- This is fantastic. Eric Schlaepfer, a hardware engineer at Google, has built a "disintegrated circuit", making a 6502 processor (the CPU from the Apple II and also used in one of my favorite undergrad courses back when I took it) out of surface-mount transistors. It can't run at MHz clock speeds because of the stray capacitance of the traces on the circuit board, but it's still amazing. If you want a metric for modern processors, if you made a version of the processor for the iPad Air 2, it would cover 82000 m2.
- This is a bit "meta", but here is Peter Woit's recent Quick Items link. I've steered clear from the whole multiverse discussion, but wow, I find it very disturbing how much recent mass publicity has been given to an idea that is described, at best, as an extremely speculative notion. It's like having Bayesian arguments about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
- Speaking of absurdist speculative garbage, Michio Kaku in recent days has claimed that we will shortly be able to create avatars that will live after us based on uploaded memories, and that we are living in The Matrix, which proves the existence of God. How has this person become one of the well-known faces of science popularization?
- American Ninja Warrior really is a good way to illustrate some fun physics.
- Geekwrapped has highlighted this blog as one of the 20 best science blogs out there. Thanks!
Energy : Short items. Alternatif Energy
Here are a few items: