fun news

topic archives: fun 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 III-2004: 03 07 08 08-2 22 IV-2004: 18 V-2004: 10 18 18-2 20 25 27 VI-2004: 07 13 16 19 19-2 VII-2004: 4 28 VIII-2004: 5 11 19 25

fun

recently discovered in the uk—early stone-age cave art

New finds of cave art in Britain. Article describing the in Antiquity online with photos.

Image credit: Paul Pettitt and Sergio Ripoli

Background article

“For many years the total lack of cave art in Britain dating to the same period perplexed researchers. Britain was inhabited, after all. And throughout the Ice Age, it was linked to mainland Europe by a land bridge.”
—
“Now more extensive surveys undertaken this year reveal that the English caves may hold the most elaborate Ice Age cave-art ceiling ever discovered.”

the web address for this article is
https://www.abelard.org/news/fun0408.php#prehistoric

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medium or rare?

World record fry up.

the web address for this article is
https://www.abelard.org/news/fun0408.php#cooking

colorflage - as in camouflage
This site has reasonably competent/impressive flash.

“Colorflage consists of wallpaper, paint, fabric, furniture and lamps. By weaving a pattern between objects and architecture we create fused and uniform space... Space is being camouflaged by colors and patterns - Colorflaged. Objects, walls and floors become one.”

Wall paper	Room design

Some other room designs by colorflage.

Lead via the auroran sunset and by Limbic.

the web address for this article is
https://www.abelard.org/news/fun0408.php#colorflage

well, you would wouldn’t you!

“To measure neptunium-237's critical mass, the Los Alamos team cast a softball-size, 6-kg sphere of the metal that could nestle within two hemispheres of uranium. The researchers then brought the uranium hemispheres together over the course of 4 days at a carefully controlled rate.

“When the hemispheres were about 3 millimeters apart, detectors recorded a steep rise in neutron production, signalling that a chain reaction was, in nuke parlance, going critical. From the neptunium-uranium assembly's critical mass, the team then calculated neptunium's individual critical mass. "When you go critical, that's when things get exciting," Clement says.

“That's exactly the kind of excitement that designers of nuclear-waste repositories want to avoid.”

the web address for this article is
https://www.abelard.org/news/fun0408.php#neptunium

moore’s law updated

Moron Moore doubles in size every one and a half years.

And now for the original Moore’s Law:

“The observation, made in 1965 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore while preparing a speech, that each new memory integrated circuit contained roughly twice as much capacity as its predecessor, [this due to shrinkage in component size] and each chip was released within 18-24 months of the previous chip. If this trend continued, he reasoned, computing power would rise exponentially with time.”

Note that the period stated varies. Intel’s site gives two years. The period stated on other sites varies between one year, to 18 months to two years, depending on which website is citing Moore’s Law.

The last of these three sites also claims that this process is likely to continue for at least the next two decades:

“[...] what will enable the industry to reach new “lows” in semiconductor manufacturing is the convergence of emerging technologies, such as quantum, optical, plastic, NEMS and SiCMOS with traditional CMOS.”

A further, related law is Gate’s Law:

“The speed of software halves every 18 months.”

Thus the satirical claim that the growth of M$ bloatware offsets the processor speed gains achieved through improved compute power.

the web address for this article is
https://www.abelard.org/news/fun0408.php#moores_law

email email_abelard [at] abelard.org

© abelard, 2004, 6 august


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