Ron Loyd discusses the Tesla Motors selection procedure for the WhiteStar electric sport sedan manufacturing facility on the Tesla Blog. I'm sure any of the finalist would have made good sites, but I'm glad it'll be next door in New Mexico.

In preparation for the IPython1 Sprint, I'm taking a harder look at Twisted. It's the asnynchronous networking toolbox that IPython1 uses to distribute and manage computations over multiple processors.

This morning's keynote was by r0ml on the "Importance of Computer Literacy". It was entertaining and thought provoking, though only peripherally related to python. It was very much about software development. More to come on this.

My turn at session chair today went smoothly. After struggling with time control during my previous sessions I prepared signs for 10, 5 and 1 minute remaining warnings. It turned out that I didn't need them, as Jim Fulton was exactly on time and Titus Brown and Grig Gheorgiou finnished early.

More interesting information today, particularly the NumPy and IPython talks. There will be significant changes with Python 3.0. I did somewhat better with the session that I chaired today. I went back after dinner for an Open Space Birds of a Feather discussion about parallel and concurrent programming.

I learned a lot today. Here's the short list.

1. The One Laptop Per Child project is really awesome. They're using Python for most systems and application programming.
2. Don't volunteer to chair one of the first sessions if you haven't done it before. Things weren't quite ready and I didn't know enough to be really helpful.
3. It's a target rich environment if you're looking for work to do.

Attending PyCon 2007, my first. I hooked up with Nelson at DIA and our flight to DFW was uneventful. It did seem a bit odd when our 'shared taxi' orbited the airport for half an hour collecting passengers until we had a van full before heading north to Addison. We had dinner at the Queen of Sheba, an excellent Ethiopian restaurant.

The release of version 0.84 of PyDSTool brings it up to date with recent NumPy (1.01) and SciPy (0.5.2) releases and adds support for 64 bit processors. This dynamical system simulation tool is suitable for modeling continuouly varying quantities which can be described with differential equations. It has limited support for discrete event modeling.

The common view is that evolution is explained by random mutation and natural selection, but if this is so it might seem that we're a cosmic accident. In At Home in the Universe, Stuart Kaufman presents the case for self-organization of complex systems as a factor complementing natural selection and mutation in evolution. If correct, this implies that we are expected rather than unlikely.

Kaufman applies complexity theory to biological systems, postulating that auto-catalytic sets of chemical reactions could have led to the emergence of life. This is an interesting theory and deserves more investigation.

The folks at the Viewpoints Research Institue are planning to reinvent programming. I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with. It's been tried before and I wish them luck.

Jonathan Erickson remembers APL at Dr. Dobb's Journal. Though he admits to not knowing much about it, he finds it appealing.

The PyTables 2.0 alpha is available for an early look. This HDF5 wrapper provides an efficient and pythonic tool for working with very large data sets in the form of trees and arrays. It now fully supports NumPy, removing the requirement for a legacy Numarray install.

We just got back from a weekend getaway in Evergreen, in the mountains west of Denver. We had a pleasant stay at The Bear's Inn. Recommended.

A Technology Review interview Robert Prinn about the uncertainty is interesting but a bit shallow. Despite the title Measuring the Uncertainty of Climate Change, the uncertainty isn't quantified. They do discuss sources of uncertainty and things that can reduce it: better data collection, better models, and faster computers.

It's interesting that the IPCC Summary for Policy Makers was released this month, though the report itself would be complete for some months yet. This reflects the nature of IPCC as more political than scientific. It's goal is to reach a concensus, which is a polical process, not a scientific one.

My Sony Vaio has died and I've replaced it with a Raven from EmperorLinux. It's a Levono X60s running Fedora Core 6 with a kernel customized for it's hardware. It's tiny, about the minimum size for doing real work. When I unpacked it, I mistook it for the media slice at first. It's a very nice upgrade from the Vaio.

Here's an interesting white paper on the trend toward parallel computing with multi-core and many-core processors. Not much in the way of answers, but a lot of good questions.

Via Andrew Kuchling.

PyCon 2007 promises to be the largest ever with 500 attendees registered so far. I've volunteered to be a session chair to help keep things going smoothly.

AutoblogGreen lists their choices for the top 10 electric vehicles you can buy in 2007. If none of these fits your needs and budget, the Volksporsche looks interesting for a DIY project.

Algae is a promising feedstock for biofuel production. Different varieties can be used to produce oil and ethanol and the oils can be refined in existing oil refineries. It hasn't bee economically competetive in the past, but higher oil prices make it worth another look.

A more dextrous prosthetic arm has been developed controlled with nerves transplanted from the patient's chest.

One of my Christmas presents was a Windtalkers DVD. Though the movie hasn't been a great commercial success success, I liked it. Having met both a Comanche and a Navajo code talker, I would have liked more focus on the code talkers themselves, rather than Sgt. Enders' angst over his grim mission, but that would have been a different story. Windtalkers told it's own story, and it's a good one.

SimPy version 1.8 has been released. It sports a number of new features, a few bug fixes, and significantly improved documentation.