Bubble net

Last night, as I was channel surfing, waiting for one of the TV shows I normally watch to come on, I stumbled upon a documentary about humpback whales on the Discovery channel.

I was fascinated how they get their food. Each day, they need to eat about 5% of their body weight. So for a 30 ton whale, this is about 1-1/2 tons of fish. They have an amazing technique for doing this. All the whales in the pod work together to bring this off.

Humpbacks can feed by creating bubble nets and swimming up through the center of the net, gulping down the small fish and shrimp trapped by the bubbles.

The fish caught in the bubble net simply don't understand they can swim out through the bubbles. Instead they are driven up to the surface where all the whales in the pod, have a fish smorgasbord.

So it just goes to show that by acting together, these whales can make the net work. There is even a t-shirt you can buy with this slogan, although I don't think it comes in XXXXXXXXXXXL size.

[Technorati Tag: Whales]

( Sep 24 2004, 09:01:45 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink

New gcalctool, now with more significant places

I've just finished releasing a new version of gcalctool for the future GNOME 2.9 distribution.

It's released early as there are two new features in the 5.5.X gcalctool series that will need a fair bit of testing:

• support for arithmetic operator precedence
• support for upto 30 places after the numerical point

That's right. You can now set and display up to 30 significant places after the numeric point should you need it. The request for this feature has been in the gcalctool TODO file for 12 years. Not because it was hard to do, but because it wasn't obvious how to represent this to the user in a simple straight forward manner. Admittedly, I wasn't losing any sleep over the lack of this functionality.

Thanks to Calum Benson, this problem now seems to have been resolved.

There is a new menu item under the Acc menu in Scientific mode (after the ten existing menu items that easily let you set the accuracy between 0 and 9 places), called "Other (12) ...", where "(12)" is the current precision. Users in Basic mode don't see this menu, so won't get confused by it. This menu item brings up a small popup allowing you to set precision between 0 and 30 significant places. The Acc button tooltip will now show the current accuracy too.

Let's hope that after waiting twelve years, there are people still interested in this new feature.

[Technorati Tag: software]

[Technorati Tag: GNOME]

( Sep 24 2004, 08:17:41 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [8]