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Computing/Misc. Technology

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Meet Mira, the Supercomputer That Makes Universes - Ross Andersen. Next month, one of the world's fastest supercomputers will run the largest, most complex universe simulation ever attempted. Argonne National Laboratory Cosmology is the most ambitious of sciences. Its goal, plainly stated, is to describe the origin, evolution, and structure of the entire universe, a universe that is as enormous as it is ancient. Surprisingly, figuring out what the universe used to look like is the easy part of cosmology. If you point a sensitive telescope at a dark corner of the sky, and run a long exposure, you can catch photons from the young universe, photons that first sprang out into intergalactic space more than ten billion years ago.

The real challenge for cosmology is figuring out exactly what happened to those first nascent galaxies. In October, the world's third fastest supercomputer, Mira, is scheduled to run the largest, most complex universe simulation ever attempted. Help me get a handle on how your project is going to work. How Google Builds Its Maps—and What It Means for the Future of Everything - Alexis C. Madrigal.

An exclusive look inside Ground Truth, the secretive program to build the world's best accurate maps. Behind every Google Map, there is a much more complex map that's the key to your queries but hidden from your view. The deep map contains the logic of places: their no-left-turns and freeway on-ramps, speed limits and traffic conditions. This is the data that you're drawing from when you ask Google to navigate you from point A to point B -- and last week, Google showed me the internal map and demonstrated how it was built. It's the first time the company has let anyone watch how the project it calls GT, or "Ground Truth," actually works. Google opened up at a key moment in its evolution. The company began as an online search company that made money almost exclusively from selling ads based on what you were querying for.

But then the mobile world exploded. And for good reason. This is not just a theoretical concern. But that would entail actually building a better map. More like what? Want to Get 70 Billion Copies of Your Book In Print? Print It In DNA | The Loom. Future Computers Will Not Only Be Cooled by Water, They'll Compute With Water. iOS Encryption Is So Good, Not Even the NSA Can Hack It. It's Hard to Believe that this Insane Real Time 3D Demo Is Not a Real Life Video. Six Designs That Would've Been Impossible Without Computer Modeling. How artificial intelligences will see us.

3 Computer Simulations that Changed The World (And 2 That Are on the Verge) Why It Takes So Long to Fix a Power Outage. 3D NAND Chips Are Going to Make High-Capacity SSDs a Reality. Watch Garry Kasparov and Alan Turing Play Chess. IBM’s Sequoia crushes all other supercomputers in new ranking. Remembering Alan Turing. Yep. Hence the name "bombe", which is not an English word. Joe Desch also led a simultaneous indedpendent effort in Dayton, Ohio, to build a bombe machine after the Germans added a fourth wheel to their enigma machine. Turing, however, was dismissive of the bombe effort at National Cash Register in Dayton, and thought it would never work.

It eventually did, though Desch suffered a nervous breakdown in the process. [www.daytondailynews.com] A lot of the guys who worked at the Dayton bombe project at National Cash Register eventually went to be founding members of the first real computer companies in the U.S., at places like Engineering Research Associates (now defunct) and IBM. I found out a year ago that my grandfather, who died in the 1970s, worked on the Dayton bombe.

How to Build Turing’s Universal Machine. This NASA Simulator Fakes Space in the Middle of Texas. Sensor-Filled Umbrella Turns Raindrops Into a Retro 8-Bit Soundtrack. 3-D Copying Makes Michelangelos of the Masses. When Cosmo Wenman went to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in late May, he did what many people do. He took photos of some of his favorite sculptures. But instead of a few snapshots, Wenman took hundreds of pictures, documenting busts and reliefs from every accessible angle. Then he did something currently unusual -- but likely to become common. Wenman turned the photos into three-dimensional digital maps, using a free program called Autodesk 123D Catch. On Thingiverse, you can also find data maps for around three dozen sculptures from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Digital Scans The technology is still primitive and frustrating, and the scans it produces are far from perfect, but the future is clear. The question is how the elite palaces will react. The initial response, by the Met and the Getty, is encouraging. Pettis says he always assumed that digitizing sculptures would require a virtual “heist” involving an expensive scanner and a lot of subterfuge. Plaster Casts. The 'filter bubble' is a sinister phenomenon. But Eli Pariser's alternative sounds even worse. How Studying Ant Behavior Can Make Social Networks Better. Supercomputer simulates nuclear explosion down to the molecular level. No it isn't. The nuclear test ban treaty went into effect in 1963. In 1964 supercomputers worked in the megaflops range. The LLNL supercomputer is likely in the teraflops to petaflops range, a million to billion times faster. This is precisely why the major nuclear powers don't do weapons testing anymore.

