Hopefully Interesting

Something I saw this last week that prompted me to think about dark silicon again was a project Ubuntu is working on, where you have a phone that is mostly a normal Android phone, but when you plug it into a computer screen and keyboard it can act as a full desktop operating system.  Since a modern smartphone is much more powerful than the desktops of ages past, and since we tend to do more and more things on far away servers, this seems like it might be a model for the future of computing.  You computer fits in your pocket and you use it as a phone most of the time, but then you plug it into some sort of dock and it becomes your desktop. But it strikes me that in a future like that you're likely to have a bunch of computational resources sitting there in your phone that only light up when the phone has access to a hefty power source.  Heat dissipation out of the phone will still be a hard limitation since there's no way you can fit a fan in a phone form factor, but th...

Pushing people off of bridges - but only to save the lives of others, of course - has long been one of the staples of debate in moral philosophy.  The original formulation of the famous Trolly Problem  is more or less "Suppose you see an out of control trolley about to run over 5 people.  Is it moral to push a fat person under the wheels if it means that only he will die instead of the 5 others."  This started out as a debate among philosophers, then became a tool for cognitive scientists to use by asking people about this topic in surveys, but often with some variation.  What if the one person is your mother?  What if you throw a switch instead of having to push the person yourself? Researchers have found out many fascinating things about how people respond to moral problems, or at least say they would respond, using this problem.  I'll plug Thinking Fast and Slow here as an excellent overview of modern cognition research in...

Recent events surrounding the Susan Komen breast cancer charity and Planned Parenthood has gotten me thinking about the idea that all publicity is good publicity. It seems to me that there are times when bad publicity can actually be bad and others where it cannot, and that this mostly has to do with the nature of the recipient rather than anything about the details of the scandal. As you might expect, Wikipedia has a long list of instances where scandal has brought people great success, and it seems that these cases have a lot in common. If your primary opponents are obscurity and apathy then the rush of attention a scandal brings can be of huge value. Even if the majority of the people who hear about you are so offended that they don't want to have anything to do with you, some wont' be and through them you'll gain from your new found notoriety. This is why some early 20th century artists explicitly tried to attract the ire of morality crusaders. The crusaders were...

For many years, the major limitations of CPU design have been about power. Back in the day, this wasn't much of a problem. Every year transistors got smaller, which meant that you needed less current to flip them from one state to another, which meant that you could flip them more frequently without doing any more (thermodynamic) work than you had done with the last generation of chips. But then something changed. Leakage current reared its ugly head. As transistors became smaller they also became less substantial. Whereas once the trickle of current that would leak through a transistor when it was off would be tiny compared to the stream it would take to shift it from off to on, as transistors became smaller they became more and more permeable. And to make it even worse, shrinking transistors meant that even if overall power usage remained the same, that power was concentrated in a smaller and smaller area. Something had to give, and it did. After the ill-fated Pentium IV...