Doctor Recommended
100% All Natural

- Knock Nevis, aka Jahre Viking (Guinness Book) (Wikipedia)

- RMS Queen Mary 2

- MS Freedom of the Seas

- Emma Maersk

Courtesy of Geordie Rose: The Mullet.

It is not just a hairstyle, it is also a lifestyle.

See my infamous wig. And the detailed entry on Wikipedia.

Yesterday, Intel announced that it plans on commercializing an 80-core, 1-teraflop general purpose chip.

While that will probably be technically feasible, there are a couple of problems that need to be addressed first.

Number one, programs must be rewritten and fined-tuned to take advantage of the parallel nature of these cores. And as we have seen with support for multiple processors in a single system, this development is often times resource intensive, time-consuming, and arduous. In fact, the highly sophisticated XBox 360, which is powered by 3 cores, has few titles that are truly optimized for these paper numbers. [See also the development of SIMD as well as HyperThreading]

Which brings us to the second point which was best annunciated by Tom Yager of InfoWorld: just because the CPU can crunch those operations and instructions does not mean that real-world usage will see this system throughput. In fact, Intel is actually taking a step backwards in its architectural approach to bus bandwidth allocation and usage with its newly touted 4-core system.

As shown in AMD’s recent K8L presentation in Moscow (sure you can call it bias, but numbers don’t lie), the stop-gap, duct-tape solution Intel has glued together in its quad-core offering will result in a double-digit loss in effective bus bandwidth. So even if each core is capable of processing ginormous amounts of raw data, accessing memory and other I/O devices is severely limited.

Think of a system bus as a water pipe at a cook out. A small lawn fire breaks out and you, as Intel, have access to hundreds of gallons of water, but your pipe is itty bitty, and thus you are ability to put out a small fire is hampered. And as a result, you burn up your neighbors lawn gnomes and no one invites you over for Christmas.

AMD’s solution to this was to create a new topology from scratch called HyperTransport, that can handle larger amounts of data rates. They also have integrated the actual cores and memory controllers onto a single die.

In closing, it should be noted that according to CNet, Intel is also working on a new transportation system called Common System Interface which should solve several of the problems plaguing its current generation of front-side bus chipsets. They are also working on “Geneseo” which will allow 3rd parties to integrate chips directly onto the system bus.

See also: System-on-a-Chip

If you enjoy reading technological predictions of the future, then you will like the interview between Compute! magazine and space-science popularizer, Gerard O’Neill (who I mentioned in passing recently).

To his dismay, space colonization never reached the level that he had hoped for, nor for that matter, did Wernher von Braun’s.

See O’Neill discuss The Colonization of Space in Physics Today, circa 1974 — as well as an interview of him by NASA.

A month ago I mentioned the pie-in-the-sky project of placing solar panels on the moon and beaming the energy back to Earth.

While that alternative has been collecting dust on the drawing board, Solar Power Satellites - its cousin - may once again see the day of light.

In a nutshell, the SPS is just a large array of solar panels launched into geosynchronous orbit. So, think of them as conventional solar-powered communication satellites without the communications equipment. Or in other words, using the technology of today, to stitch together a kilometer+ sized array of solar cells.

Once the energy is collected, it could be beamed back to a terrestrial recevier through the use of microwaves — and at a high rate of efficiency (very little loss due to atmospheric disturbances, weather, etc.).

The links above discuss some of the monetary costs of launching such a system into orbit, and they are still quite steep. Of course, that could all change if relatively light-weight materials (e.g. nano-based cells) are developed, which shed the payload costs.

Or, as mentioned in “Shooting yourself into space with a cannon,” you could switch to an entirely different approach to launching objects into space, mass drivers. No doubt, you are familiar with these devices, such as rail guns, through their depiction in Hollywood films like Eraser.

For more on the practical uses of SPS and mass drivers see: Gerard O’Neill and the L5 Society.

In 1900, about 2 percent of the college-age population enrolled in higher education. That number is around 65 percent today. And of the nation’s 15.5 million college students, about 44 percent attend community college.

According to the Census Bureau, as of 2004, 28 percent of those age 25 or older reported they had attained at least a bachelor’s degree.

And based on survey results analyzed by The Council of Graduate Schools, 643 institutions enrolled more than 1.5 million graduate students in the fall of 2005.

So, the next time you hear someone use nerd as a pejorative, embrace your heritage and be offended — because holding a college degree nowadays is almost like owning a car: everyone’s got one. Thus, for comparative marketing purposes, you are most certainly not a nerd.

For more on degree inflation, see also: Overselling Higher Education

According to stat-intensive comScore, the internets are home to 713 million users. As part of the national breakdown, the US - which has the most - has about 153 million users and is followed by China, at around 78 million.

