Magnetic fields created using nanotechnology could make computers up to 500 times faster

Magnetic fields created using nanotechnology could make computers up to 500 times faster

Dream, dream, dream. " “We can only go so far in getting more power from silicon chips by shrinking their components – conventional technology is already reaching the physical limits of materials it uses, such as copper wiring, and its evolution will come to a halt.

“But if this research is successful, it could make computers with wireless semi-conductors a possibility within five or ten years of the end of the project. Then computers could be made anything from 200 to 500 times quicker and still be the same size."

Such a failure of imagination. When we've made transistors out of wireless signals, why not larger components? Why not a computer entirely made up of intersecting wireless signals, interacting and cancelling inside a magnetic containment field or something equally good at preventing their escape from their glass prison through refraction. Indeed, the image of a clear box using intense magnetism to trap light so it's just black appeals to me somewhy... though of course, it'd need to prevent light getting into it as well, so it would be essentially mirrored. Inside it the 3D interactions of the electromagnetic beams either projected and received by transmitters on the box walls or, further down the line, organised by the alterable interior shape...

OXM Whore

Xbox 360 - The Official Magazine

I've never done this before, but I've just noticed that a load of my reviews and previews are up online, so I'd thought I'd link to that, like the egocentric b'stard that I am. Constructive criticism and deconstructive psychoanalysis welcome.

WARNING though; it's been creatively sub-edited to fit the website, so most of it won't make sense. :) Brace for impact...

Reviews
Table Tennis
Top Spin 2
Far Cry Instincts: Predator.
Battlefield 2: Modern Combat
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Still the best game of the last five years.)
Call of Duty 2

Previews
Star Trek Legacy
Battlestations: Midway
Lord of the Rings: The Battle For Middle Earth II
Crackdown
Stranglehold
Table Tennis
Bioshock (Utopian RPG horror - can't wait...)
Rainbow Six: Vegas
Far Cry Instincts: Predator
LMA Manager 2006
Fight Night Round Three
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: Legend (attack of the colon...)
Final Fantasy XI Online (The review was also misattributed to me.)
Lost Planet
Splinter Cell: Double Agent
Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter
Mass Effect I'm off to see this in Alberta on Tuesday!
Test Drive: Unlimited
Kameo
Prey
Gears of War
Elder Scrolls IV (AGAIN!)

Phew. That's enough. There's more spread all over the intrawub, but it won't buy me immortality. Curses!

Boing Boing: Implanting a magnet in your fingertip adds a sixth sense

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Bereavement in Judaism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bereavement in Judaism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

When I went home, a few weeks ago, my mum reminded me that she wanted me to do Kaddish for her when she died. She revealed she also wants me to do Kaddish for my grandma. Kaddish is the Jewish mourning ritual, lasting a year. I knew little about it, beyond it being arduous, until I read this article. Through filial love and obligation I will be forced to do it.

To remind those of you who know me only partially, though I performed my barmitzvah at the wailing wall, though I was brought up Jewish, I protested against it from day one. When I was six or seven I was first sent to the Jewish sunday school at the Shul and declared myself an atheist to my mum on that day. She said, "you're too young to know. I'm just giving you the chance to make your own decision." I didn't believe in anything then and as I get older I get closer to a pragmatic nihilism. For eleven years I was bullied and excluded by almost everyone at the synagogue and I feel no affection for the religion and I do not forgive my mother, my apparently atheist mother, for sending me there for feelings of obligation to her mother and grandfather and those who died in the war. I felt that, by putting the wishes of the dead (gone) above my wishes, she betrayed me.

However, I need to learn this ritual as my grandmother is increasingly old and frail. The ritual consists of several stages, as far I can see. First I must tear my hair and clothes and do nothing until the body is buried (within 24 hours.) Second I must spend a week in the house "sitting shivah", praying with a minyan (ten Jewish men) every day, receiving visitors. Next the thirty-day shloshim. Any good deeds I do during shloshim go to the credit of the departed, meaning they get upgraded quarters in heaven. Apparently, I'm not allowed to shave and it's customary to coordinate a group of people in learning the mishnah (jewish oral law) completely during this time. Finally, the next eleven months I'll have to spend reciting the mourner's kaddish as part of services in a synagogue, until finally the gravestone is planted and unveiled. At that point, I'm not allowed to mourn anymore.

I am massively offended that my mother has asked me to do this. It's made me disproportionately angry, because this religion felt like such an abuse of my childhood. If she'd died, I probably wouldn't have done it, as I know her to be unreligious and she wouldn't have been around to see it. I would have mourned her in my own, non-institutionalised way. I believe that death is the end; I may be wrong, but I think it highly unlikely in the worlds of possiblities that the Jewish afterlife happens to be correct. However, now she says she wants me to do it for my grandmother, I'm obliged to learn this, as my mother will be there to see it.

Watching the ghouls go by.

So... I was sitting on the tube bakc to Ealing Broadway, and a family sat next to me. The day was tall but massively corpulent, soma-eyed with a dark blue t-shirt/tent and tight shorts. As far as I could tell, he couldn't talk. His wife was pretty much normal looking, and the two girls, apart from the standardised slut gear that appears to be the norm amongst school kids, looked normal if a little foreign. Their slack-tracksuited son slumped on the seat next to me, so far that his shoulder-blades were next to my hips and his knees stuck right across the carriage. He writhed there, rubbing his head and talking in German. His mum responded in kind. Dad sat silently. Then the two girls started speaking fluent, slightly-accented english and, after about ten minutes of puzzling, I realised they weren't German, they were... scouse. No racism intended, just tired-I couldn't understand them and the nearest language I could approximate from the glottal stops and gutteral noises was German. However, the only thing that the son said after that, which I understood, was "Mum, agh, ugh, where's Brussels?" and Mum replied... "It's in Spain."

