The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world’s most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History. The new film, created by the Museum, is part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan through May 2010.

For more information visit http://www.amnh.org

As company’s grow, they tend to suck more. We see this happen every, single, day. Yet some companies continue to innovate and do the right thing. What principles set these companies apart?

We need to study the principles that keep good companies from turning into sucky ones. Here’s an internal NetFlix document that goes a long way to identifying key elements of successful organizations. Every college student should read this before entering the workforce.

NVIDIA Tesla GPU Computing Processor Ushers In the Era of Personal Supercomputing

Sometime’s Moore’s Law is simply ignored. This is a discontinuous leap of performance for some vertical computationally-intensive markets and brings the cost/gigaflop down dramatically.

A dedicated, high performance GPU computing solution, Tesla GPU computing processor, deskside supercomputer, and GPU Computing server brings supercomputing power to any workstation or server and to standard, CPU-based server clusters.
“NVIDIA Tesla™ is going to make discovery of huge oil reserves possible through faster and more accurate interpretation of geophysical data.” —Steve Briggs, Headwave, Inc.

“NVIDIA Tesla will give us a 100-fold increase in some of our programs, and this is on desktop machines where previously we would have had to run these calculations on a cluster.” —John Stone, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

“NVIDIA Tesla has opened up completely new worlds for computational electromagnetics.” —Ryan Schneider, Acceleware

“Today’s science is no longer confined to the laboratory; scientists employ computer simulations before a single physical experiment is performed. This fundamental transition to computational methods is forging a new path for discoveries in science and engineering,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of NVIDIA. “By dramatically reducing computation times, in some cases from weeks to hours, NVIDIA Tesla represents the single most significant disruption the high-performance computing industry has seen since Cray 1′s introduction of vector processing.”

Suggested Reading:

PC Hardware Buyer’s Guide: Choosing the Perfect Components

Amazing overview of how technology permits the interlinking of minds.
How does this change who we are, and how does it change our civilization?

I’ve admired Ray’s work for many years. He continues to surprise people because his vision is consistently “beyond the horizon.” People, even scientists and technologists, tend to predict the future based on the recent past. They consistently underestimate future changes because, in any short segment, an exponential growth curve appears relatively straight. Hence, we tend to make linear projections. Ray’s vision is so dramatically exponential that he envisions a singularity–a time in the near future (our lifetime) when our artificially-evolved intelligent transhuman species bursts forth outside of the confines of earth and fills the known universe.

On August 4, 2005 in the breathtaking Tuscan Hall of his 21-acre campus, Roy H. Williams, the Wizard of Ads, introduced the thesis of Generational Cycles. According to this thesis, every 40 years our civilization oscillates between two fundamental ways of being; one characterized by Idealism (which emphasizes individuality) and one characterized by Civic duty (which emphasizes community). These great cycles permeate every aspect of civilization. Their characteristics are first adopted by the society’s youth and “trickle up” to the mainstream. In a lively multimedia presentation, Williams outlined the past 80 years with milestones from music and literature.

Williams credits discovery of the generational thesis to Strauss and Howe in their book: Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069). He presented examples from music, literature, and technology that demonstrated the distinguishing characteristics of each cycle, explaining how their onset, waxing, waning, and collapse can be recognized in the popular culture of our world.

The year 2003 closely mirrors 1923 and 1963–the previous two onsets of a new phase in the world. Watch for prosperity, growth, and incredible coming together of the people on the earth. These themes are reflected in the growing connectivity of the world via internet, cell phones and instant messaging, and the wonder of the Open Source movement that brings together talented techologists from far-flung countries.

In their book Strategy of the Dolphin: Scoring a Win in a Chaotic World Dudley Lynch and Paul Kordis describe these cycles with the terms, “sacrificial”, and “expressive”. I feel that meaning of the terms relates most closely to the notions of “service-to-self” and “service-to-others.”