Yes, I've been wondering the same thing. Transputers contained key ideas that seem to be coming around again...
But a more crucial thing might be how much heat can you handle on one chip? These guys are already at 25-125 watts, likely depending on how many cores are actually turned on. After all they're playing pretty hefty heat management tricks on current i7's and Phenom's.
http://techreport.com/articles.x/15818/2
What use are 48 cores, let alone 1000 if they're all being slowed down to 50% or whatever by heat and power juggling?

The article is way too optimistic and as expected weak on science. They start out with the old mindset of each bacterial line being completely seperate, totally missing the extensive lateral gene transfers that have spread such wonders as antibiotic resistance and the toxins that created O157...
And follow it up with assumption that knowing the code makes it so much easier to figure out how to stop or fix any problem organisms arise. We still barely understand protein folding, and then only with the help of supercomputers.
Oh, and then you add a funny thing called evolution to add random mutations...
Life is a massively parallel ongoing experiment, with the current ecological terrain/surface the result of countless battles in multiple dimensions. And we are continually making the terrain more and more fragile through the chemicals we spew and spray all about the globe with hardly a clue of their impact let alone their combinatorial influence...
Unfortunately most humans are not saints, but lazy, greedy and sometimes outright paranoid and murderous. Expecting morals and miracles to stop mistakes is foolish.

While plant names do change, some have stayed consistent over the years. However plants that are heavily used for food, medicine and flavouring tend to remain the same over time.

I have studied a bit of botany and herbal medicine and while I don't have the referred to text in front of me, I do find the comparisons a bit ludicrous.

Particular bad examples : garlic, rose bush, juniper berry, bay leaf

A particular glaring one for me is "nutgall", which presumably refers to oak galls, and were used to make ink, that drawing makes no sense to me. I think this "solution" has a bit too much selective matching.

Hi Quinkin,

Thanks for the reminder about the old inverse-square attenuation law. I'm still curious as to exactly what the distance is, ie. more precisely that "several inches". The current tiles do an admirable job of dealing with the thermal load of reentry.

What I'm mostly interested in seeing is whether there are active alternatives to deal with the thermal issues of reentry. Despite the amazing complexity of the shuttle, it's still basically a nicely shaped brick falling through the atmosphere and using simple friction to dump all that inertia. Is there a way to reduce the amount of inertial energy being converted into heat? Can it be converted into useful work? Or at least re-radiated back out so that the accumulation of heat is not so intense?

This of course also does not detract from the need to maintain a safe vehicle, and so I heartily endorse the concept of an inspection before descent in order to avoid gaping holes in the body of the spacecraft causing problems upon reentry.

It would seem that there are several forms in which the energy might be received, thermal, acoustic(vibrational), or electromagnetic. Can any of them be converted efficiently enough to be converted and used or exported? What threshold of reduced energy would be needed to usefully increase the safety margin of re-entry? Could the energy be used to increase the effective drag of the craft while not increasing the thermal load? Ie. slow it down faster by perhaps increasing the size of the shockwave, or firing a plasma rocket out the front(vectorwise) of the shuttle?

There is the XPrize - http://www.xprize.org/press/release_006.html for lifting craft into space, perhaps there needs to be more focus on a safer way to return...