Odds n’ Ends (15)

Technut News (link here) has some very interesting news recently. Here are some of their recent stories:

1). Create a Brain Using a Silicon Chip - An international team of scientists in Europe has created a silicon chip designed to function like a human brain. With 200,000 neurons linked up by 50 million synaptic connections, the chip is able to mimic the brain's ability to learn more closely than any other machine.

Although the chip has a fraction of the number of neurons or connections found in a brain, its design allows it to be scaled up, says Karlheinz Meier, a physicist at Heidelberg University, in Germany, who has coordinated the Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States project, or FACETS.

The hope is that recreating the structure of the brain in computer form may help to further our understanding of how to develop massively parallel, powerful new computers, says Meier…

Tom's Comment: OK, this computer chip simulating a human brain has 200,000 neurons linked up by 50 million synaptic connections, and this is "only" a fraction of what the human brain actually contains. When the brain is so obviously designed, that even the best minds of today can only do a small partial design of it, isn't this telling us something? The human brain continues to be a slam-dunk example of a Higher Mind designing and having been Created, with the naturalists only response being Darwinism's mechanism of unguided mutation? Game, Set, Match, to Intelligent Design;

2.) Personal Supercomputer is Coming! Within the next three to four years, most PC users will see their machines morph into personal supercomputers. This change will be enabled by the emergence of multicore CPUs and, perhaps more importantly, the arrival of massively parallel cores in the graphical processing units.

In fact, ATI (a division of Advanced Micro Devices) and Nvidia are already offering multiple programmable cores in their high-end discreet graphics processing platforms. These cores can be programmed to do many parallel processing tasks, resulting in dramatically better display features and functions for video, especially for gaming. But these platforms currently come at a hefty price and often require significant amounts of power, making them impractical in many laptop designs.

But preliminary steps are being taken to make these high-end multicore and programmable components available to virtually any machine…

3.) Engineers Make Quantum Leap in Developing Faster Computers. The researchers have created components that could one day be used to develop quantum computers - devices based on molecular scale technology instead of silicon chips and which would be much faster than conventional computers.

The study, by scientists at the Universities of Manchester and Edinburgh and published in the journal Nature, was funded by the European Commission.

Scientists have achieved the breakthrough by combining tiny magnets with molecular machines that can shuttle between two locations without the use of external force. These manoeuvrable magnets could one day be used as the basic component in quantum computers.

 

And from Gene Veith's blog, he asks the following:

4.) Is President Obama's 'New Foundation' built on rock or sand? More in our ongoing series on the language of the new administration. . . .FDR had the New Deal. JFK had the New Frontier. Now President Obama has a phrase for his economic program: The New Foundation. The metaphor raises the question: Is this new foundation being built on a rock or on sand?

My wishes that you enjoy this beautiful weather in Minnesota. I pray that the Lord bless you with blessed friendships, more laughter and the Lord's joy in being a new creation, and peace that only comes from the Prince of Peace, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen.