From the article: "The newly formed million-processor-core ‘Spiking Neural Network Architecture’ or ‘SpiNNaker’ machine is capable of completing more than 200 million million actions per second, with each of its chips having 100 million moving parts."
I seriously think that a major reason for the lack of public scientific literacy (I get an earful of anti-evolution, anti-climate change, anti-Big-Bang crap from my conservative family) is the lack of a competent institution for communicating these truths.
Outside of scientific journals, and the occasional pop-sci bestseller, the average person has to rely on university press releases, bloggers, and magazine writers - and they generally seem to be terrible at their jobs.
> anti-evolution, anti-climate change, anti-Big-Bang crap from my conservative family
At least anecdotally, my conservative family is like this because those topics have been used in the past to attack/bludgeon their religious beliefs which leads my family to dig in their heels, double down on their beliefs, and close their minds to accepting them.
I've made a lot of progress by instead showing how those things are not only not anti-religious topics, but quite the opposite - they bring us closer to the truth of how God accomplishes what he does. Once they feel that their core beliefs are not being threatened, but merely augmented, it's much easier to accept them.
Honestly, scientific literacy does jeopardize the "personal God" concept, and in particular obviously the Christian mythology. There are still plenty of christian scientists though, some more keen on the moral teaching and community aspect of the religion, some interpret the texts as non-literal (a tiny minority I presume cling to literal texts).
I mean, I'm all for more engagement and scientific literacy, but let's not pretend there isn't some conflict here; specially for the more hardline churches -- while catholicism in particular seems happy to transition its role (into important lessons and social support) and turn dogma into allegory.
Half of the craters on the moon are named after priests. "Cells" are named for the places where monks live. The Vatican has operated scientific observatories for centuries. There's even one in Arizona that makes important discoveries to this day.
The whole science vs. religion meme is something that the internet has amplified out of proportion by latching onto fringe groups and smaller denominations and holding them up as the only kind of religion that exists, creating artificial levels conflict to justify their position.
> Half of the craters on the moon are named after priests.
Sure, religious folks often don't have a problem with simple empirical observations (I mean, the Catholic church _did_ get around to pardoning Galileo 350 years after they murdered him).
But Lord help you if you apply the scientific standards of empirical rigor or explanatory parsimony to any topics further afield. Most obviously, there isn't a shred of evidence - none whatsoever - for the existence of a divine being along the lines of what's posited by the Abrahamic religions.
So I'll bite. I'm agnostic, which means that I firmly believe that we don't have such "scientific" evidence because it's impossible to obtain. Given the existence of an Abrahamic God, He would have invented everything we call "science". By definition, He lives outside of the universe where these observable effects take place.
I'll just copy-paste another comment I apparently made 4 years ago... (Time flies I guess!)
Of a particularly relevant note here is agnosticism [1], or the viewpoint that there are certain things that are simply unknowable to humans. The implication being that humans can neither confirm NOR deny the truth value of the statements. Metaphysical statements often fall into this category. And hence, you can also have agnostic theists [2] and agnostic atheists [3], who both recognize that they are taking a stance on an unknowable truth value. Some would then define this as the very essence of the word faith, but I would like to at least point out that both sides are subject to the same definition.
> Sure, religious folks often don't have a problem with simple empirical observations (I mean, the Catholic church _did_ get around to pardoning Galileo 350 years after they murdered him).
There's a lot of people you can reasonably argue were murdered by the Catholic Church, but Galileo isn't one of them.
This isn't the place for a discussion about the details of religion, but I guess my response to this is, "So what?"
You may need evidence, but people who believe in God don't need evidence. To them, God exists whether there is evidence or not.
At one time there was no evidence that hydrogen existed, yet is was still there.
At one time there was no evidence that x-rays existed. But they were still there.
At one time there was no evidence of other galaxies or planets. But they still existed.
Something can exist without there being current scientific proof of it. That certain people can see beyond what is physically in front of them is called "faith."
My point is that an important scientific principle is that claims that are put forward without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. The burden is upon the claimant. (See Russell's Teapot).
Adopting this scientific principle basically undermines all religious thought. Why am I bringing this up? Because it underscores a deep epistemological and methodological differences between religion and science.
> At least anecdotally, my conservative family is like this because those topics have been used in the past to attack/bludgeon their religious beliefs
This bludgeoning, historically, especially in the US, has gone almost entirely outward from Christian conservatives, though inventing fantasies of attacks on the Christian community has been a key mechanism the leaders within that community have used to rally their congregation into participation in the bludgeoning; the persecution complex of the most politically, economically, and socially powerful religious group in the nation is the result.
Let's also not forget that literal billions have been spent convincing people to reject evolution, climate change. It's a lot of marketing disguised in all sorts of different ways that has completely disrupted the public's support of scientific work.
I don’t think science journalism is the reason why anti-science themes have evolved in the public mindset. Science used to be culturally important in the 50s as a way to understand truth, explore the world, improve life, and create industry. It’s since been challenged by both religion and industry via politicians for viewpoints that go against some of their desires. Politicians have since used it as a tool for dividing, reinforcing the anti-science climate. I don’t think it’s fair to blame journalists here.
Not just science journalism. I've yet to see a journalist get a story 100% right where I knew the facts personally ahead of time. If you're lucky, they've just garbled people's names...
Yeah, I've noticed the same. There's also a lot of anti-biology from my left-wing friends.
The problem is also compounded by the fact that Wikipedia discourages primary sources in favor of shoddy reporting. It makes sense to reject self published scientific articles in favor of journal-published articles. But more often than not, modern media outlets just seem like a vector for adding political bias and inaccuracies by reporting on things they don't really understand.
