Friday, November 09, 2018

Quick notes: Placebo effect, Wind damage...

  • What if the Placebo Effect Isn’t a Trick? New research is zeroing in on a biochemical basis for the placebo effect — possibly opening a Pandora’s box for Western medicine.

  • https://www.bhagavad-gita.us/bhagavad-gita-6-5/


  • Ecological imbalance from Wind Farms: In the Western Ghats, wind farms have reduced the abundance and hunting activity of predatory birds like raptors. As a result, wind turbines are creating a “predation-free environment” that is changing the behavior and even the form of creatures lower down the food chain.


  • China Telecom's Internet Traffic Misdirection: The improper routing caused some US domestic Internet communications to be diverted to mainland China before reaching their intended destination.


  • Democrats will back Trump on Trade war: “Even though Democrats and Republicans disagree on many issues, they hold exactly the same negative opinion of China.” 


  • Widebody jet: China, Russia unveil life-size model of planned widebody jet.... Question: Why is China the only country that seems to be challenging the USA for global dominance?  



  • 10 Indian workers die in Gulf every day: At least 24,570 Indian workers have died in six Gulf countries, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and UAE since 2012 till mid-2018


  • KK Mohammed ex Regional Director, ASI: Temple existed


  • Rafale deal: 36 Rafales cost 40% more than Dassault’s earlier offer




  • World University Rankings 2019: IISc, IIT Indore top Indian institutes for physical sciences. NO Indian institution finds spot in top 200 globally


  • Sai Nikhil Reddy Mettupally: Indian student’s algorithm helps in leading driver directly to empty parking spot 


  • 'Chiplets', the future of processor fabrication: Instead of printing a whole circuit on a single chip, a number of chiplets can be put together in various configurations allowing multi-die processors tailored for specific tasks such as machine learning or cloud computing.


4 comments:

san said...

Regarding China challenging US for global dominance - the Chinese are also a clear and present danger to India. Being that India can't fend off China by itself, we should be praying that China doesn't succeed in seizing global dominance. China is also Pakistan's #1 backer, so we face a pincer from the two of them.

Pagan said...

Trump tariffs, if maintained for a few years, can potentially bring China to its knees. The effects will be felt starting January. As strong as they seem, they have their vulnerabilities -- over-reliance on exports is just one of them.

BTW, Yuval Harari argues that Big Data makes Chinese model (or Soviet Union model) much more competitive against free-market economies.

san said...

Regarding chiplets - aren't these then limited by the speed of the interconnects between them?

Pagan said...

Correct.. depends on how smartly the design is partitioned. Two things to note here:

1. What they are calling 'chiplet' is a 4-core or 8-core processor, so not really that small in terms of transistor count. At 10nm or 7nm, the geonetries are small, but not transistor count.. So, they use these 'chiplets' to put together a 64-core processor or some such massive chip.

2. Interconnects are crazy fast these days -- 112 GBps will be reality soon.