Happy Monday to everyone. Did you have a good weekend? Is you new week getting off to a positive start? Looks like were in for some cooler weather, still really nice, just not quite as hot. It was 109 degrees yesterday were my sister Marsha lives, in Amarillo, Texas.
Last Friday I took a drive to the top of Mount Evans. I had a nice lunch with my dad, he then graciously helped me fill my gas tank, so I thought it would be a good time to take that drive. There is still quite a bit of snow, but the road is open. I parked my car in the parking lot at the top of the mountain, then took a hike the rest of the way to the official summit. The view is just spectacular. You can see Long’s Peak to the north, Grey’s and Torreys Peaks, South Park, the Collegiate Range, Mount Bierstadt, the Sawtooth Ridge, the plains – just awesome. To view a four minute slide-show of my pictures, click here. I threw a snowball or two just for the fun of it. There were quite a few people up there, the parking lot was full. There were also some bikers, some riding from Echo Lake to the summit. Just a day after I was there, I read a sad news article about a woman in her twenties falling from Sawtooth Ridge. Click here to read the article. I am very blessed to be so close to something as awesome as the Rocky Mountains. Adventure is just a few hours drive away.
Today in the online algorithm class we learned about the quicksort algorithm. This is recursive partitioning. It is generally faster than insertion sort or merge sort. The mathematics part of this class is way over my head, but I am getting the gist of the algorithms and how they work. The math is about how long it takes the algorithm to run, there is a worst case scenario – the longest it would take to run, the average case scenario, and and a best case scenario. Usually in this class, they deal with the worst case. This is to get a ‘guarantee’ on how long the algorithm would take to run. I suppose computer time is a big commodity when dealing with large amounts of data, such as with phone companies, grocery stores, government entities, the electric company and so on.
The other day I read that Japan now has the fastest supercomputer in history, nicknamed K – a play on the Japanese word kei, meaning 10 quadrillion, the number of operations per second it is designed to perform when it is completed next year. It has performed 8.16 quadrillion operations a second, making it 3 times faster than China’s previous record holder.
