DECADES!? Read and type faster, dude!

Yeah, not even close.

That’s an Elliott 405 computer. It could perform up to 500,000 instructions per second, aka FLoating-point Operations Per Second (FLOPS).

The other is a Raspberry Pi Zero which can perform 250,000,000 FLOPS, 500 times the Elliott 405.

And, the Elliott 405 cost between 140k-350k in 1957, depending on the features and configuration chosen. With inflation to 2015 dollars, that’s $1.2-2.9 million ($2.40 per 1 FLOPS)

The Raspberry Pi Zero was their new low-power, low-cost board in 2015. It only cost $5 in 2015 (50 million FLOPS per $1)

And for an extra 30 bucks ($35 total) in 2015, you could have picked up a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, which is capable of 24,000,000,000 FLOPS. That is 96 times faster than the Pi Zero, and 48,000 times faster than the Elliott 405. (~686 million FLOPS per $1)

Not an electrical or computer engineer so I can’t really speak on the limits of miniaturizing hardware in terms of physics or technological ability. But even if you can fit a full computer on a fingernail, it’s gonna be hard to have a even just a USB-C connector on a finger nail. At a certain point, there’s little reason to miniaturize computers further when they still have to interface with human usable devices. Instead of miniaturizing the board further, continuing to increase transistor density on the cpu and chips to get more compute power in the same area seems like the obvious focus for future miniaturization efforts.

Saw one going to Cheerio Street once, and it had this sort of cosmic, spacey kind of pattern printed on it. It was a Universal Cereal Bus.

This is currently me, but for a non-prod issue from another team that is not our teams problem yet needed to have an emergency call with 10 engineers on it including 3 from our team and ultimately resolved when they just retried the deployment again. During lunch too.

Computer science is not a soft science. Soft sciences are qualitative studies, often on human behavior, like psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc. Computer science is generally considered a hard science. I mean I don’t apply my degree in any sort of hard scientific manner. I went for engineering instead. But actual computer science is a formal science.

I was about to say, looks like my CS courses, apart from Thermo and Topology. I didnt actually take crypto, but it was an elective, I believe.

Where did you find the other 15?

Enterprise was not bad at all. It’s theme was bad. But the show was decent.

Another fun-ish, kinda fucked up, weird story… There’s a woman, Henrietta Lacks, who had a biopsy for her cervical cancer in January of 1951 before passing in October of that year. These cells were found to be incredibly resilient and quick to replicate. Most cells only lasted a few days before dying, but hers seemed to be functionally immortal under controlled lab conditions.

So, unbeknownst to her as consent wasnt required for such things at the time, her cancer cells were cultured and grown into large samples to be used in research. Those samples were split off and passed off to other labs. They’ve since spread around the entire world for a ton of research and commercial purposes.

They were used in the development of the polio vaccine, for example, as well as having been used in research on cancer (obviously), AIDS, the effects of radiation and toxic materials, gene mapping, etc. They are used to test safety of cosmetics as well. Approximately 11,000 patents involve these specific cancer cells.

In the 1970s, there was an incident where these cells contaminated other cell cultures, so the researchers needed DNA samples from the Henrietta’s family to differentiate her cells from the others. This is the first time anyone in her family learned that her cells had been used in research at all, let alone that her cells were being cloned and used in research and commercial product development across the entire world. It became a legal issue after this, and after a couple decades of litigation, it made it to the Supreme Court of California where they ruled that “discarded biological materials” is no longer ones property and could be commercialized freely. They continue to occasionally fight against aspects of her cells’ usage, and there are health privacy concerns for her family as well, but results have been mixed for them.

Henrietta the person died in 1951 at age 31, but her immortal cancer cells which still contain her full DNA sequence continue to live to this day, 75 years later. One source claims that as much as 50 million metric tons of tissue has been generated from these cells.

And oh the shenanigans!

It’s a cop out to put them on the Holodeck. I want the real Harlem Globetrotters to be sent from the year 2000 to the year 2377, to a random planet in the Delta Quadrant where they happen to run across them. They’re now called the Harlem Timeandspacetrotters.

It’s not like you can’t make an early-timeline modern show without making a bunch of weird conflicts, retcons, and anachronisms. Strange New Worlds is great and sticks pretty well to the canon tech, styles, and sigh Klingon physical appearance as the original canon (or Next Gen canon for the Klingons) with slick modern production, design and writing. But they wanted an early-timeline show with advanced late-Trek tech, unique species designs, and muddled in with established characters. They wanted their cake and to eat it too. It isn’t a bad show, but from the very beginning they wrote themselves into having to later recon the entire show out of the annals of Trek History or else all of the canon would make no sense.

Don’t let that cheeky squirt forget the 5% chance the message fails to arrive

The famous red wastes of Brazil.

Wolfric?

He seems to be… pro-celiac?

I ran the Wild Beyond the Witchlight campaign with some new players a couple years ago. I had one player who was painfully suspicious of all things, so he refused to wear his wings in the Witchlight carnival that marks him a valid patron of the carnival.

He managed to dodge a “Can I get your name?” trap that would have robbed him of his nobility along with his Noble background features. Not out of being wise to the trick, but just pure avoidance of anyone that seemed to want anything from him.

But then I had a lornling running away from an apparent theft. It bumped into sowpig as it booked it to the Hall of Illusions and knocked her down into some mud. She asked the suspicious player, “could I get an arm?” and he reached out and helped her up. She said “thanks” with a malicious grin and went the same direction as the lornling. He failed his check to detect what had happened, only feeling a general sense of loss. So it was a bit before he realized that she had stolen his ability to use melee weapons. Pretty rough for a Barbarian. Ooops!

But it did make for some great alternative combat situations. The fight in Bavlorna’s house where he grappled each lornling in the room that were dodging everyone else’s attacks and just yeeted them out the window to drown in the lake below was fun.

Lovecraftian horror.

Kneeanu Greaves