IBM Electronic-Photonic Chip

(ExtremeTech) – Sebastian Anthony:

IBM has become the first company to integrate electrical and optical components on the same chip, using a standard 90nm semiconductor process. These integrated, monolithic chips will allow for cheap chip-to-chip and computer-to-computer interconnects that are thousands of times faster than current state-of-the-art copper and optical networks. Where current interconnects are generally measured in gigabits per second, IBM’s new chip is already capable of shuttling data around at terabits per second, and should scale to peta- and exabit speeds. …

extremetech…142881

Silicon Integrated Nanophotonics

(IBM Research) – The technology is capable of feeding a number of parallel optical data streams into a single fiber by utilizing compact on-chip wavelength-division multiplexing devices. The ability to multiplex large data streams at high data rates will allow future scaling of optical communications capable of delivering terabytes of data between distant parts of computer systems. …

ibm…project…id=2757

Bible Contradictions and the Titanic

(FTB::NonStampCollector) – Mark’s gospel was written probably in the 70s CE, and was the first. Matthew’s most probably came next, and Luke’s in the 90s. John’s not until the 2nd century.

So let’s put that on a Titanic time-frame. That would have the first written account (the first to survive long, anyway) of the Titanic’s sinking coming out in the 1950s. It would need to be written by people who weren’t there, who didn’t see it happen, and who were getting their ‘facts’ from 40-50 years of word of mouth. Different versions, claiming to be authoritative, would still be emerging in the 1980s. …

nonstampcollector/2012/11/08/bible-contradictions

Bible Contradictions Quiz Show

(FTB::NonStampCollector) – One after another, believers in an inerrant bible claim that I have thoroughly misinterpreted the text or taken every example out of a context in which it would naturally make perfect sense in harmony with all other bible verses, and that they can explain away every single ‘so-called-contradiction’ I included in the script. …

“A person wrote it down wrong” is not, in any context, an unlikely eventuality. It is attested by centuries of biblical scholarship; it is nothing new. It explains everything, and leaves nothing to be explained. There is simply no better explanation for the texts to be in the state they’re in, in these cases; yet not even the most liberal Christians are entirely comfortable going there. We all know why – only the non-believers are happy to go where that fact inevitably leads: These texts, and the errors that fill them, are the products of exclusively, and entirely, human minds. [shudder] …

Billionaires Warn

(The New Yorker::The Borowitz Report) – Andy Borowitz:

Introducing a new wrinkle into the already fraught fiscal cliff showdown, a consortium of billionaires today warned that if their taxes are raised they will no longer have enough money to buy politicians.

The group, led by casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, commissioned a new study showing that the cost of an average politician has soared exponentially over the past decade. …

borowitzreport/2012/12/billionaires-warn