No one wants their last words to be "Oh my God! The old gypsy woman was right..."
I wish I had been better at maths when in school. If I had been I’m certain my life and career path would have been much different. I don’t doubt for a second that I would have gone on to a career in the sciences if that had been the case. Science and technology just plain fascinates me. This morning reading this article IBM calculates the force it takes to move atoms, all I could think of was is that not just too cool or what
It is hard for us, (and especially those of us who are “getting on” in years, whose formative and majority of adult life were in pre-personal computer days ) to grok the implications, never mind the scope, of the information explosion going on around us. Consider this small factoid. In 2006 humans created approximately 161 EB (ExaByte - or 1018 in decimal or 1060 in binary, which translates as one quintillion,1,000,000,000,000,000,000, bytes, or 1024 PetaBytes where 1 PetaByte equals 1024Terabytes and where one TeraByte is 1024 GigaBytes to bring it down to a scale you may be familiar with ) of data. That is about 3 million times the amount of information in all the books ever written. That’s one frikken huge amount of data no matter how you look at it.
The logarithmic increase in knowledge has made it impossible for anyone to be a generalist anymore. Indeed it is getting so large that you can’t really be a generalist in a particular major category of science anymore, like biology, physics, chemistry etc. as there is just too much happening in any one field to stay on top of it, constant drilling down to ever more specialized sub-fields is required to stay current.
Dealing with this much data requires huge amounts of computing resources and is quickly becoming responsible for no small amount of green house gases. Currently the fastest computers in the world are supercompter mainframes working at teraflop speeds (flop=floating point operations per second) which is one trillion flops per second. IBM and others expect to reach Petaflop speeds in the near future and groundwork is now being laid for Exaflop computers. The research being done on pushing atoms around will no doubt play a part in that as it is directly tied to reducing transistor size and therefore the speed at which calculations can be done.
All very cool stuff and I wish I had a clue about it 
So, just for you, Doug, and 20,000 other maths fans,
I shall be telling you on the 29th how to take cube roots in your head in less than a second. Does that blow your mind , or what 
Stu Savory 
—
6:07 am 2/24/2008
That sounds great Stu
The Dynamic Driveler 
—
9:26 am 2/24/2008