Doctor Recommended
100% 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√ó1600) 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.