[Edu-sig] Europython story...

[kirby urner]

So here's a sort of funny story, true, from Vilnius that time.

I'm in the ConocoPhillips demo of how a big oil company uses Pythonic
tools as a part of a video pipeline (sort of a pun) connecting Ecofisk
to shore managers, big screening room, lots of eye candy, you've
probably seen places like it.  So like if a ship is pulling up,
that'll be there on screen, to scale, looking very ship like, and even
bobbing up and down in the waves, rather dramatically in a storm (in
which case, maybe try docking later?).

At this point, this professor to my left, from Italy, semi-explodes
saying there's no way to solve all those partial differential
equations about fluid dynamics in real time (he's right) and sort of
foaming at the mouth thinking what a breakthrough this must be, like
playing Doom for the first time, you could just see the Exxon /
NUMB3RS crypto bonanza, like Springer-Verlag on steroids, spilling out
of his thought balloon.

Meanwhile we non-mathematicians were muttering stupid stuff, like we'd
just come from Pixar like "it's just a fucking cartoon" but we held
our tongues, not wanting to be impolite (especially me, in a stupid
suit like I thought would help me "blend in" in Lithuania, like what
the hell did I know:  I poke vicious fun at myself in the caption to
this picture (following URL)).

http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/1022917395/in/set-72157601248882665/

Kirby