Yes, I know. Publishing day quietly slipped from Tuesday to Saturday. When I just wrote blog and watched "Big Bang Theory", I managed to do everything on time. First signs of troubles started to show up when I decided to do some cycling in the evening. Then I do some more to collect money for Hope Relay. Croatian TV started to air new episodes of "Lie to Me", and few weeks later they added "Mad Man", too. And then came the final blow: application for Coursera on-line course.
Coursera is company that provides massive on-line courses prepared by lecturers from top universities. As some topics I am interested in were not covered by my former education, I decided to spend some time on self-improvement, so I took "Machine Learning" by professor Andrew Ng. Course is a really gentle introduction to the topic. Professor manages to explain key concepts without throwing too complex math theories at the students. At later point, it introduces interesting piece of software, Octave.
Octave is tool for solving mathematical problems numerically by relaying on brute force of the machine. Here is the funny part: you can install it on Android. We take our smartphones for granted, but just thee decades ago, computer of such power would be used to predict weather or simulate nuclear explosion. Legendary Cray XM-P, fastest computer in the world 1983-1985, had power to calculate 400 million floating point operations per second (MFLOPS). Top mobile phones, like HTC One series, can calculate over 200 MFLOPS. Take two and you got yourself a supercomputer, and you don't even need liquid cooling. If you wait just a little bit more, one will be enough, as new Snapdragon S4 Pro with four Krait cores reaches between 400 and 600 MFLOPS.
But smartphones and software are just the tools. If you have some old interest of your own, take an online course. It's a chance to feel again forgotten joy of learning and accomplishment.
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