The highlight of the scientists’ testimony was a series of several colorful diagrams of how the big machine would work. One consisted of colored dots resembling Skittles banging into one another. Noting the motion lines behind the circle-ball things, committee members surmised that they were slamming together in a “fast, forceful manner.” Yet some expressed doubts as to whether they justified the $50 billion price tag. “These scientists could trim $10 million if they would just cut out some of the purple and blue spheres,” said Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD), explaining that he understood the need for an abundance of reds and greens. “With all of those molecules and atoms going in every direction, the whole thing looks a bit unorganized, especially for science.”
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, in collaboration with scientists at NASA’s Ames Research Center, have built a low-cost robotic device that enables any digital camera to produce breathtaking gigapixel (billions of pixels) panoramas, called GigaPans. These huge image files can then be explored by zooming in on features of interest in a manner similar to Google Earth. “We have taken imagery and made it a new tool for exploration and for enhancing global understanding,” said Illah Nourbakhsh, associate professor in the School of Computer Science’s Robotics Institute. The GigaPan camera system is part of a larger effort known as the Global Connection Project, led by Nourbakhsh. Its purpose is to make people all over the world more aware of their neighbors. Global Connection’s earlier accomplishments include the publication of the National Geographic magazine photography and story layer in Google Earth.
It was the Internet that stripped the world of its innocence. Algorithms, as closely guarded as state secrets, buy and sell stocks and mortgage-backed securities, sometimes with a dispassionate zeal that crashes markets. Algorithms promise to find the news that fits you, and even your perfect mate. You can’t visit Amazon.com without being confronted with a list of books and other products that the Great Algoritmi recommends. Its intuitions, of course, are just calculations — given enough time they could be carried out with stones. But when so much data is processed so rapidly, the effect is oracular and almost opaque. Even with a peek at the cybernetic trade secrets, you probably couldn’t unwind the computations. As you sit with your eHarmony spouse watching the movies Netflix prescribes, you might as well be an avatar in Second Life. You have been absorbed into the operating system.
The world is changing in an exponential rate. The world 20 years ago was vastly different from today. In 1987 could anyone have predicted the communication structures that we now take for granted? What will the world be like in 20 more years? It will be even more different than the last 20.
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a giant banana that a Canadian artist’s building to blast into space. Cesar Saez is planning to launch the 300m-long inflatable banana into orbit from Mexico next summer to see how people react to his crazy flying fruit. The finished banana will certainly be hard to miss – it’s going to be longer than three football pitches and as high as a 20-storey building in the middle. That means it will be between 15-20% of the size of the full moon!
Advanced Micro Devices Inc. launched its highly publicized new server chip Monday, delivering the biggest jolt to its product lineup in four years. The company’s redesigned Opteron processor is the first from AMD to feature four computing engines on a single chip instead of just one or two. How does Barcelona stack up to a pair of dual-core Opterons? In other words, how much faster can we expect Phenom to be vs. the Athlon 64 X2? To put it succinctly, it looks like around 15% clock for clock. Clock for clock that’s nothing short of a huge increase in performance over the K8 based Opterons. We saw how competitive AMD became after the first round of price cuts this year, but after the second set Intel went back to dominating. The trouble for AMD this time around is that Phenom is a much larger chip than the outgoing Athlon 64 X2, whereas Intel’s Penryn family will actually be smaller than Conroe. AMD is already losing a considerable amount of money each quarter, so fabbing a larger chip at the same price as current CPUs will only make the situation worse. However, Intel can afford to continue to keep its processors as aggressively priced, especially moving to 45nm. To put it plainly: Phenom/Barcelona makes this price war more difficult on AMD, while Penryn makes it easier on Intel. What’s the end game? Is there a solution? The concern is that a non-competive AMD will bring about a more complacent Intel, which we do not want. We want the hungry Intel that we’ve enjoyed for the past year, we want ridiculous performance and aggressive pricing, and we won’t get that without an AMD that can fight.
Mapping the great network that is the internet was never going to be an easy task. There would have to be as many connections as there are in the human brain. But for a group of web architects based in Japan, it is worth a go. Modelled on the fiendishly complex Tokyo Metro map, the latest Web Trend Map (the 2007/V2 version) organises some of cyberspace’s movers and shakers into an easy-to-read chart. Plotted by the Japanese firm Information Architects (IA), each line on the map represents a theme, be it news (green), tools (pink) or the brown Chinese line, which IA calls the “second internet”, after the country’s efforts to censor much of the content freely available in the West.
The Dark Tower is a series of seven books by American writer Stephen King. The series begins, “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” It tells the story of the last living member of the Gunslingers, Roland Deschain, and his quest to catch The Man in Black, which will ultimately lead him to the Dark Tower. The Dark Tower is often described in the novels as a metaphor, and also as a real structure said to be located at the nexus of all universes. Roland exists in a place where “the world has moved on”, in a world that is recognizable as the Old West but exists in an alternate time frame or parallel universe to our own. The series incorporates themes from multiple genres, including fantasy fiction, science fantasy, horror, and western elements. King has described the series as his magnum opus; beside the seven novels that comprise the series proper, many of his other books are related to the story, introducing concepts and characters that come into play as the series progresses.
Even the highest density hard-disk drives use approximately 1 million magnetic atoms to store a single bit of information. IBM’s Almaden Research Center (San Jose, Calif.) has measured the ability to store a bit on a single atom, portending hard drives with ultra-high storage capacity. Simultaneously, IBM’s Zurich Research Lab has demonstrated a molecular switch that could replace current silicon-based chip technology with processors so small that a supercomputer could fit on a chip the size of a speck of dust. IBM’s claims its atomic-scale demonstration promises to pack up to 1,000 times as much information on a hard disk than current technologies. Such hard disks could store 30,000 full-length movies on a device the size of an iPod.
In Ending Aging, Dr. de Grey and his research assistant Michael Rae describe the details of this biotechnology. They explain that the aging of the human body, just like the aging of man-made machines, results from an accumulation of various types of damage. As with man-made machines, this damage can periodically be repaired, leading to indefinite extension of the machine’s fully functional lifetime, just as is routinely done with classic cars. We already know what types of damage accumulate in the human body, and we are moving rapidly toward the comprehensive development of technologies to remove that damage. By demystifying aging and its postponement for the nonspecialist reader, de Grey and Rae systematically dismantle the fatalist presumption that aging will forever defeat the efforts of medical science.
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Posted by eneve 
Posted by eneve 