Sorry, but that's not the reason. There's no rational reason for declared nuclear powers not to test their weapons, it was always an emotional decision made for publicity reasons (because everyone knows that nuclear weapons are, ummm, bad). Pretty much. I refer only to recent work. The test ban in the 60s only covered above ground testing and testing in space. Perhaps back in 1987 the matter was still in dispute, but, according to the Obama Administration, thanks to the huge advances in supercomputers in recent decades, the United States need not ever test nuclear weapons again. But I feel pretty safe in believing the current administration if they say that. [cryptome.org] [gcn.com] How Hackers Nearly Took Down Google's reCaptcha System.

10 Tricks That Chatbots Use to Make You Believe They're Human. 4.12: Mother Earth Mother Board — www.wired. The hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, chronicling the laying of the longest wire on Earth. In which the hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, acquainting himself with the customs and dialects of the exotic Manhole Villagers of Thailand, the U-Turn Tunnelers of the Nile Delta, the Cable Nomads of Lan tao Island, the Slack Control Wizards of Chelmsford, the Subterranean Ex-Telegraphers of Cornwall, and other previously unknown and unchronicled folk; also, biographical sketches of the two long-dead Supreme Ninja Hacker Mage Lords of global telecommunications, and other material pertaining to the business and technology of Undersea Fiber-Optic Cables, as well as an account of the laying of the longest wire on Earth, which should not be without interest to the readers of Wired.

Information moves, or we move to it. During the decades after Morse's "What hath God wrought! " FLAG facts. Why you'll be eating quantum dots twenty years from now. How to build modern railroad track – the machinery is amazing. Probably because of all the history classes we all took in grades 1 through 12, many people have a impression of the railroads that comes from the 1800s. We imagine hundreds or thousands of men building railroad tracks using hand-carried wooden railroad ties and hammers. Something like this: The following video has made the rounds since it was released, with well over half a million views.

It is fascinating in a “How It’s Made” sense, because it shows an amazing amount of automation now used in the process: The only problem is the lack of an explanation of what is going on. Each machine is accomplishing a specific task. This is a tamping machine, designed to pack the ballast (gravel) around the ties, in this case made by Plasser & Theurer: - Plasser & Theurer Production Range - Ballast tamper A ballast tamper or tamping machine is a machine used to pack (or tamp) the track ballast under railway tracks to make the tracks more durable. What is the following machine doing? The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say) | Threat Level. It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google's former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes.

And the data flow shows no sign of slowing. In 2011 more than 2 billion of the world's 6.9 billion people were connected to the Internet. The data stored in Bluffdale will naturally go far beyond the world's billions of public web pages. Once it's operational, the Utah Data Center will become, in effect, the NSA's cloud. 1 Geostationary satellites Four satellites positioned around the globe monitor frequencies carrying everything from walkie-talkies and cell phones in Libya to radar systems in North Korea. 2 Aerospace Data Facility, Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado 3 NSA Georgia, Fort Gordon, Augusta, Georgia 5 NSA Hawaii, Oahu. 25 years of HyperCard—the missing link to the Web. Sometime around 1988, my landlady and I cut a deal. She would purchase a Macintosh computer, I would buy an external hard drive, and we would leave the system in the living room to share.

She used the device most, since I did my computing on an IBM 286 and just wanted to keep up with Apple developments. But after we set up the Mac, I sat down with it one evening and noticed a program on the applications menu. "HyperCard? " I wondered. I opened the app and read the instructions. Not only that, but HyperCard included a scripting language called "Hyper Talk" that a non-programmer like myself could easily learn. Intrigued, I began composing stacks. This month, I glanced at my historical watch. "What was this thing? " And so the Cupertino company exiled the program to its Claris subsidiary, where it got lost amidst more prominent projects like Filemaker and the ClarisWorks office suite. Even before its cancellation, HyperCard's inventor saw the end coming.

This Is What Happens When Anonymous Tries to Destroy You. 9 secure phones.