Black holes, LHC, Star Wars, quantum uncertainty… if it is of general geek interest, but doesn’t fit into one of the other categories, it lands here.
Adam and Jamie of Mythbusters fame are cool guys. I enjoy their program and find it oddly educational, in a sort of geeky-destructive way. But I have to admit that the following video of a demonstration they did at an Nvidia graphics card conference really impressed the heck out of me. The first part of the video shows their interpretation of computer graphics using a single CPU, and the second part is their version of a massively parallel GPU rendering.
I was reading a news item the other day indicating that the Las Vegas Hilton is closing the Star Trek Experience in Vegas. This was one of the few things in Vegas, along with the fountains at Bellagios and the Siegfried and Roy Secret Gardens animal exhibit, that my wife and I actually enjoyed while we were there. But it was apparent when we were at the Hilton that they were barely putting any effort into the Star Trek Experience any more.
Continue reading Star Trek Experience closing… what’s the point of Vegas now?
My blog doesn’t get a lot of traffic. It has never been referenced on Slashdot. No one Diggs me. Basically, folks who find my site do so via a search engine, more or less by accident, or are friends and family. The fact that my site has been here at kgadams.net for a number of years and I’ve made an effort to make sure I keep the search engines moderately happy means that I get *some* traffic: maybe ten thousand hits a month, more or less. Just so we are on the same page: many “moderately popular” websites get that many hits in an hour. Seriously popular sites get that many in a minute.
But despite the fact that my site isn’t generating massive influxes of visitors, I still care about performance. It bugs me when my main page takes more than a second or two to generate, or when my administration interface takes ten seconds to appear. So what do I do to improve responsiveness? Well, I visit another blog…
Microsoft has been working on something they call “Surface” technology. Basically, it is a touch sensitive user interface, and it is usually demonstrated using a large, flat horizontal LCD panel… a table. I’ve had my doubts about the usefulness of this technology outside of a niche environment- but I’m ready to be proven wrong. That said, I find the following video pretty effectively expresses my doubts…
I’m sitting here in front of my second computer, more commonly known as “Irene’s game computer.” It is going through the process of installing Windows Vista at the moment, for the third time in less than a week due to various hardware and driver issues.
Nearly 20 years ago, some scientists observed something that looked like room temperature fusion, or “cold fusion”. If such a thing actually worked, and generated net positive energy flow (I.E.: you get more energy out than you put in to start and maintain the fusion), the world could be changed in amazing ways. Unfortunately, no one, including the original scientists, has been able to reproduce the observations in the two decades since the original incident.
I came across this post on Gizmodo today, with the following video:
Liars, damned liars, and statistics. Apparently, several of the most “reliable” temperature recording surveys in the world indicate that the Earth’s average temperatures are actually showing a downward trend during the last decade. But the single most quoted source, NASA, says exactly the opposite. From an article on The Register…
Continue reading Is NASA playing with global temperature statistics?
According to Jim Cicconi, “Vice president of legislative affairs” at AT&T, the whole Internet will be completely full by 2010. If you believe Jim, 20 typical households in 2010 will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today.
Continue reading Internet will be full by 2010- or so says AT&T doofus
I’m shocked and disappointed. Apparently, that Iron Man trailer I told you about some time ago is being made into a (are you sitting down?) a *movie*
Continue reading Iron Man trailer to be adapted into full length film?!