Can you give some examples of liberals being anti-biology? That seems so far from even the common stereotypes of liberals that I'm genuinely not sure what you're talking about.
There are some legitimate concerns there. However, given that the current Republican White House is outright censoring government science agencies on a large scale[1][2] when their results are politically inconvenient, it's pretty laughable to claim that leftists are the real science-haters.
This article was published before the 2016 election, so at the time it might have been merely naive, but I see that the author has a video from just a few months ago where he "explains that the real war on science is the one from the left." He is absolutely not arguing in good faith.
This must be that whataboutism I've been hearing about. My greater point was that political extremists all across the spectrum have the bad habit of rejecting science when it conflicts with their dogma. The problem is amplified the more they are emotionally invested in an issue. A lot of people think its just "the other guys" that are guilty of it, partly due to selection bias, and partially due to just over-scrutinizing the other side in general.
"200 million million", "actions per second" and "100 million moving parts".
Why write like this?
Either the writer is trying to dumb it down to a ridiculous level or they have no idea what they are talking about and just threw technical words together.
As a Brit, no one has made the million/milliard distinction for my entire life. 1000 million is a billion as far as anyone is concerned, a million million is a trillion. It’s just comically bad writing.
I think the writing in this article is not so good, but I've seen this usage by plenty of respectable writers. Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" is not comically bad writing, and it's full of even more outlandish usages of "million million million ..."
Maybe they are fundamentally misunderstanding what a transistor is? That number still seems low. Maybe electrons are the moving parts? (then that number would be very low.)
I'd assume that by "moving parts" they mean transistors.
Ofcourse this is somewhat confusing to people who know how computers are composed of transistors and what transistors are.
But if you just want to convey to the lay person the complexity of the component, I'd say it's a reasonable way to do it.
No, it's a terrible way to do it. It's fundamentally wrong. It's not even reasonable metaphorically. It's like trying to explain the automobile to a 17th century pirate and saying it's a horse with 4 sails.
It really depends on whether you include the memory in that count, as memory uses masses of transistors without being very interesting as most of those transistors spend their time just sitting there in a stable state. It's the transistor count (more properly, the gate count; gates can be thought of as multiple transistors fused together, yet they're truly a single thing in terms of manufacturing and layout) in the computational parts of the processor that is really interesting.
SpiNNaker is built using old ARM968 cores on an ancient process (because that was cheap, for various reasons). The SpiNNaker2 hardware (under design; I can't remember if it is next year or the one after when it is finalized) will be on a modern process that will let us pack ten times as many cores on per chip, with those cores being quite a lot more powerful. Which isn't bad; we're not a commercial outfit here…
Yes, I've switched to the HTML version permanently, and I hope others do the same. Maybe if Google sees enough people switching to HTML, they'll get an idea of how popular their new version is.
There is something to be said for having at least one 30 meter class telescope in the Northern hemisphere. There are parts of the sky which are never visible from Chile.
Your point about there being no universally recognized Native Hawaiian representative organization is a very good one. There's no group or finite set of groups, that the TMT could reach an agreement with (by providing scholarships, environmental offsets, rent, etc.) and then be free from the protests. Three people getting angry in a Hilo coffee shop can stop construction of the TMT.
I don't think this ruling changes much. The TMT project had permission to start construction 3 years ago. They could not even hold the ground-breaking ceremony, because protesters blocked the access road. Every time the TMT construction crews tried to drive up the mountain, protesters would stand in the road, and block the vehicles. A couple of hours later police would show up. They would stand around for 3ish more hours, and then arrest perhaps 5% of the people blocking the road. By the time that was done, it was too late for the construction crews to get to the summit and do any work, so everyone drove back down. The few people who were arrested were immediately released once they arrived in Hilo, so they'd be ready to do it all again the next day if the crews tried to return to the mountain. No significant fines were ever levied on the arrested protesters.
The only way the TMT construction will be able to proceed is if local law enforcement is willing to arrest dozens of protesters (including "aunties" - photogenic elderly Hawaiian women) every week day, and not release them immediately. There is absolutely no reason to believe that will happen.
Even if the local law enforcement officials are willing to perform mass arrests, there are lots of other pressure points that the protesters could attack. I would not be surprised to see the protesters shut down the University of Hawaii, which hosts the Institute for Astronomy that runs Maunakea Observatory, because that university has a very active Hawaiian Studies program.
I worked for an observatory on Maunakea when the the first set of TMT construction protests took place. The protesters were allowed to build an unpermitted shelter building, to make blocking the road more convenient for them. If they spend half a day piling rocks in the road, they can declare that it is a sacred shrine, and the road maintenance crews cannot simply remove it. Meanwhile, our observatory had to go through a formal review process with an outside board if we wanted to move a small weather station from one side of our building's roof to another side.
Actually, when I was a Fed worker, I was told that browsing porn sites was one of the very few things that could lead to immediate termination, without the usual Civil Service procedures (which take years to play out).
I believe groupthink killed those astronauts. However, I'm not really focusing this argumemt around the idea of bringing leaders at NASA up on murder charges.
Yes, many things are seemingly impossible to us at this time. They might not be to future us at another time. Future us might laugh at our impossibles like we look at the impossibles of humanity just 300 years ago.
There are things which are provably impossible. No amount of future cleverness will change that. It is, for example, impossible to find three nonzero positive integers A, B and C for which the cube of A plus the cube of B equals the cube of C.
