The time may come when a computer will be able to out-compute a human, but not yet. According to a recent study, adding up all the computation power in every laptop, server, mainframe, cell phone, and digital processors of all kinds, everywhere on the planet will give you approximately the ability to handle approximately 6.4 x 10^18 operations a second. About the same as a human brain.
All the worlds storage – paper, film, hard-drives, etc. would give you same amount of storage as human DNA. In other words, somewhere around 2011 the planet has enough computing power to account for 1 extra person. The vast amount of “thinking” is still done by organic chemistry. Read the article I read on ARS Technica.
Since your first day of kindergarten when you sang your “ABC’s” educators have used music to teach the otherwise boring lists, numbers, patterns and history of our world and universe. I don’t know if it is actually easier to memorize when put to music or simply more rewarding so you try harder – after all, it is very impressive to name all 192 odd countries in the world in 60 seconds to the tune of the Mexican Hat Dance (see number 5).
#1 The periodic table
I would love to be able to memorize this song, but even I’m not that big of a geek.
#2 The Pi Song
This could have been horrible if it was not sung so well. This is another song I have little interest in actually learning but its always fun to know PI to at least 10 places…just incase.
#3 The Universe Song – Monty Python
I really love this song and sing it all time to remember how big the universe really is. This version is sang by Clint Black (I am from Texas you know, plus the original lacks such quality visuals).
#4 The Universe…Again
A catchy tune and inspiring version, but since it lacks the numeric information of the Monty Python version it will always live in its shadow.
#5 The Nations of the World
This is one of my favorites. I have the first 2 sections memorized, but I loose it when he gets to Africa. Unfortunately, like most of these songs the information is increasingly out of date.
#6 I am the very model of a modern major-general
While not necessarily conveying a lot of scientific or practical information (that’s kind of the point of the joke), this famous scene for the play the “Pirates of Penzance” does have a lot of historical perspective on what he nerds of the 19th century where talking about. From a time when things like “beings animalcules” (microscopic organisms) were first discovered. The late great science fiction author Isaac Asimov wrote an essay about this song where he identified the meaning behind every strange and forgotten word. If you’re into retro steam punk, you’ll enjoy this vocabulary lesson.
I was testing BlogJet today as a possible desktop blogging tool. Strangely, what caught my eye first was not the tool, but the quote, attributed to Albert Einstein, that they used in the sample post… I found it a little hard to believe that Einstein who died in 1955 would have a quote about computers…especially about computers being fast. Here is the quote:
“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination.” — Albert Einstein (or was it Leo Cherne?…read on)
On the mantle of my bed I have a planetarium (Sega HomeStar) that projects the night sky onto my ceiling. Every other night or so, I turn this on when I’m relaxing into sleep. It allows me to star up at the stars, forget about the day, and contemplate the vast, unending beauty of the universe we live in. It is hard to look at the sky without your brain searching it for patterns (after all the brain is a pattern finding machine). The brain cannot help but try to connect the dots in a futile search for meaning and familiar shapes. Seven of the brightest stars in the northern hemisphere form what we call Ursa-Major – Latin for “The big bear”. I for one, and most people I know never can see any bear shape at all in those stars, so we call it The Big Dipper instead. We can’t see the bear for 2 reasons –
First, there are actually 20 stars that make up the bear, and the “big dipper” is just his rump and tail – that’s right I said “tail”.
Second, bears don’t have tails.
Why does this bear have a tail? According the the Greeks, Zeus, the king of Greek gods, flung this bear into the heavens by its tail, stretching the tail into the shape it has now. Was this story compelling enough that Greeks, Roman’s, and all of Europe and generations of artists would see a bear? Apparently it was:
Artists have been drawing this “bear with a tail” for centuries.
Interestingly, many American Indian tribes who never heard the Greek story, also knew these seven stars as part of a large bear. They saw the three stars of the Dipper’s handle not as a tail, but as three boys chasing a bear. A much better story if you ask me.
This is not a Photoshop. It was taken on the 4th of July by Spencer Weiner of the LA Times, showing a firefighting airtanker dropping fire retardant on wildfires in southern California.
On the mantle of my bed I have a planetarium (Sega HomeStar) that projects the night sky onto my ceiling. Every other night or so, I turn this on when I’m relaxing into sleep. It allows me to star up at the stars, forget about the day, and contemplate the vast, unending beauty of the universe we live in. It is hard to look at the sky without your brain searching it for patterns (after all the brain is a pattern finding machine). The brain cannot help but try to connect the dots in a futile search for meaning and familiar shapes. Seven of the brightest stars in the northern hemisphere form what we call Ursa-Major – Latin for “The big bear”. I for one, and most people I know never can see any bear shape at all in those stars, so we call it The Big Dipper instead. 