This relates to a recent article from CIO magazine regarding the development and deployment of IPv6 networks across the world, and China in particular.

Remember how I mentioned the resolution for the new Ultra High Definition standard had been created (at 7680 x 4320)?

To give you some perspective, the highest resolution you find in a typical HD TV is 1920 x 1080. That is approximately 2 megapixels worth of imagery.

The WQXGA standard (2560×1600) weighs in at just over 4 megapixels and can be currently found in two consumer products: the 30″ Apple Cinema Display, and the 30″ 3007FPW from Dell.

And development has begun on bigger toys. For instance, the WQUXGA (Wide Quad Ultra Extended Graphics Array) standard beefs up the resolution to 3840 x 2400, which is roughly 9.2 megapixels. And the WHUXGA (Wide Hexadecatuple Ultra Extended Graphics Array) reaches a mammoth 7680 x 4800, or nearly 37 megapixels — and slightly larger than Ultra HDTV.

But can your eye really tell the difference?

Well, based on some everyday calculations it turns out that our itty bitty eyes are capable of resolving at least 576 megapixels.

Here’s to holding your breath.

See also: FLOPS, MIPS, Watts and the Human Brain.

If you’re a thug that’s grown up on the tough streets of Compton - and I know all 3 of my readers are - then you can undoubtedly relate to Chamillionaire’s catchy song: “Ridin’ Dirty.”

Here is the original music video featuring Krayzie Bone.  And if that is removed: here is a remix of the original (on motorcycles no less) and here is a small parody of the original.

And speaking of parodies, a friend sent me the new Weird Al Yankovic’s lampoon of that song, and it is aptly titled “White and Nerdy.”

Peace out.

The SciFi Channel noted on their ever eclectic blog that researchers at Cornell have gotten light to turn into electricity (and vice-versa) — through the use of OLEDs.

This of course has a cornucopia of applications as you could conceivably recharge anything that has an OLED screen during the day, like say, your cell phone.

An anonymous reader sent me a rather weird ad on Craigslist: How many 5 year-olds could you take on at once?

I’m not sure which is more disturbing: that someone wonders that, or that it is the W4M section.

DealBreaker has found some odd ones too. Oh yea, be careful what ads you respond to — it might end up haunting you later on.

You have heard of homesteading (claiming unclaimed land) before, perhaps even seeing it take place in the film, Far and Away.

Patri Friedman (all around geek that works at Google and writes at Catallarchy) apparently had some free time over the past few years and worked on what is truly the ultimate guide to constructing a self-sufficient community on the high-seas; and it is aptly called Seasteading. See the Powerpoint slides from a presentation he gave a couple years ago.

In addition to wading through the swaths of information presented there, you might also be interested in a hands-on account of Project Atlantis — a similar concept to Seasteading put together during the 1970s by Werner Stiefel.

And if you just cannot wait for any of these to germinate and you have $1 million, you can buy your own studio apartment on The World, a large residential cruise ship operated by ResidenSea.

See also: Ocean reclamation, the building of artificial islands

Economist Arnold Kling pointed to a new paper that truly synthesizes many of the problems higher education has as both a business plan and as a institution for instilling intellectual curiousity (or lack thereof).

It almost makes me wish I had never gone to college, or rather, that my friends who did not, were really ahead of the game.

See also: Teaching teaching to teachers about teaching teaching to teachers.

In a day filled with military coup’s and UFOs it is nice to be able to reflect on fanciful, childhood memories:  Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood Gerrymandered To Serve King Friday’s Make-Believe Agenda

See my other nominations for excellence in journalism.

Earlier today Peter Klein pointed to a very interesting article regarding elite universities from the WSJ aptly titled, “Any College Will Do.” In it, the author notes that only 10% of the chief executives of Fortune 500 firms attended an Ivy League school. In fact, most of the executives simply matriculated to seemingly generic schools (e.g. large State-supported schools).

This piece is germane as The Economist recently noted that because of the advent of relatively cheap and easy-to-use electronic media (e.g., e-reserves, bulletin boards, listserves, electronic digests, etc.), the top universities no longer have a resource-based advantage over their less-affluent counterparts with respect to conducting cutting-edge research.

It also ties into learncasting (educational podcasting) and of particular interest: the case of Robert Schrag, a communications professor at North Carolina State University. At the beginning of the Fall semester he began to sell his lectures in podcast form for $2.50 — to both student and public denizen alike. However, he was recently required to take them down until the University had come up with a formal policy to handle the intellectual property issues surrounding the class material.

This is a perfect example that illustrates my thesis regarding the transformation of the traditional, residential-based college in the “Web 2.0″ era.

