Normal quotes

58-01.md

@@ -3,26 +3,26 @@
   ------------------------ --------------------------------- --------------------
 
 Chapter 58\
- Heinlein’s Crystal Ball, Spock’s Brain, and the 9-Cycle Dare {#Heading1}
+ Heinlein's Crystal Ball, Spock's Brain, and the 9-Cycle Dare {#Heading1}
 -------------------------------------------------------------
 
 ### Using the Whole-Brain Approach to Accelerate Texture Mapping {#Heading2}
 
-I’ve had the pleasure recently of rereading several of the works of
-Robert A. Heinlein, and I’m as impressed as I was as a teenager—but in a
+I've had the pleasure recently of rereading several of the works of
+Robert A. Heinlein, and I'm as impressed as I was as a teenager—but in a
 different way. The first time around, I was wowed by the sheer romance
-of technology married to powerful stories; this time, I’m struck most of
-all by The Master’s remarkable prescience. “Blowups Happen” is about the
+of technology married to powerful stories; this time, I'm struck most of
+all by The Master's remarkable prescience. "Blowups Happen" is about the
 risks of nuclear power, and their effects on human psychology—written
-before a chain reaction had ever happened on this planet. “Solution
-Unsatisfactory” is about the unsolvable dilemma—ultimate offense, no
+before a chain reaction had ever happened on this planet. "Solution
+Unsatisfactory" is about the unsolvable dilemma—ultimate offense, no
 defense—posed by atomic weapons; this in 1941. And in *Between Planets*
 (1951), consider this minor bit of action:
 
-> The doctor’s phone regretted politely that Dr. Jefferson was not at
+> The doctor's phone regretted politely that Dr. Jefferson was not at
 > home and requested him to leave a message. He was dictating it when a
-> warm voice interrupted: ‘I’m at home to you, Donald. Where are you,
-> lad?’
+> warm voice interrupted: ‘I'm at home to you, Donald. Where are you,
+> lad?'
 
 Predicting the widespread use of answering machines is perhaps not so
 remarkable, but foreseeing that they would be used for call screening
@@ -31,15 +31,15 @@ is; technology is much easier to extrapolate than are social patterns.
 Even so, Heinlein was no prophet; his crystal ball was just a little
 less fuzzy than ours. The aforementioned call in *Between Planets* was
 placed on a viewphone; while that technology has indeed come to pass,
-its widespread use has not. The ultimate weapon in “Solution
-Unsatisfactory” was radioactive dust, not nuclear bombs, and we have
+its widespread use has not. The ultimate weapon in "Solution
+Unsatisfactory" was radioactive dust, not nuclear bombs, and we have
 somehow survived nearly 50 years of nuclear weapons without either
 acquiring a world dictator or destroying ourselves. Slide rules are all
-over the place in Heinlein’s works, and in one story (the name now lost
+over the place in Heinlein's works, and in one story (the name now lost
 to memory), an astronaut straps himself into a massive integral
 calculator; computers are nowhere to be found.
 
-Most telling, I think, is that in “Blowups Happen,” the engineers
+Most telling, I think, is that in "Blowups Happen," the engineers
 running the nuclear power plant—at considerable risk to both body and
 sanity—are the best of the best, highly skilled in math and required to
 ride the nuclear reaction on a second-to-second basis, with the risk of
@@ -47,7 +47,7 @@ an explosion that might end life on Earth, and would surely kill them,
 if they slip. Contrast that with our present-day reality of nuclear
 plants run by generally competent technicians, with the occasional
 report of shoddy maintenance and bored power-plant employees using
-drugs, playing games, and falling asleep while on duty. Heinlein’s
+drugs, playing games, and falling asleep while on duty. Heinlein's
 universe makes for a better story, of course, but, more than that, it
 shows the filters and biases through which he viewed the world. At least
 in print, Heinlein was an unwavering believer in science, technology,
@@ -65,7 +65,7 @@ special-casing the code so that it does just what it has to, and no
 more. The greatest impediment to this process is seeing the problem in
 terms of what the code currently does, or what you already know, thereby
 ignoring many possible solutions. Put another way, how you look at an
-optimization problem determines how you’ll solve it; your assumptions
+optimization problem determines how you'll solve it; your assumptions
 may speed and simplify the process, but they are also your limitations.
 Consider, for example, how a seemingly intractable problem becomes
 eminently tractable the instant you learn that someone else has solved
@@ -76,7 +76,7 @@ mapper in X-Sharp.
 
 ### Texture Mapping Redux {#Heading3}
 
-We’ve spent the previous several chapters exploring the X Sharp graphics
+We've spent the previous several chapters exploring the X Sharp graphics
 library, something I built over time as a serious exercise in 3-D
 graphics. When X-Sharp reached the point at which we left it at the end
 of the previous chapter, I was rather pleased with it—with one
@@ -92,11 +92,11 @@ assembly—pretty good code, by most standards!—and I felt comfortable
 with my implementation; but then I got a letter from John Miles, who was
 at the time getting seriously into 3-D and is now the author of a 3-D
 game library. (Yes, you can license it from his company, Non-Linear
-Arts, if you’d like; John can be reached at 70322.2457@compuserve.com.)
-John wrote me as follows: “Hmm, so *that’s* how texture-mapping works.
-But 3 jumps *per pixel?* Hmph!”
+Arts, if you'd like; John can be reached at 70322.2457@compuserve.com.)
+John wrote me as follows: "Hmm, so *that's* how texture-mapping works.
+But 3 jumps *per pixel?* Hmph!"
 
-It was the “Hmph” that really got to me.
+It was the "Hmph" that really got to me.
 
 #### Left-Brain Optimization {#Heading4}
 
@@ -112,13 +112,13 @@ The inner loop of my original texture-mapping code is shown in Listing
 shown in Figure 58.1; an outer loop runs through all the scanlines in
 whatever polygon is being drawn. I immediately saw that I could
 eliminate nearly 10 percent of the cycles by unrolling the loop;
-obviously, John had done that, else there’s no way he could branch only
+obviously, John had done that, else there's no way he could branch only
 once per scanline. (By the way, branching only once per scanline via a
 fully unrolled loop is not generally recommended. A branch every few
 pixels costs relatively little, and the cache effects of fully unrolled
 code are *not* good.) I quickly came up with several other ways to speed
 up the code, but soon realized that all the clever coding in the world
-wasn’t going to get me within 100 percent of John’s performance so long
+wasn't going to get me within 100 percent of John's performance so long
 as I had to cycle from one plane to the next for every pixel.
 
 ![](images/58-01.jpg)\