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You’ve seen trick plays like the Statue of Liberty.

You may have even caught some well-timed attacks in rugby.

This comes close to taking the cake:

SI story: Trinity needs 15 laterals to pull out improbable victory

Via Panda’s Thumb

Or so said a professor I had 8 years ago.

One of the things I do each day here in the Hermit Kingdom is discuss current events with the students.

This week I discussed the Nobel Prize in Physics and how it has impacted my students.

Like many children in industrialized countries, most of them have an MP3 player of some kind and all of them have a relatively new computer at home.

Yet, unsurprisingly, none of them could explain how Giant magnetoresistance (GMR) has changed their listening or viewing habits.

GMR, of course, is the quantum effect that was discovered twenty years ago and whose productive applications involve playing with fuzzy dice: within the world of electrons and magnetism.

Tell me something I don’t already know, right?

What about Kryder’s Law?

It is essentially the parallel version of Moore’s Law applied to the world of hard disk space and is named after professor Mark Kryder of Carnegie Mellon University.

Of bits and bytes

Geordie Rose recently linked to a story about several old disk drives and other computer gizmos made over the past 50 years.

However, one that did not make the cut was the IBM 305 RAMAC.

It weighed one ton and had a capacity of 5 MB. That product is just a tad bit different than the 4 pound, 750 GB drive you can pick up at the local computer store for under five benjamins.

Speaking of rapid changes, last week Popular Mechanics pointed out, that capacity of drive space has increased 50 million times over the past five decades.

And as mentioned above, Mark Kryder was also interviewed last week by PM and he noted that capacity increases a whopping 40% each year.

So where does this all lead?

As Charles Stross predicted this summer, probably to the digitally powered omnipresent world in which every person uses a lifelog, that chronicles every second of your life in full high definition audio and visual. All in a device smaller than an iPod.

I guess that will make you think twice about looking at the low-cut v-neck or midriff of your female coworker. Or maybe you will do it that much more…

[Note: back in 1997, my brother brought home a new 2.7 GB hard drive. He asked me how on earth he would fill it up. Suffice to say that the typical installation of Vista requires ~15 GB]

See also: What is wrong with Moore’s Law?

I’ve mentioned the Storm botnet worm war thingy a couple of times now (1 2), noting how theoretically powerful it is.

Yesterday, two articles were published and give diametrically opposite outlooks to this menace.

The Guardian ran the alarmist version.

PC World ran a much more rosy version by an academic.

As the saying goes, time will tell which outlook is valid. With any luck Skynet will simply remain in DVD format.

If you are looking for a new show that is witty, yet as offensive as South Park, I highly recommend “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”

Start with Season 2 or 3 (the first one is okay, but is missing a chemically-imbalanced Danny DeVito).

Unlike Lost or Heroes, the stories don’t really build on one another in any meaningful way… kind of like Seinfeld. The writers basically find a hot topic to parody (like abortion or gun ownership) and look at it in the most absurd angles, making fun of everyone in the process.

Here is a small clip, though you can grab them all with Bit Torrent (… unfortunately they don’t sell copies here in Korea):

One of their best yet:

In The Know: Is The Government Spying On Paranoid Schizophrenics Enough?

The last part reminded me of a great story: CIA Realizes It’s Been Using Black Highlighters All These Years

Since I’m a sucker of old, historical pictures, I recently came across a new batch from the London Zoo. Many of these are over 100 years old.

Unfortunately, no dinosaurs are among the archive.

See also: the longevity of certain animals.

“NASA must complete the ISS so it can be dropped into the ocean on schedule in finished form.” - Bob Park of the University of Maryland

See also:
Do we need NASA?
What Won’t Nasa Invent Next?
A World Without NASA

If you’ve ever trolled the comments over at Slashdot or Digg, this is pretty much how “real life” would be like according to just about any of their threads:

Reminds me of the “real life” chat room called The Parlor.

If you follow the semiconductor industry, you may be interested in the thoroughly detailed interview with David Ditzel.

He’s a 30-year industry veteran who worked on engineering projects at Bell Labs, Sun, and Transmeta.

The most interesting part I found was the discussion on RISC as well as the difficulties of introducing a new ISA for the mainstream market.

Also, Ditzel notes at the end that he is currently looking for “holes in the marketplace” to see what products he could help provide for customers. Is that not the textbook definition of entrepreneur in action? Fantastic.

See also:
Basic or Applied Research: Quantum edition
How much should companies spend on research and development?
What’s wrong with Moore’s Law?
FLOPS, MIPS, Watts and the Human Brain
Seth Lloyd’s Million Megahertz CPU
Specialization, Centralization, and the Future of Chip Integration