Sci/Tech

Have you ever been overwhelmed by a restaurant menu with far too many options? The Cheesecake Factory is notorious for this — they hand out a Bible-sized booklet of different dishes you can choose from. Most of us feel a little lost examining these menu treatises. How can we possibly decide on what to eat when there are so many options?

There's a faction of behavioral economists who think that too much choice is a bad thing; we, as humans, don't know how to optimize our choices when presented with more than six or seven options. Are they right?

A few months ago for a conference put on by the Wosk Center for Dialogue at the Simon Fraser University in Canada, I was asked the questions: How is sustainable development different from conventional economic development?…and, What are we trying to sustain? The same questions came up again yesterday regarding financial policy initiatives to create “sustainability”.

This is a confusing time, with the US in gridlock, the Great Recession rolling on, killer tornadoes and forest fires dealing a bitter dose of climate change, post-Bin Laden terrorism possibly spreading to Yemen and other failed states, and more surprises sure to come.

Today TOP500 released their latest rankings, which put Japan's K Computer in the number one spot with 8.162 petaflops, a jump of more than three times the performance of the now number two Tianhe-1A. How was such a sharp increase realized and what does it mean for supercomputing in the future?

About three months ago, I embarked on a less-than-epic, although very entertaining, quest to confirm or deny the famous Six Degrees of Separation experiment, originally conducted by Stanley Milgrim. My goal was to send out letters, as in the original experiment, and have those recipients do their best to get those letters to a named someone in Boston. Each link in the chain would write down their name on the letter, and, by the end, we’d have a list of how many people the letter went through to get to that final person.

Well, it’s time to report out on that experiment. Get ready to have your mind blown.

Not one letter made it to my contact in Boston.

Why did this happen?

The popular revolts erupting in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and other Arabic nations surprised us, but they are another reminder that bold change is always a shock. Think of the similar changes that also shocked us when the USSR imploded, when women gained power, when the environment turned sacred, when blacks became accepted, and gays were liberated.

Since I have a little background in gaming folks are always asking me, "How do I get in?"

Which is usually followed by, "Is it worth it?"

First of all, it is. Definitely.

It's all that you think it is and more. The best part being that all your colleagues are huge fans so it's like one big gaming fest.