Macro/Micro : beyond the veils of negative existence

What’s that? Don’t know. Looks like mushrooms, om nom nom etc.

Apparently Moore’s Law is due to hit a wall… is already hitting a wall.

Many computer scientists have been warning for years that this time would come, that Moore’s Law would cease to be valid because of increasing technical difficulties and the expense of overcoming them. Last week at Stanford University, during a panel on the future of scaling (of which the shrinking of transistors is one example), several panelists said the end was near.

“We’re done scaling. We’ve been playing tricks since 90 nanometers,” said Brad McCredie, an I.B.M. fellow and one of the company’s leading chip designers, in a reference to the increasingly arcane techniques the industry has been using to make circuits smaller. – New York Times

So those mushroomy things are silicon nano-wires. What are they? Small wires. Magic.

There’s a lot of it about:
First-ever calculation performed on optical quantum computer chip.

(PhysOrg.com) — A primitive quantum computer that uses single particles of light (photons) whizzing through a silicon chip has performed its first mathematical calculation. This is the first time a calculation has been performed on a photonic chip and it is major step forward in the quest to realise a super-powerful quantum computer..

That’s primitive?

That’s not primitive. Eating baked-beans straight from the can with you fingers is primitive. Charging about in a thunderstorm, naked, yelling, covered in mud and attacking cars with a machete is primitive.

Being able to do quantum computing by manipulating single photons is fairly advanced I would’ve thought. I have absolutely no idea what these people are talking about – their words are just frightening sounding noises… incantations and conjurations. They’re abracabracising.

And I’m a computer programmer.

At a slightly less mind-bending scale comes this little marvel from the University of Michigan (It’s always universities doing these things. They’re up to something these people. They’re definitely up to something)

It’s a pneumatic microprocessor… (or more accurately, macroprocessor) which may (or may not) be quite useful in the emerging field of lab-on-a-chipdom… coupling with the marvelous device that turned up a couple of weeks ago

Microfluidics. Automateable experimentation. Could possibly interface with those robots that did their own experiments from earlier this year.