Some interesting numerical analysis chemistry work around. Important 
stuff, too.

I rattled some cages on Friday that might give support for this. Out 
here in the boonies Cellulose Biomass is growing at unprecedented rates 
with no market. Lumber mills gone, pulp paper gone, grass hay that won't 
feed a cow. But I saw some local celebrity experts on TV show 100 year 
old Hinckley fire photos and thought some search for modern biofuel 
science skills was about time again.

After the usual mix of constructive contacts and jerk bureaucrats I 
discovered that the U of MN has some activity with David Morse in 
Chemical Engineering, etc. Not exact, but close as any, biopolymer 
computer modeling.

The Feds had to roll back Cellulosic Biofuels mandate because MN 
bureaucrats fell on their faces, as usual. Burn up money and beg for 
more, failure is very profitable politics. So we need to pick up the 
pieces and accept the baby steps made to compete with the big world.

I don't know how it fits into numerical analysis supercomputing, but I 
told the couch scientists to "copy fire." Fire is all "photochemistry," 
and solar energy can be stored directly in melting cellulose; just like 
making steam from ice.

Anyway, a lot of computer geek stuff going on at the U of MN around this 
topic, as well as electric cars, etc. As once said regarding the future, 
"If you have no plan any path will get you there."

Iznogoud wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 17, 2017 at 02:46:26PM -0500, Mike Miller wrote:
>> Iznogoud - Do you have access to a supercomputer?  I had Minnesota
>> Supercomputing Institute (MSI) accounts for many years, but not
>> anymore.  What are you doing with all the cores?
>>
> I have access to several here at MN and at other places. We do numerical
> simulation where I work. It is a lot of fun for the most part. I used to use
> the MSI's machines a lot when I was a graduate student in the late 90s. I had
> access to the SGI Origin and IBM/SP at the time. I did not use the Army Center's
> CM (Thinking Machines) or any of the Crays. Circa 2000 we built our own cluster
> and since then we have had 5-6 generations of them in our basement, all Linux.
>
> No, I do not mine for bitcoin!
>
>   
>> About MPlayer -- your comment is intriguing.  How could it change my
>> life?  I thought it was just a video/audio player and I normally use
>> VLC instead.  I guess I'm missing out on some really nice features.
>>
> I recommend that you take a look at what MPlayer does. You can put it in
> "interactive mode" and have it listen form commands coming from a unix pipe.
> You can sit at the other end (even typing by hand) and send commands; seek,
> crop, rotate, dump frame, etc, etc. The beauty is that you can manipulate its
> functionality without really having to code anything that uses its codecs or
> ffmpeg and all of that. The functionality becomes a black box via scripting
> on the command-line, or interactively through the pipes. Invest that time in it.
>
> Here is an example of extracting individual frames from a video:
> 'mplayer -vo jpeg -frames 1 -ss "offset"'   # "offset" is a number
>
> Here is an example of using a "video filter" that crops and rotates the image,
> and it drops every frame to a PNG image:
> 'mplayer -vf crop=172:622:170:0,rotate=1 -vo png  video.mov'
> (The input video was an Apple's format; this is autodetected.)
>
> I believe this is a top Open Source Software project.
>
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>