“But Daddy! I want an Oompa Lumpa Supercomputer NOW!…”

Does a super computer that is 250 times faster than your desktop sound appealing - I mean, assuming it was the size of a desktop and under $10,000?  It does to me, and now it is available. 

NVIDIA Tesla Personal Supercomputer uses parallel computing architecture and powered by up to 960 parallel processing cores to give you a supercomputer on your desk…

When a technology like this breaks the $10k mark, it is not long before it breaks the $1,000 mark, and that’s when things start to get interesting.  And we will need it, with virtual reality and hyper-bandwidth connections…

Anyway, thought you might like to know…

Hmmm, I wonder how the unlimited availability of cheap, huge, perfect diamonds will change the engagement rituals…

Artificial diamonds - now available in extra large - environment - 13 November 2008 - New Scientist

“The most exciting aspect of this new annealing process is the unlimited size of the crystals that can be treated. The breakthrough will allow us to push to kilocarat diamonds of high optical quality,”

CNN created a Star Wars type hologram for the election, but this is an order of magnituede more impressive.  3 dimensional imagery is here - now, let’s see how long it takes them to make it affordable for the serious consumer…

3D Display Offers Glimpse of Future Media

Some people eat more, eat more fat, eat more often than others, and exercise less, yet still remain thin and healthy.  How?  Metabolism.  Their body processes the food differently.

When I was studying biopsychology in college, experimenters discovered that the amount of Brown Adipose Tissue (BAT) that someone had, multiplied by how active it was, was directly related to how many calories the body burned in metabolism.  Back in 1990, they were testing drugs that stimulated the BAT cells in mice, turning morbidly obese mice (yes, they exist) thin without changing their diet or exercise. They were testing it on humans, but the side effects were so intense it was dangerous, so it never made it to market.

Now, genetic research has found a new compound that does all of that and more.

The Healthy Skinny Pill: European scientists have found that mice fed a high-fat, high-calorie diet and prevented from exercising regularly can be protected from weight gain and metabolic disorders when given a drug that targets a gene linked to longevity. The treatment even increases the animals’ running endurance.

If it works in humans without negative side-effects, we are looking at a very interesting door opening into a whole series of Designer Metabolism drugs that will revolutionize the health care field.  Again, keep your balance, and let’s surf this asymptotic spiral of development with artistry and grace!

Mark

Just a heads up.  The have found a way to create essentially transparent sheets of nanotubes that can be stretched over objects and act as speakers, playing music etc.  Wow. 

Watch a video of a carbon nanotube speaker being stretched

When fully stretched, the sheets are transparent and so they could
be attached to the front of an LCD screen to replace standard speakers.

Hot nanotube sheets produce music on demand

Shoushan Fan and his research team at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, working with colleagues at Beijing Normal University, created a thin sheet by roughly aligning many 10-nanometer-diameter carbon nanotubes. When they sent an audio frequency current through the sheet, they discovered it acted as a loudspeaker.