Has anyone watched the Lost episode from last week? I think Teebs did if his away messages are any indication. They went back to the whole flash-forward thing again. I may be in the minority here but generally I like the idea of flash-forwards. I think they added a lot to episode 401. This episode was a complete wash though. They focused way too much on Sayid in the future and seemed to, once again, just randomly introduce ridiculous plot lines (with the whole Ben Linus boss thing in the future) that can’t possibly all be resolved no matter how long the show goes on. And, most importantly, they sacrificed any significant development on the island for this new crap in the future. Lame.
On an unrelated note, I was talking with afischer tonight about some random things and brought up my previous ‘Gmsh’ post. He said mostly what I expected … that is, “no one will remotely care about Gmsh”, but then said (paraphrasing), “no, I bet there is some ridiculous vdov.net groupie out there somewhere who feverishly anticipates anything new that comes onto the site”. I replied, “yeah, there may be, but I’m pretty sure if I met this person I would likely hate him/her … what does that say about vdov.net?”.
Nothing good, that’s for sure. Ha!
Often I’ll ditch a piece of software because it doesn’t fit my needs. Or because it’s not open source and a reasonable alternative comes along. Or because it frustrates the hell out of me. A year ago I developed all my unstructured meshes in Gmsh, which is a great little language for developing everything from very simple to very complex finite element geometries, which can then be imported (with some difficulty sometimes) into your PDE solver of choice. Or, as I’m doing in my chemical engineering class right now, you can write your own solver. Writing your own is solver is a wonderful exercise and very important, but insofar as you can use unstructured meshes, there’s really no reason to reinvent the wheel when Gmsh is so much better now than it was. There are obvious limitations to unstructured meshes for certain problems but they work very well for the types of problems I’m working on, especially because I often have absolutely no idea what the solution is going to look like for my dynamic systems. There is a nice little community around the software as well. It’s always great to find that software you initially dismissed over a year ago has totally reinvented itself and fixed all the issues you had with it previously. Regardless, check out Gmsh, even if you don’t do finite element calculations or calculations at all. It’s pretty fun to play around with.
Oh and it does a fantastic job of optimizing elements. This was done in 30 seconds on a single processor in a ~3-4 million element tetmesh, and basically completely eliminated the bottom 2 quadrants of mesh quality (the range in “mesh quality” here (I won’t explain the details), is 0 -> 1). If you can’t see it (someone who knows please explain to me why firefox on linux screws up image scaling so bad … I’m sure there is a simple solution but I definitely don’t know it), a blown up version is here.
I have been very excited about the beginning of this season of Lost for quite some time. My excitement was augmented by my meeting/sitting next to Matt Fox (Jack Shepherd) on a plane from Seattle to Redmond, OR in late December. Alas, last night I was not able to watch the show, so I will watch it today. However, this morning’s blog feeds did not bode well for episode 401. From Commentary’s blog Contentions comes this short post. And I quote:
Gibberish. It was absolute and total gibberish. Once again, it simply set up a series of new unanswered peculiarities rather than doing a thing to address the 27 plotlines its writers have already laid out. In particular, the revelation that Dr. Jack’s doctor father is also an Invisible Man living in a cabin on the Lost Island — if you’ve never watched, don’t ask — relocated Lost to the land of camp. I don’t think there is now any question that the writers and producers of Lost are just making it up as they go along, that they have created mysteries without first knowing the solutions and that, when they reach a dead end, they just make up another mystery. We’ve been had.
Damn it. Of course, this is exactly the crap that every Lost fan is afraid of, and exactly the type of writing that convinced me in the middle of Season 2 to stop watching (I decided to keep watching, in the end). I hope my feelings on the episode are somewhat less negative, but I doubt it.
Cheers.