Wednesday link dump
Because I have nothing better to do right now, it's a good time to dump the interesting links that I've been accumulating.
Cherenkov glow in the Advanced Test Reactor
- While radioactive hunks of matter are often portrayed as glowing with a green tinge, we all know that's not actually true.. unless there's Cherenkov Radiation involved, as in many nuclear reactors- that's not green, though.
- Google have (for now) won the suit against them by Viacom regarding copyrighted content being uploaded to YouTube, which is good news for everyone except maybe Viacom. It's still fun to read choice excerpts of correspondence involving all sorts of mudslinging in the case (warning: lots of curses).
- OpenStreetMap is a neat project to create free maps, similar to Google Maps, Bing Maps, etc. Cool stuff, and all the map data is Creative Commons, meaning it could be used for any number of shiny projects.
- There might be life on Saturn's moon, Titan, observations courtesy of the NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini mission, which has been bouncing around the Saturnian system since mid-2004 after launch way back in 1997. It's far from a sure thing, but it's really exciting that predictions of how life might work on Titan have been supported by observation.
- This study (PDF) of internet routing to previously unused blocks is quite interesting, especially the numerous SIP streams pointed at 1.1.1.1 (section 5.1).
- The EFF (kind of like the ACLU of internet, if you're not familiar with them) recently put out the HTTPS Everywhere extension for Firefox. When it's this easy to lock down your web traffic, there's no reason not to. What's your excuse?
- Huge things are cool. Want to feel tiny? Go ask Wikipedia about the local supercluster, then consider how tiny everything humanity knows is, relative to that. When you're done scrabbling about in your own Total Perspective Vortex, consider epic timescales for extra kicks. Yeah.. cosmology is awesome.
- Exasecond timescales are impressive, but then there's the depressing concept of the universe's heat death. What if there were a way to reverse entropy?
- How did I not know this album exists? There are some really good mixes on it..
..and that's several weeks of accumulated cool-things. Enjoy.
Hacking life
Today (er, yesterday) was a big day for science. In the May 20th issue of Science, there was an interesting paper detailing how researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute (yup, name means nothing to me there) successfully created a life-form containing entirely artificial DNA [abstract,PDF]. This is really exciting stuff.
As the authors of the paper note, sequencing genomes is nothing new, but there's a gigantic leap between just knowing how something is made and being able to make it yourself. Although this modified strain of yeast has mostly stock genes from other yeast and just over a million base pairs, Wired Science notes that our ability to manufacture chunks of DNA has grown by around 100x in the last five years. Following such a linear pattern, we would be able to build a human genome from scratch (~3 billion base pairs) within ten years. From here, where can we go? Anywhere.
Consider what living things do in nature. Now take some of that variety and modify it a little to do something more useful. Say, design an enzyme allowing yeast to break down oil from spills and removing any other metabolic pathways. You suddenly have a bacterium which eats oil spills, then the colony dies when the oil goes away.
Sure, something like that is a ways off; we don't have anywhere the necessary knowledge of the biochemistry involved in such a thing (or do we..? I could be entirely wrong). Proteins are amazingly complex molecules, and their assembly/folding is rather poorly understood at best. However, give it a while, and we could begin to do radical things within the framework of living things. Say, custom-designed viruses to patch our genomes. Literally, life hacking.
This is simply incredible stuff, and it's the first step toward the singularity, IMHO. More thoughts on that in the coming days.
CPU Comparison Shopping
I've been slowly working towards putting together a new PC build to replace my current one, a Core 2 Duo- based system I built about three years ago, which is starting to show its age. In the interest of comparison shopping, I put together a spreadsheet and some charts looking at the newer Intel (i5/i7) and AMD (Phenom X4/X6) processors. Turns out that Intel's Core i5-750 seems to be the best deal in processors for what I'm looking for in a system at the moment.
Raw Data
Clock speeds are in MHz, TDP in Watts, and cost is price in USD at newegg as of 5/3/2010. Processors with SMT (hyperthreading) are noted in the Cores column.
| Manufacturer | Model | Cores | Clock | TDP | Cost |
| AMD | Phenom II X4 955 BE | 4 | 3200 | 125 | 159.99 |
| AMD | Phenom II X4 940 BE | 4 | 3000 | 125 | 161.99 |
| AMD | Phenom II X4 965 BE | 4 | 3400 | 125 | 180.99 |
| AMD | Phenom II X6 1090T | 6 | 3200 | 125 | 309.99 |
| Intel | Core i5-650 | 2 | 3200 | 73 | 184.99 |
| Intel | Core i5-661 | 2 | 3330 | 87 | 199.99 |
| Intel | Core i7-920 | 4 (SMT) | 2660 | 130 | 279.99 |
| Intel | Core i7-930 | 4 (SMT) | 2800 | 130 | 294.99 |
| Intel | Core i5-750 | 4 | 2660 | 95 | 199.99 |
| Intel | Core i7-860 | 4 (SMT) | 2800 | 95 | 279.99 |