Here in Sweden Midsummers eve, traditionally celebrated on summer solstice but moved around a few days here and there due to religion and politics through the years, is one of the most celebrated holidays, probably second only to Christmas. It was even a candidate to become the country's National day, but it wasn't suitable since it occurs at a different date every year.

How can there even be an "age old efficiency problem related to the power amplifier in smartphones"? Sounds like an oxymoron to be. Or maybe it's just me getting age old.

The seismic history according to the Nature article is that similar events likely happened in 1461 and 1703. What sane person, scientist or otherwise, would not draw the conclusion that such an event is extremely unlikely and thus that there is essentially no danger. Sure that doesn't mean absolutely no danger, but you can't just come with 20/20 hindsight and say that because it happened, it was likely to happen.

I think the problem with complex numbers is the name, imaginary. It makes them sound like fantasy numbers which doesn't really exist, they are after all the "opposite of real numbers". At some point in history however, negative numbers must have felt equally strange. You can't have "minus five" apples in your hand, such a thing just doesn't exist. But today most people have no problem to understand that negative numbers are a useful tool to describe things in our life and universe, such as the difference between how many apples I have now compared to before or to describe the distance I have traveled when I'm moving backwards with respect to some reference frame.

Yet, when it comes to complex numbers, people (including me) seem to have a hard time to do the same, to realize that they are simply a useful mathematical tools to describe different things that happen in the real world. That they are just as real or imaginary as any other analytical tool we use.

Did you read another article than the one I read? This is an honest question.

1. The article in fact mention that the new technique is not applicable for life or death situation where a high radiation dose is acceptable. But rather for routine tests where it is important to limit the dose.
2. Article doesn't mention different generations of CT
3. No price is mentioned that I can see. I've search for "1.5", "million", neither words are used anyway
4. No mention of linux

Maybe the link have changed from an earlier version. The article is intel.com so I assume that it's main purpose was PR, but still I thought it was pretty ok and it was clear on the improvement that was made (computation time was reduced by a factor of 100).

I did some opencl in python with PyOpenCL recently (http://mathema.tician.de/software/pyopencl). I found it very very easy to get going with. You simply prepare all your data in high level, friendly python and then you fire it off to the graphics card and wait for the result. Sure the OpenCL part is written in a language most resembling C but there is no need not to use a better tool for your non-computational parts.

Doesn't sound that far away from kjol which is the Swedish word for, guess what: skirt

Maybe I'm different from other Facebook users then, sure I have some people on my friends list that I only met once at a party and now don't even remember who they are. But in real life there are so many more people that I know casually and would say I'm "connected to" that I am not friends with on Facebook, such as: my hair dresser, my dentist, my boss, other colleagues, all the people I ever went to school with (of whom I've probably befriended less than 25% on Facebook) all the teachers I ever had, my neighbours, distant relatives, my siblings friends etc etc.

So I think if we included everyone we know in real life the degree of separation would probably go down, not up.

Not to feed the anonymous troll but this got me curious to do some research since I remember reading of Dennis Ritchies passing first here on Slashdot and later on other news sources. A search for "Ritchie" on Slashdot shows that the story of his passing was posted Thursday Oct 13. The initial Google+ post that the story linked to states that he passed away during the weekend, so up to four days earlier, could this troll actually be correct?

Going on to Google News I can't find any reports of his death before Oct 12. It lists only three sources on Oct 12 (although when clicking two of them they actually come up as Oct 13) and a large amount of sources from Oct 13 or later. In fact Wikipedia claims he passed away on the 12th, the source of that is possibly a New York Times article from Oct 13 which claims he was found dead in his home on the Wednesday. So aside from the difficult part of finding out when he actually died it is very obvious that Slashdot was not several days "after reports in mainstream". Instead it seems like 4 days before the Slashdot post either only his closest family knew of his death or he was even still alive.

What would joogle know about that?

I'm not sure I understand your criticism completely but please not that it is not a normal memory they put on the chip but a "quantum memory" that can actually store the state of a qubit.

Finally I can build that large hydron collider I always wanted.