[update] below the fold and video. I can only conclude at this point that the “don’t get it” disease runs deep and wide in this administration. [update 2] This at the WSJ encapsulates what we are observing. This has gone beyond painful to watch to embarrassing. The president now claims that his statements were sliced and diced. He now is saying that he believes that businesses built themselves, while claiming that his earlier statement was taken out of context.

And do it again, … sooooo …. a public works project (bridge, dam, …) is equivalent in his eyes to …. a risk an entrepreneur takes? Seriously? Erp …. its glaringly obvious whom does not have an understanding. The worker in the private sector, punches the clock BECAUSE somewhere, somewhen, the entrepreneur had the idea, took the risk, entirely upon themselves, and built something. The “public sector” is a cost, something to be kept as small as possible so as not to drive those paying the public sectors bills, into the poor house.

Wonderful post by Jim Pethokoukis, covering a talk made by Ronald Reagan years ago. and I will freely admit that I was (almost) completely wrong in my original impressions of Reagan. I had a different political outlook in those days, and I had trouble viewing the guy as getting it. But get it, he did. This change in perception comes mostly from a maturing and a rethinking of my own world view.

I’ve been long bothered by serious people espousing ideas not well correlated with reality, as representing reality, and telling us not to believe our lying eyes or instruments. This is in a context of (catastrophic) AGW (call this CAGW). I don’t have any dogs in that race, nor in fracking, which uses hydrological mechanisms to extract hydrocarbon fuel precursors from underground reservoirs. I am very interested in sound science, and sound policy derived from either sound science, or as close to intelligently constructed policy as we can make.

below the fold. Snarfed from many places on the net. Copyrights are owned by their respective owners. I don’t know all the correct attributions, so if you find/know of it, please let me know so I can correctly update the list. The few remaining defenders of this failed statement and meme are all parroting seemingly, the exact same talking points. Now why would that be? Most everyone else, regardless of political affiliation realizes what a complete mess this has become … well … those outside of the media.

Sleep is the great rejuvinator. When you get good sleep, you feel generally much better when you wake up. Your body does repair functions, your brain works out (some issues). And occasionally you dream. Going without sleep ages people, makes them less productive as they are more tired during the day. It limits the repair functionality. It hinders the “work through problems”. It prevents dreams. Pulling all-nighters is one instance of doing without sleep.

This past week saw the president of the US in another major screw up … one he doesn’t quite understand why its a screw up … and many of his supporters don’t quite seem to get it either. The responses to the screw up have been coming fast and furious. This has become a major issue of the campaign now, about “getting it”. Its as defining as “its the economy stupid”, and specifically as to what the economy is.

HPC is a small fraction of the total computing market. The market in general experience forces from the state of the economy … in growing economic times, generally large portions of the computing market are refreshing and updating gear. Conversely, when we are treading water, or contracting as an economy, word from on high in IT organizations is usually “make do with what you have” for a while. Many industries and economists have noted signs portending a downturn over the past few months.

On James Cuff’s blog, a nice post about utilization of software. In it he writes: to which I say … Human Voice Clip Female Young Woman Exclamations Oh Man Seriously … I gave up on the indentation as a form of program structure when I stopped doing much Fortran. Sheesh. Whats next … everyone using BASIC, with a little OO wrapper, a JIT, and an LLVM backend to run on GPUs (with a VHDL conversion tool)?

See here. Parallel and distributed computing, not as an afterthought, but reasonably well integrated. Even better would be loops and vector ops which handled parallelism completely transparently … which … they effectively do in some cases. Waiting on static compilers, this language uses LLVM backend. There’s even a hook to generate code for PTX targets. No more separate language needed for GPU. Just run your code and it takes advantage of computational resources, regardless of the asymmetric nature.