The "wilderness of New Jersey"? I mean, the Pine Barrens are unpopulated and all, but I'm not sure I'd call it "wilderness". Are they going to build it entirely out of gangster bones and toxic waste?

While others have mentioned both the Field Museum and the Museum of Science and Industry, it should be noted that they are co-located with the (also excellent) Shedd Aquarium and Adler Planetarium. Not far away is the world-class Art Institute of Chicago. Much of this is the legacy of the 1893 Chicago World Fair, and in terms of density of world-class museums, is more bang for your time and dollar that you'll get anywhere outside of Washington DC (Smithsonian, etc) and perhaps London. You can get a multi-day pass to all of these museums for anywhere from about $70/person, and it is well worth it.

Thanks to the OP and Slashdot for this. As an avid reader of Lem since the 1970s, I remember The Futurological Congress well, and if I were at home, I'd grab my copy and re-read it. For those who need a gentler introduction to Lem, try Tales of Pirx the Pilot and its sequels. However, for pure, all-out trippyness, try Memoirs Found in a Bathtub. And don't forget that Lem wrote Solaris, an SF classic, despite the two attempts at movies from it.

Saying "given software that can parallelize across many such cores" is the same as saying "then a miracle occurs".

Unless you are interested in a pretty small class of problems, the inherent parallelism of most applications continues to be somewhere in the range 2.1 to 2.5 (i.e., you can speed them up by a little over 2x with the addition of more processors). Thus, in most real-world applications, most of those cores, or vector units, or any other "supercomputer" features will go unused.

If anyone here observes a quad-core chip running any particular load anywhere close to 4x the speed of a single core should write a paper about it, because this has been the holy grail of parallel computing for going on 40 years now.

That Intel thinks this is a solution is sadly typical -- the problem is a software one, not a hardware problem, and they do not know how to solve it.