I have been playing around with distance field rendering, inspired by some of Iñigo Quílez’s work. Along the way I needed to define analytic distance functions for a number of fairly esoteric geometric primitives, among them the logarithmic spiral:

I recently installed the beta of Microsoft Office 2010, and the first thing that struck me is how it performs noticeably worse on my 3.0 GHz quad-core gaming PC, than Office ’98 performed on a now 12-year-old PowerBook G3, powered by a little 250 MHz PPC processor.

You can probably guess the next stage of this anecdote… Office ’98 on that G3 performed ever-so-slightly worse than Office 4.0 on a truly ancient PowerBook 180, which sported a fantastic (for the time) 33 MHz Motorola 68030 CPU.