Comments on: Blue Light https://www.isegoria.net/2007/08/blue-light/ From the ancient Greek for equality in freedom of speech; an eclectic mix of thoughts, large and small Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:01:40 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.6.1 By: Grasspunk https://www.isegoria.net/2007/08/blue-light/comment-page-1/#comment-3247232 Grasspunk Tue, 08 Sep 2020 20:56:37 +0000 http://isegoria.net/isegoria/?p=1175#comment-3247232 When I was a compsci student I managed to get contract work coding for the Psychology department. They wanted me to add new features to this software that used a fancy plotter with multiple pens of different colors to draw EEG lines from scanning people’s brains during experiments.

The software drew nine small graphs, each with multiple colored lines showing EEG plots from different stimuli.

As I watched it in action it would get the black pen, draw the X/Y axes of the first graph then switch to the first colored pen, draw its line, switch to the second colored pen and so on. The line drawing was super fast but the pen changing was really slow. Then it switched to the second graph and did it all again. It was spending 95% of the time changing pens. I couldn’t bear to watch this thing plot once and they were using it every day.

First thing I did was the obvious rearranging of the loops so it did all the lines for one color at one time because I could not stand watching that endless pen shuffling. They thought I was a coding genius but it was more an operations problem than a code one.

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