The administration and its stake holders are at cross-roads. On one hand they could adopt this technology - as numerous Universities have - and use it as an additional revenue source. Ignoring the much maligned DRM issues, in the long-run this could enable Universities to reach the distance-based education customer who is short on commuting time and/or lacks the ability to pay for lodging each semester. They could even develop these lectures into a full-blown video series, a low-tech product that everyone is familiar with and capable of reaching mass-markets.

On the other hand, if the administration did decide to go this route, they would tacitly be admitting that the competitive advantage of attending classes via meatspace is at a dead-end. This is not to say that there are no advantages of living at a residential college: building a social rolodex can still enable students to gain advantages over their isolated, virtual peers — in theory at least (one could argue that because of chat rooms, newsgroups, blogs, wikis and a slew of other social web services, a self-motivated individual could become just as proficient as their college-bound peers).

See also: 1 2 3

Update: according to The Chronicle, the professor’s podcasts are back online.  However, they are password-protected and thus are currently only accessible to students (and now for free).

Still under the weather (literally).

Yesterday I noticed a post on Tim O’Reilly’s multi-author blog regarding a recent synthetic biology article in The Economist. Although The Economist has a formal policy against publishing by-lines, it was written by Nikolaj Nyholm and is fairly interesting as it tries to remain hype-free (set in contrast to futurologists such as the seemingly starry-eyed Kurzweil).

The timing is somewhat serendipitous because today, the SFGate published an overview surrounding scientist Aubrey de Grey and his Methuselah Mouse Prize. Apparently, Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and libertarian technologist, donated $3.5 million to the organization which is attempting to reverse the aging process. See also this interesting Wired piece on Thiel and PayPal from 2001.

De Grey’s work has of course been criticized and scrutinized by his peers, including a highly public debate with the editor of MIT’s Technology Review magazine.  See also this news release.

Back to Thiel, he eventually sold PayPal to eBay back in 2002 and his cut was $1.5 billion. He then started a VC firm and has been instrumental as a lead or angel investor in web companies such as Facebook.

Last year eBay also purchased Skype. One of the original investors of Skype was Steve Jurvetson, who is also a managing director of a well-known VC firm.  He is also a libertarian technologist of sorts, which may be explained by his Estonian heritage.  Estonia of course, has become the poster child of post-Soviet, free-market success in Europe and is a hot bed for technological-based entrepreneurship.

I have it.

Here is a brief description of what it is.

Google’s “advanced” search options give a user the ability to fine-tune health-related search terms.  See also their useful co-op program.

Guess what?  The successor to HDTV has already been developed, weighing in at 16x the previous resolution (resulting in an image of 7680 x 4320).

And slightly related: you are surely familiar with megapixel-sized resolutions for cameras.  What about gigapixels?

I’ve mentioned Unmanned Aerial Vehicles before (1 2 3).

Wired News has an interesting writeup on the current State of AI use in robotic UAVs. Swarm intelligence combined with autonomous functionality built from the ground up with nanotechnology has created a formidable tool for the military (like they needed yet another way to destroy property…) and perhaps other industries as well (emergency search & rescue is always at the top of that list).

While the Wired article discusses vehicles that are a few inches in size, in the past, several defense contractors have created other prototypes along the lines of the box-office bomb, Stealth. These include: Northrop’s Tacit Blue, Boeing’s Bird of Prey, and Lockheed Martin’s Polecat.

And speaking of self-navigating machines, Volkswagen has just released one of those auto-parallel parking cars; and China’s FAW recently released a car that can reportedly drive itself everywhere, at 93 mph no less.

For even smaller innovations, see also: Picotechnology and Femtotechnology.

Generally speaking, the immune system works simply by comparing a potentially harmful critter against a large database of approved microscopic entities.

This has become the analogy du jour in explaining how a negative database works in software applications.

Last month, The Economist discussed this issue in “The non-denial of the non-self” stating,

The immune system is interesting, because it protects its owner from pathogens without needing to know what a pathogen will look like. Instead, it relies on a negative database to tell it what to destroy. It learns early on which biological molecules are “self�, in the sense that they are routine parts of the body it is protecting. Whenever it meets one that is “not self� and thus likely to be part of a pathogen, it destroys it.

And an academic research team led by Fernando Esponda and Paul Helman are trying to apply this nature-inspired, reverse psychology-esque system to secure sensitive information.

On a related note, Mercedes-Benz is developing a new car that is designed based on the streamlined features of a female boxfish. And while it may not be the sexiest looking vehicle on the road, gets about 70 miles/gallon.

See more on the dynamism of nature and engineering.

Via Mike Ewens.