I told this to a room full of people, who mostly laughed or tutted. Yet the only liverpudlian took massive offence and called me racist. This isn't racism; I'd be astounded at such placid (flaccid, mark?) stupidity in anyone and this family just be happened to be from liverpool.

I got off the train at the other end to find Ealing Broadway disturbed, full of policemen and ambulance men and distraught mobile-phoners. A couple of kids had jumped off a packed platform onto the line, presumably to run down it for hi-jinks. One had stumbled and fell against the live line (which they presumably didn't know about) and been electrocuted in front of the massed commuters. (Electrocuted; a word invented just to describe the damage caused by one of man's inventions. We have a thousand words for man-made death, don't we? Eskimos eat your hearts out.) There's a lot of stupidity around, isn't there?

Red Pepper | Know your enemy | Clear Channel: End of Glastonbury? Fiona Osler

Red Pepper | Know your enemy | Clear Channel: End of Glastonbury? Fiona Osler

Little brother Dov pointed out in the comments that Clear Channel aren't the nicest of companies, so I thought I'd post the link. Turns out they are quite spectacularly nasty; I hope our new chief doesn't bring their morals with her - she'll find they don't quite fit Future...

Affectionate Diary: Industry Interview - Dan Griliopoulos

Affectionate Diary: Industry Interview - Dan Griliopoulos: "Let's talk about your feud with the wonderful, fair and just Jon Hicks for a moment, if we can. We all know about your famous public spats, but when did it actually all start? And did you *really* say you wanted to **** his *** with your big ****?"

Interviewed by Leo, I mean, by Suki for no discernible purpose with no focus on the work what I do or who I am. Utterly futile, but pleasant.

Action Philosophers!

Action Philosophers!

A bit like the excellent Freud comic in Kieron's Commercial Suicide anthology mixed with those cartoon books I remember from public libraries that explained key individuals through the medium of bad drawings, this is edutainment in its finest form. I still prefer Martin Rowson's reinterpretation of Tristam Shandy (better than that awful movie by a very long way.)

Future slumps after H1 loss, CEO leaves

Future slumps after H1 loss, CEO leaves
"LONDON, June 6 (Reuters) - British magazine publisher Future Plc (FUTR.L: Quote, Profile, Research) said it swung to a first-half pretax loss on Tuesday, warned future profits would fall and said its chief executive had resigned, sending its shares tumbling 13 percent. Future, which publishes more than 150 consumer magazines such as Xbox, Total Film and Fast Car, said Chief Executive Greg Ingham was leaving with immediate effect. Ingham said he was leaving to do something different in business and 'to broaden my experience.' He will be succeeded by Stevie Spring from July 3.

The group said it was scaling back its rapid expansion plans and over the next 18 months would focus on organic growth and operational effectiveness.

'Together with lower expectations for 2006 this organic investment will depress reported profits in 2007 to a level below existing expectations,' Chairman Roger Parry said in a statement.

The group said pretax losses for the half-year to end-March were 12.1 million pounds ($22.7 million), compared with a profit of 11.1 million pounds the year before, due to a major profit shortfall in games titles.

'Future's interims for the six months ended March 2006 are actually worse than anticipated,' analysts at Bridgewell said, while maintaining an 'underweight' rating.

Spring was most recently chief executive of media company Clear Channel. Prior to that she spent sixteen years in national and international advertising company management.

Shares in Future, which have underperformed the UK media sector <.FTASX5550> by more than 50 percent in the last year, were down 13 percent at 38-1/4 pence by 0820 GMT, valuing the group at around 122 million pounds."

Yay! We're being led by someone from billboard advertising who doesn't understand or know magazines! Woo! A perfect replacement for our friendly and ebullient greg who's leaving to spend more time with the World Cup. Let's hope she's po-faced enough that the city types will think she's competent!

...

Anyone want some Future shares? Going cheap (and cheaper by the minute.) We're so ripe for a takeover, it's hilarious.

EDIT:

nei! [only five weeks left] says:
does it say HOLY CRAP
nei! [only five weeks left] says:
CAPTAIN JUMPS SHIP BEFORE RATS

Also it's 6/6/6 and this is my 777 post... creepy.

Consult Me

Consult Me
Originally uploaded by Hot Grill.

I've just started a new site, essentially plagiarising this amazing book from 1866 I found in Bakewell market "Consult Me For All You Want To Know." With information ranging from how to select meat, to cures for cancer, to explosive compounds, it's amazing. Have a read.

Sci Fi Wire -- The News Service of the Sci Fi Channel

"Cage Finds Himself In Next"

Nicholas Cage is producing and appearing in "Next", yet another Philip K. Dick adaptation, this time from the short story "The Golden Man". The story is about the government hunting down and extinguishing mutants, because of the threat they generally pose to normal people, and how they come across a silent golden man who sees the future as an extension of the present. Like most of these adaptations, they're going to feck it up, but the question is how much? Well, they're making the silent, super-evolved golden beast (a metaphor for the aryan ideal, both Indian and facist) into a speaking Nicholas Cage, he of the Roger Moore eyebrows. Huzzah!