionality without having to do a bunch of imports, or the equivalent of "system.out.println instead of printf". The second is slightly more subtle. Processing is structured around the idea that you'll have a setup, a draw, and an event loop, and that the "draw" will draw things, either every frame, or on certain events. It is absolutely amazing how much more natural this is than "print stuff out" for tweaking and debugging programs whose output is (primarily) other visual artifacts.

1. The simulation platform I used for most of my research in grad school. You can run it and see the results at http://alumni.soe.ucsc.edu/~mds/cclsim/.

   Currently I am in the process of talking to the appropriate people at the University of California about how to do this, as I wrote most of this in the process of research for the UC. Hopefully it'll turn out that language in one of the federal grants I received forces me to open it, or that at least it'll turn out to have so little commercial application that opening it is not a problem.

2. The library and platforms used to generate most of the projects at http://alumni.soe.ucsc.edu/~mds/?News=collapse&Other=expand&Demos=expand#Demos.

   While these were developed when I was a graduate student, most of it was done before I had any research grants, and all of it was done on my own equipment.

   My main hesitation about opening it up is that I'll have to publicly admit to having used "glVertex3f" as late as 2004/2005.

   For what it's worth, a snapshot of the code is at http://www.club.cc.cmu.edu/~mds2/old_ucsc_gl_source/

3. The source for http://alumni.soe.ucsc.edu/~mds/spacecraft_sim/.

   While this project was built on top of the libraries described in the second item, this particular integration *was* done as part of official university research. I'm hoping that the fact that I did it on a NASA grant means I am forced to open it, but because it was done as a University researcher, I am pretty sure I have to go through a different path to open it up.

"Jianjun Chen in China proposed an interesting idea for eliminating station dwell times for trains. In his/her design, each train has a detachable boarding shuttle mounted on the roof of the train. Passengers who wish to disembark leave the main passenger compartment of the train, and enter the shuttle. Meanwhile, embarking passengers board an identical shuttle already located at the station. As the train approaches, the shuttle mounted on the train, disengages so it can slow to a stop at the station, while the shuttle is grabbed and mounted onto the moving train."

• Programming is a social activity. Sure there are cases where you are working with a fixed set of libraries you know well, and you're trying to generate something interesting within this vocabulary of thought, but most industrial coding seems to consist of cobbling various libraries together.
  
• Computing is a social activity. (no explanation needed)
• (completely unrelated) Things that only the "dorky kids" did in my generation are the exact things "all the kids" seem to be doing in subsequent generations.
• Programming is the fundamental activity people do with computers, much like "driving" is the fundamental activity people do with cars
  
• Learning to program only *seems* hard because we try to force students from zero to programming-literacy in one college semester, then fail them if they fall behind on the interesting stuff that depends on that basic literacy. Imagine if we spent a year slowly teaching programming for every year we taught kids about reading, writing or arithmetic.
• Analogy between modern professional programmers and ancient scribes.
  
  • Elite group of educated scholars
  • Write using needlessly difficult technology (either "C" or "All caps and no punctuation")
  • Mostly write things like "So and so owes the king 15 sheep" / modern day business software
• Analogy between programming and other basic intellectual tasks.
  
  • Perhaps in the future being a "professional programmer" will be as weird as being a "professional writer" or a "professional mathematician" today
  • But, likewise, everyone will need to do a little reading/programming/arithmetic
  • There may be many "high school programming teachers"
• Printing press analogies
  
  • Looking at computers and the internet to day and getting interested in them as "fascinating machines" is like looking at the first printing presses and becoming obsessed with the screw mechanism.
    
  • Omitting the rest of the analogy

1. Its flat (so you can arbitrarily scale it up with new runways) Of course the current solution to overcrowding at SFO and LAX is to increase runway space at outlying airports like SJC and Ontario -- one of which is already in the central valley, while the other one is along one of the proposed high-speed rail lines (albeit the part of the line least likely to be built soon -- most sensible discussion thinks high speed rail will connect to CalTrain/Metrolink, and CalTrain will take care of the San Jose --> San Francisco leg)
2. High speed rail will make a hypothetical Central Valley Airport accessible from the current major metropolitan areas (not useful if you're flying to LA, but what's an extra hour of train ride if you're going to Singapore?)
3. One of the parts of the Schwarzenegger agenda I actually sort-of-agree with is the (unstated) intent to push urban/suburban growth into the Central Valley, most likely along the CA-99 corridor. The housing bubble stopped this somewhat, but the infrastructure/empty housing is in place, and a chain of UC campuses stretching from Davis to Riverside could spur job growth.
4. Part of me secretly wants to teach at UC Merced. I predict that, as time goes on, UC Merced will rapidly become a top engineering school, (making it even harder for me to do this). High speed rail and a massive airport would make it easier for an urbanite like me to live there.
5. Unrelated, but I'd like to curse the Southern California software industry for locating primarily in the public transit deadzone of Santa Monica. Although I'm told that there is a new Expo Line they are building between downtown and Santa Monica. I'd like to remind everyone that the massive Southern California megalopolis is "train scale" and not "car scale."

"The Central Valley is one of the world's most productive agricultural regions. On less than 1 percent of the total farmland in the United States, the Central Valley produces 8 percent of the nation?s agricultural output by value: 17 billion USD in 2002."

sqrt(l2 + 2500) - l