SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Can pop-sci self-help books make you smarter ?
Mind-reading, prediction and intelligence - these three books promise three superpowers. But do they make Kate Douglas a better person? SELF help. Now try to keep an open mind. This is the world's bestselling genre, with around 45,000 titles in print. What's more, it has intellectual credibility. Today's cutting-edge titles are written by respected scientists and journalists, and include a sophisticated blend of neuroscience, psychology and philosophy. It's only human to want to better oneself, if just to outsmart the competition. So we should applaud the trend to bring the latest insights from the human sciences to a wider audience. But, having read a fair few of these titles, I can't help noticing a distinct lack of personal growth. Sure, I know more about my brain, mind and behaviour, but am I a better person?
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129581.000-can-these-popsci-selfhelp-books-make-you-smarter.html
Generic Journal Entry
This is a generic journal entry posted entirely so that you can tell me I'm awesome, call me a dick, or impart useful information since SN lacks a messaging feature and I'm not giving out my email address.
A $1,499 Supercomputer on a Card?
A $1,499 supercomputer on a card? That's what I thought when reading El Reg's report of AMD's Radeon R9 295X2 graphics card which is rated at 11.5 TFlop/s(*). It is water-cooled, contains 5632 stream processors, has 8 GB of DDR5 RAM, and runs at 1018MHz.
AMD's announcement claims it's "the world's fastest, period". The $1,499 MSRP compares favorably to the $2,999 NVidia GTX Titan Z which is rated at 8 TFlop/s.
From a quick skim of the reviews (at: Hard OCP, Hot Hardware, and Tom's Hardware), it appears AMD has some work to do on its drivers to get the most out of this hardware. The twice-as-expensive NVidia Titan in many cases outperformed it (especially at lower resolutions). At higher resolutions (3840x2160 and 5760x1200) the R9 295x2 really started to shine.
For comparison, consider that this 500 watt, $1,499 card is rated better than the world's fastest supercomputer listed in the top 500 list of June 2001.
(*) Trillion FLoating-point OPerations per Second.
Accurate science fiction story list
A story idea I just submitted. I've never used the journal before, here or on the other site, and I never thought to do this with submitted stories, (in case they get rejected, I won't lose the submission).
Although at times science fiction stories need to take liberties with physical law to advance a story, there are many instances where writers remain consistent with the current understanding of physics and astronomy. Andrew Fraknoi has assembled a nice list over at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific of 270 science fiction stories that portray the science accurately. The list is nicely broken down into 40+ subtopics and is intended to be used as a teaching resource, so for example if you are teaching about neutron stars, you could include Stephen Baxter's Flux as recommended reading.
If you know a good example that isn't on the list, Fraknoi would like to hear about it.
Salient SoylentNews Links
As the SoylentNews site has gone live, I've seen several URLs posted for access to different "areas" of the site as well as to other supporting resources. I'm using this space to collect the SoylentNews links I've found, in no particular order. Some are for historical reference, others for current access/reference.
The following links may be somewhat dated or obsolete:
Alternative URLs listed here were found at the top of http://irc.sylnt.us/
- sylnt.us - wiki
- sylnt.us - forum
- sylnt.us - code
- sylnt.us - IRC Logs
- sylnt.us - Got Bugs?
- sylnt.us - Who's Who?
- sylnt.us - Leave your IRC comments here
If you are new to IRC, a good place to start is the www.irchelp.org web site!
More #Soylent IRC-related links: NOTE: issue "/msg NickServ help" to get started.
