Professor Build Budget Supercomputer

"This past winter Calvin College professor Joel Adams and then Calvin senior Tim Brom built Microwulf, a portable supercomputer with 26.25 gigaflops peak performance, that cost less than $2,500 to construct."

Microwulf has been measured to process 26.25 gigaflops, or 26.25 billion double-precision floating point instructions, per second. It achieves this performance by relying on four dual-core motherboards connected by an 8-port Gigabyt Ethernet switch. The connected components form a three-tiered system that looks like a triple-decker sandwich.

Check out the specs.

A psychoanalytic perspective on violence

Explosions of violent behavior have periodically riveted public attention. While such behavior may be associated with a major psychiatric illness, there is a continuing challenge to understand the emotional underpinnings of such behavior, the sources of aggression, hostility, anger, hate, rage, and violence. Analysts from Freud to Karl Menninger to Kernberg and Kohut have speculated as to the confluence of psychological and real forces that prompt violent outbursts. Other analysts have explored the manifestations of aggression and rage in infancy and childhood. An instance of a violent outburst is presented, and underlying factors are explored. Critical elements prompting such behavior include: (1) an individual perceives a narcissistic injury that is experienced as being profoundly unfair; (2) the individual has no hope for achieving a reasonable resolution of the injury; (3) the individual reaches the decision that the injury cannot be tolerated further and must be responded to with action; (4) the individual has access to weapons to enhance the capacity and potency to respond; and (5) the individual feels a sufficient sense of potency and/or disregard of the consequences to initiate violence.

Curcumin

The 26 beliefs that drive modern medicine and the FDA

1. All herbs are dangerous and might kill you.


2. Vitamins and dietary supplements are not only useless; they're so dangerous that they should be regulated or banned.


3. The only thing more dangerous than dietary supplements is allowing the public to have access to accurate information about dietary supplements. To maintain control, the public must be kept ignorant of the medicinal uses of all substances other than patented chemicals.


4. Most diseases are caused by pharmaceutical deficiencies and can only be treated with pharmaceutical supplementation.


5. Botanicals interfere with pharmaceuticals, not the other way around. There is no such thing as a pharmaceutical that interferes with an herb.


6. Scientific progress is measured by the degree to which man dominates nature.


7. Free speech should only be protected for drug companies, not nutritional supplement companies.


8. The 300+ synthetic chemicals now found in the blood of nearly everyone are completely harmless and have no negative health effects.


9. The FDA is incapable of making mistakes, and therefore, drug companies should be granted full immunity against consumer lawsuits surrounding the injuries and deaths caused by FDA-approved pharmaceuticals. It is impossible for an FDA-approved drug to cause the death of anyone, because the FDA is infallible.


10. There is no need to safety test chemicals used in cosmetics and personal care products because the skin doesn't absorb chemicals. Unless, of course, we're talking about transdermal drug delivery products like the anti-smoking patch, in which case the skin readily absorbs chemicals.


11. Nature cannot be trusted. All herbs must be "standardized" to be safe. And even then, they're still useless.


12. Phytochemicals only act in isolation. Scientists can understand the physiological action of plant chemicals by isolating them, synthesizing them, and testing them one by one. There is no such thing as "synergistic action" with phytochemicals.


13. The only use for plant chemicals is to serve as ideas from which drug companies can synthesize patented drugs. Phytochemicals (phytonutrients) have no inherent value and their use for preventing, treating or curing any disease should be outlawed and stripped from modern civilization's knowledge base.


14. Shamans, medicine women, herbalists, midwives and healers are all engaged in quackery based on superstition or voodoo.


15. There is no such thing as bioenergy, intuition, mind-body medicine, quantum physics or therapeutic touch. The entire universe operates only on the physical and chemical levels. There is nothing beyond those two levels yet to be discovered or explored.


16. We already know everything there is to know. No new discoveries are necessary, nor are any paradigm shifts in scientific medicine. It is important that we all reject any new ideas or beliefs that threaten our existing ideas or beliefs.


17. Drug corporations should be protected because they have the best interests of the general public in mind. The future health of the entire world depends on the research being conducted right now by drug companies.


18. Americans are lucky to pay the highest prices in the world for medication. Everyone else has to settle for "bargain" pricing, but Americans get the honor of knowing their dollars help fund the shareholder profits of the world's wealthiest corporations, all of which deserve unlimited financial riches because they are saving the world from disease.


19. Drugs from Canada are so dangerous that they cannot be allowed to be touched or swallowed by superior Americans. Canadian drugs might be suitable for exporting to third world nations, but not to America.


20. The best way to help consumers is to control them by limiting their options and minimizing their access to information that might confuse them.


21. Nutrition has no role in human health. Any talk about healing with nutrition is quackery.


22. The human body is incapable of healing itself. Health can only be enhanced through chemical or surgical intervention. Patients have no role in determine their own health outcome.


23. "Science" is whatever we say it is.


24. Anything that disagrees with our definition of science is "unscientific."


25. The "Scientific Method" is the process by which we decide what is science.


26. Conflicts of interest don't count if we all mean well.

Zinc Lowers Amyloid- Toxicity by Selectively Precipitating Aggregation Intermediates

Russian Heavy Machine Gun

This is a pretty awesome MTB video about the Russian heavy machine gun. I want one.

Cuminaldehyde

Medical Mechanica

My cousin's kid is 9 years old; he gets ten mg of Adderall XR a day. And a small cup of coffee from his loving aunt. He's mesmerized by the television as we speak. I have ear plugs in. I am in the basement.

I wonder how it is that this has come to pass? Rather, how it is that loving, if busy, parents can submit their children to the merciless will of pharmaco-allah? Does this reflect an improvement in the standard of living, or in child-care management in general? If so, why not export the revolution?

In the begining was the TV and children saw it and it was good.

Then there were the psycho-stimulants that produced pharmacologically managed childhood for when the electronic eye could not be accessed.

One wonders what is next? Maybe some sort of teddy ruxbin type animal that dispenses pills AND advice and whose face is a television? Who knows?

MedicalMecanica anyone?