Daily Archives: October 27, 2004

Stillness Part V, Chapter 51

Raymond dropped a paper sack containing his belongings by the front door. Six more such bags were lined up there. He wandered into the common room, where some of the children were sitting around the television, watching more coverage of the

Phenomenon.

He plopped down on the big gray sofa next to Lucinda.

“Well, I did it,” he said. “Okay? But I still don’t think it makes any sense.”

“Thank you,” said the younger girl.

“What time is it, anyway? Are we going to have dinner?”

Bettina, who was sitting on the floor in front of the TV, turned to look at him.

“There’s some soup on the stove,” she said. “We already ate.”

“What kind of soup?”

“Tomato,” several voices offered at once.

Amazing Exponentials, Part 2

27nasa.jpeg

A mere 29 days ago IBM announced that it’s Blue Gene/L system was the world’s fastest computer capable of a sustained speed of 36.01 teraflops (a teraflop is a trillion calculations per second).

Yesterday, NASA announced that its Project Columbia Beowulf cluster achieved a sustained performance of 42.7 teraflops. The $50 million dollar system will be used “to speed up spacecraft design, environmental prediction and other research.”

Remarkably, this system was built in only 120 days.

This rivalry isn’t over yet. Neither Blue Gene nor Project Columbia is operating at its top theoretical speed. Only 16 of Project Columbia’s 20 computer units were operational at the time it was tested.

Brain Juice

This is interesting. Perhaps a stop-gap solution before full-blown brain prosthetics become commerically available:

Connecting a battery across the front of the head (the prefrontal cortex) can boost verbal skills, says a team from the US National Institutes of Health.

A current of two milliamperes applied for 20 minutes is enough to produce a significant improvement, they found.