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Stealth airplanes. Coronary artery stents. Genetically modified foods. The proof of Fermat's last theorem. Much cheaper solar panels. Fracking for oil and

by graycat 10y ago

Stealth airplanes. Coronary artery stents. Genetically modified foods. The proof of Fermat's last theorem. Much cheaper solar panels. Fracking for oil and gas. Gem quality synthetic diamonds. No doubt various medicines, medical procedures, prosthetics, but I'm not a medical expert. GPS. Much cheaper titanium. Carbon fiber. CDs. DVDs. 14 nm line width lithography. The astounding progress in hard disk drive density and price. WiFi. Cable modems. The Hubble telescope. Gravitational wave detection. The Higgs boson detection. High temperature superconductivity. The scanning tunneling electron microscope. The cameras in smartphones. Color inkjet printers. Color laser printers. LEDs. Hypersonic ram jets.

GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
* CDs and DVDs need computation for doing the error correction, not to mention compression for the latter * WiFi needs to do channel modeling * You can't frack if you can't do the computational work needed to find the reserves in the first place
- graycat 10y ago
  Yes, but in principle the computing for the fracking could have been done with the computers 40+ years old. Yes, but, e.g., CD/DVDs are also terrific because of how the lasers are used to read/write the disks. So, CD/DVDs are amazing even without the connection with computing. So, the computing is not the whole story. IMHO, similarly for the other examples I gave.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
    > Yes, but in principle the computing for the fracking could have been done with the computers 40+ years old Doubtful. The size of the meshes needed for good-enough solutions to the PDEs is immense (and there's a reason the oil and gas industry has been buying supercomputers since the early days).
    - graycat 10y ago
      I hadn't heard that PDEs were crucial to the practical progress in fracking. The applied math I heard about was really mostly just the fast Fourier transform (FFT) for deconvolution of seismic signals to identify rock layers. The FFT was in, what, 1968 or so so 40+ years ago? Well, the computers of 1968 could do some really good FFT calculations.

by graycat 10y ago

GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago

* CDs and DVDs need computation for doing the error correction, not to mention compression for the latter * WiFi needs to do channel modeling * You can't frack if you can't do the computational work needed to find the reserves in the first place

graycat 10y ago
Yes, but in principle the computing for the fracking could have been done with the computers 40+ years old. Yes, but, e.g., CD/DVDs are also terrific because of how the lasers are used to read/write the disks. So, CD/DVDs are amazing even without the connection with computing. So, the computing is not the whole story. IMHO, similarly for the other examples I gave.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
  > Yes, but in principle the computing for the fracking could have been done with the computers 40+ years old Doubtful. The size of the meshes needed for good-enough solutions to the PDEs is immense (and there's a reason the oil and gas industry has been buying supercomputers since the early days).
  - graycat 10y ago
    I hadn't heard that PDEs were crucial to the practical progress in fracking. The applied math I heard about was really mostly just the fast Fourier transform (FFT) for deconvolution of seismic signals to identify rock layers. The FFT was in, what, 1968 or so so 40+ years ago? Well, the computers of 1968 could do some really good FFT calculations.