Every six months, Earth’s biggest supercomputers have a giant race to see which can lay claim to being the world’s fastest high-performance computing cluster. In the latest Top 500 Supercomputer Sites list unveiled Monday morning, a newly assembled cluster built with IBM hardware at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) takes the top prize. …
Continue reading “America regains the title of ‘fastest supercomputer on the planet’”
When Mexico’s long-ruling party was ousted by voters 12 years ago, giddy celebrants hailed the event as something like the fall of the Berlin Wall. For seven decades, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, had governed virtually unchallenged, aided by election trickery, a well-honed ability to buy off potential troublemakers and, when that didn’t work, …
Continue reading “The ousted authoritarian government of Mexico – PRI – may be back”
Back in 2009, NPR ran a story titled “‘Reading Rainbow’ Reaches Its Final Chapter.” At the time, that probably seemed like a reasonable headline — after all, after 26 years, the beloved TV show was going off the air, the victim of changing government funding priorities. But it looks like there’s actually a lot more …
Continue reading “Reading Rainbow turns into a startup, releases an iPad app”
“In the past year, coal plants have been facing a perfect storm of falling natural gas prices, a continued trend of high coal prices and weak demand for electricity,” Susan Tierney wrote in the report. Tierney wrote that those factors have combined to make coal a less desirable fuel source. Coal-generated electricity has been waning …
Continue reading “Coal power plants are going offline, in favor of Natural Gas plants”
A fascinating, tongue-in-cheek piece about the dynamics in relationships. Believe it or not every relationship is made up of chaos muppets are order muppets. Which one are you? Every once in a while, an idea comes along that changes the way we all look at ourselves forever. Before Descartes, nobody knew they were thinking. They …
Continue reading “What kind of muppet are you – chaos or order?”
International Surfing Day is tomorrow, Wednesday June 20, and I hope you can get in the water. If not, don’t worry because most of the events are this weekend. Still, for Wednesday, Surfrider has lined up an all-day web-a-thon, an Instagram photo contest, and a few specials for membership. One of them is for a …
Continue reading “International Surfing Day Events in Orange County”
For the first time in more than 30 years, NASA is allowing Kennedy Space Center visitors inside the Launch Control Center – where NASA directors and engineers supervised all of the 152 launches including the space shuttle and Apollo programs. The KSC Up-Close: Launch Control Center (LCC) Tour, the second in Kennedy Space Center’s special 50th …
Continue reading “A rare opportunity – NASA opens Launch Control Center to visitors”
Silicon Beach Fest is LA’s first festival organized by its tech community to celebrate LA tech, entertainment & startups with panels, keynotes, workshops, mixers, and more at a dozen venues focused in Santa Monica and Venice on June 21-23, 2012. Head to the beach on the first weekend of summer to celebrate LA’s digital innovators! …
On Twitter, Pixar storyboard artist Emma Coats has compiled nuggets of narrative wisdom she’s received working for the animation studio over the years. It’s some sage stuff, although there’s nothing here about defending yourself from your childhood toys when they inevitably come to life with murder in their hearts. A truly glaring omission. #7: Come up …
Continue reading “22 rules of storytelling – according to Pixar’s Emma Coats”