tmt chose hawaii over chile

from tmt website, 7/21/09:

"After careful evaluation and comparison between two outstanding candidate sites—Mauna Kea in Hawai‘i and Cerro Armazones in Chile—the board of directors of the TMT Observatory Corporation has selected Mauna Kea as the preferred site for the Thirty Meter Telescope."

making c codes faster

some basic tricks for speeding up c codes:

• division is much slower than multiplication
• log10(), sqrt() are also very slow -- should avoid using these unless absolutely necessary
• inlines can be of tremendous help, as it may be easier for the compiler to optimize
  
• a for loop like for(i=1;i<=10;i++) can be re-written as for(i=10;i--;), which may save a little bit of time

more tricks can be found here