Hasta La Gadget!

Last August, before domestic drones had become a concern worthy of a 13-hour Senate filibuster, I found myself inside a stretch limousine with a bunch of engineering students. We were on a rural highway in eastern North Dakota, rolling past bales of hay and soybean fields, the limo’s mirrored bar set with a row of empty champagne glasses. No one paid attention to them. Instead, the student engineers were deep in a marathon conversation about flying robots.

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Every stepparent remembers the moment they finally earned their stepkids’ seal of approval. It’s a meaningful moment — as any stepparent can tell you, a stepchild’s trust can be hard won, sometimes taking years and years to gain.

On Friday, Redditor Jedi_Hog shared his shiningest moment as a stepparent — in meme form. Take a look here:

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The beginning of the baseball season is only a few days away. This is good news to all baseball fans who have made it through another off-season, and another winter. This season, like all others, is full of possibility excitement and questions. Will this be the year the Yankees finally fall apart? How can Mike Trout top his extraordinary rookie season? Are the Nationals going to be as good as they look? Somewhere in the ephemera is Miguel Cabrera still waiting for that slider? All, or most, of these questions, and many others will be answered over the next seven months or so.

Baseball is always evolving in style, rules and structure; and this year will be no different. Minor rule changes regarding pickoff moves will not be noticed by most fans. The growing trend of securing young players to long term contracts continues to make the free agent market weaker and a less viable strategy for building a winner than even a few years ago. Innovative managers are still exploring new ways to manage the bullpen; and every year new statistics are created to measure one or another aspect of player performance.

There are also some changes that do not require new rules, but that would make the game more enjoyable for fans, and in some cases, help teams win. These are changes of style, strategy or marketing, not rules. Here are four of them.

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Werewolves, vampires and zombies are figments of the imagination, right?

Not necessarily.

There are some people who are convinced or have convinced others that they are honestly vampires.

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Things got a tad hairy for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Blue Waters supercomputer when IBM halted work on it in 2011, but with funding from the National Science Foundation, the one-petaflop system is now crunching numbers 24/7. The behemoth resides within the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and is composed of 237 Cray XE6 cabinets and 32 of the XK7 variety. NVIDIA GK110 Kepler GPU accelerators line the inside of the machine and are flanked by 22,640 compute nodes, which each pack two AMD 6276 Interlagos processors clocked at 2.3 GHz or higher. At its peak performance, the rig can churn out 11.61 quadrillion calculations per second. According to the NCSA, all that horsepower earns Blue Waters the title of the most powerful supercomputer on a university campus. Now that it’s cranking away around-the-clock, it’ll be used in projects investigating everything from how viruses infect cells to weather predictions.

Filed under: Science, Alt

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Source: National Center for Supercomputing Applications