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Today Theresa May's letter triggering Article 50, the UK's withdrawal from the EU, was delivered to Donald Tusk. Far-right populism appears to have triumphed over post-WWII cooperation. We live in interesting times. Scotland has voted to have another independence referendum, and Northern Ireland's regional assembly is in limbo as a result of a corruption scandal and republican parties have increased their presence. The UK's days are numbered.

AP link #1
AP link #2
Fox News
The Republic

(all 4 links are the same AP story)

Dell’s 32-inch 8K UP3218K Display Now For Sale: Check Your Wallet

Overall an 8K monitor offers 33.2 megapixels of coverage, which in a 32-inch (31.5-inch) form factor gives 280 pixels per inch. 33.2 megapixels is four times that of UHD, which is 8.3 megapixels. Users wanting to play some AAA titles at 8K on this beast are going to run into walls with memory bandwidth very quickly, however eSports titles should run OK. Using some undocumented tricks, a pair of tests in our new set of gaming benchmarks for CPU reviews can render at 8K or even 16K without needing a monitor, so you might see some numbers in due course showing where we stand with GPU power on this technology. It’s worth noting that Raja Koduri, SVP of AMD’s Radeon Technology Group, has stated that VR needs 16K per-eye at 144 Hz to emulate the human experience, so we're still a way off in the display technology reaching consumer price points at least.

Oh no, that's not enough horrifying detail for me and I think I will wait for 16K.

The Unicode Consortium will adopt a new crop of emoji in June 2017.

So far, we're getting an exploding head, a face with "!@#$%&" in front of it, a vomiting face, a monocled face, an older (unemployable) adult, a woman with headscarf, a bearded man, breast-feeding, mages, fairies, vampires (you can potentially make a black vampire by adding the U+1F3FF Fitzpatrick modifier), merpeople, elves, genies, zombies, an orange heart, gloves, giraffes (pregnancy not specified), a hedgehog, a T-Rex, a steak, a fortune cookie, a flying saucer/UFO, and the flags of England, Scotland, and Wales (perhaps the Unicode Consortium is preparing for the dissolution of the United Kingdom by adding these in advance).

I'm not sure why this stuff popped up in Google News on the 22nd, since most of the glyphs have been known for months. There may be some new languages that weren't there back in August, as well as a Bitcoin sign.

Rumor: AMD Working on 16 Core/32 Thread Ryzen CPU To Take The Performance Crown In The HEDT Spectrum

AMD Announces Ryzen 5 Lineup: Hex-Core from $219, Available April 11th

$249: Ryzen 5 1600X
6/12 cores/threads
3.6/4.0 GHz base/turbo
95 W TDP

$219: Ryzen 5 1600
6/12 cores/threads
3.2/3.6 GHz base/turbo
65 W TDP

$189: Ryzen 5 1500X
4/8 cores/threads
3.5/3.7 GHz base/turbo
65 W TDP

$169: Ryzen 5 1400
4/8 cores/threads
3.2/3.4 GHz base/turbo
65 W TDP

http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0003574546

Their project is supported by a Japan Science and Technology Agency program that provides subsidies of up to ¥5 billion for promising technologies. The corporate-academic project team aims to achieve the fastest computing speed in Japan by June, which would make the computer the third-fastest in the world, and eventually claim the world’s fastest position.

The new supercomputer will be the first to be equipped with a high-capacity, low-power 3D integrated circuit (IC) developed by Keio University Prof. Tadahiro Kuroda. The team is utilizing ExaScaler’s original “liquid cooling” technology to efficiently cool down the heated computer using liquid carbon fluoride.

These technologies allowed the supercomputer to be downsized to about one meter wide by one meter long. The plan is to link and install 18 such computers at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology’s Yokohama Institute for Earth Sciences, to achieve a speed of 24 quadrillion computations per second. If successfully realized, the new supercomputer will have the highest capability in Japan and be the third-fastest computer in international speed rankings.

https://www.hpcwire.com/2017/03/14/new-japanese-supercomputing-project-targets-exascale/

MWC 2017: AGM Preparing IP68 Rated Snapdragon 835 Smartphone with 8GB DRAM

While the AGM X1 is positioned by the manufacturer as an affordable rugged phone for extreme sports and other outdoor activities, but it is definitely not a phone from the premier league. In the coming months (in mid-2017) AGM plans to introduce its X2, which will be positioned as a premium smartphone and will feature Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 835 SoC (10nm, eight new Kryo cores, Adreno 540, X16 LTE, LPDDR4X, etc.). This is along with 8 GB of DRAM, 256 GB of NAND, two cameras, a ~6000 mAh battery (there will also be the AGM X2 Pro with a 10,000 mAh battery) an omni-bearing ambient sensor and so on. Based on official images of the AGM X2 (originally published by AGM and AndroidHeadlines), it is possible that the phone has four antennae and thus supports 4x4 MIMO, one of the three features required for Gigabit LTE.

The AGM X2 will be one of the first IP68-rated Snapdragon 835-based smartphones with a rugged design. Meanwhile, for AGM, this will be a debut on the market of premium smartphones that compete against Apple’s iPhones or Samsung’s Galaxy S-series. The price of the AGM X2 is unknown, but it will likely vary significantly depending on the store and the region. For example, the AGM X1 can be bought for $260 in China or for over $480 in the U.S.

How 4Chan's Worst Trolls Pulled Off the Heist of the Century

The folks of 4Chan have, for some time now, been systematically fucking with Shia Labeouf for his "He Will Not Divide Us" art/protest project. The project first started with Labeouf setting up a webcam in New York. It was supposed to be a permanent live feed for the duration of Trumps presidency, one where people could look into the camera and chant the saying—this obviously did not end well.

[...] The non-stop bullshit surrounding his art project seemingly got to some people and it was shut down by the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, where it was located. Shia, not to be deterred, then moved the exhibit to El Rey Theater in Albuquerque in mid-February, but the fuckery continued. The live stream was spray painted and it was eventually shut down when gunshots were reported in the area.

Still though, Shia, ever the trooper, carried on. This time the HWNDU project featured a livestream of a flag waving in the air. The stream contained only the sky and the flag as not to give away its location to the trolls. 'Yes,' Labeouf must have thought, 'there is no way they're shutting this one down. I, Big-Daddy Shia, did it.'

Big-Daddy Shia would be proven wrong once again—instead of vanquishing the trolls, he started the most intense game of capture the flag ever. The trolls using only the live stream of the flag, started, I shit you not, studying the flight patterns and contrails of the airplanes passing overhead. They mapped out what they saw and took their findings to flight radars to try and pinpoint a general area. Using the knowledge gleaned from the flight patterns they found that the location was near Greeneville, Tennessee.

(Continue at the article)

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170306154230.htm

Five times a day, roughly 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide, bow, kneel, and place their foreheads to the ground in the direction of the holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, as part of the Islamic prayer ritual, the Salat. The ritual is one of the five obligatory elements of the faith set forth by the holy book, the Qur'an.

According to research at Binghamton University, State University of New York, the complex physical movements of the ritual can reduce lower back pain if performed regularly and properly.

"One way to think about the movements is that they are similar to those of yoga or physical therapy intervention exercises used to treat low back pain," said Professor and Systems Science and Industrial Engineering Department Chair Mohammad Khasawneh, who is one of the authors of "An ergonomic study of body motions during Muslim prayer using digital human modelling."

Islam: Relieving the Pain in Your Ass Adjacent to Your Rear

An ergonomic study of body motions during Muslim prayer using digital human modelling (DOI: 10.1504/IJISE.2017.10002578) (DX)