3D computer chips

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As a schoolboy, having exhausted my enthusiasm for winding my own tuner coils for home-built crystal set radios, I embarked on my first transistor radio employing one red spot transistor – Add an Imagesomething which cost many weeks of horded pocket money. The thought of a billion transistors being compressed into a square inch would have seemed inconceivable at the time. Not so today, though.

Intel has now designed a new processor chip where transistors are smaller and use less power because of their fin shape.

From here:

Intel has unveiled its next generation of microprocessor technology, code named Ivy Bridge.

The upcoming chips will be the first to use a 22 nanometre manufacturing process, which packs transistors more densely than the current 32nm system.

Intel said it would also be using new Tri-Gate “3D” transistors, which are less power hungry.

Rival chip manufacturers including AMD and IBM are understood to be planning similar designs.

The announcement marks a significant step forward in the commercial processor industry, which is constantly striving to build more transistors onto silicon chips.

One of the main measures of its progress is the length of the transistor “gate”, measured in nanometres (1nm = 1 billionth of a meter).

A human hair is around 60,000 nm wide. Current best microchip technology features a 32nm gate.

It has been known for a long time that 22nm technology would form the next stage in the evolution of microprocessors.

However, the exact nature of Intel’s offering has been a closely guarded secret, until now.

The company expects to begin commercial production later this year.

 

Anglican Journal reports “sombre reactions to Bin Laden's death from religious leaders”

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A lot more here:

Christian leaders cautioned against applauding a death while acknowledging bin Laden’s role in killing others. “Nobody should wish to rejoice at the death of a man, but the world w ill rejoice if recent events prove to be a vehicle to reduce the level of violence and hatred in the world,” a Vatican Council of Bishops official who asked to remain anonymous told ENInews. “We pray for the soul of Osama bin Laden and for the souls of all those killed in violence, and ask God for the blessing of peace.”

It’s odd that the Anglican Church of Canada is obsessed with “doing justice”, yet it doesn’t seem to be too keen on rejoicing at this particular spot of well-deserved justice.

Surely the august organ of the Anglican Church of Canada is not biased in favour of its own parochial, culturally blinkered version of justice?

Anglicans and Lutherans join forces

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From here:

Inter-church communion the norm in future, predicts primate.

Holding aloft a spade with a bright green pointed blade, Archbishop Fred Hiltz delivered a stirring May Day sermon at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Buffalo, N.Y. The service was one of two Canada-U.S. border services, the other in Fort Erie, Ont., celebrating a decade of full communion between Anglicans and Lutherans…..

In Canada, full communion is already manifest in a number of ways. “The National Bishop [Susan Johnson] and I speak with one another every month,” said Archbishop Hiltz. “We share joint messages for Christmas and Easter and release joint statements on many issues, most recently on poverty and homelessness in Canada.”

The two churches held the first joint meeting of their respective governing councils in April and are developing a theme for the joint meeting of the National Convention and General Synod in July 2013 in Ottawa.

While interdenominational cooperation between Christian churches is a commendable endeavour, this particular excursion into ecumenical harmony has more the flavour of two waning liberal-to the-point-of no-longer-being-Christian-churches pooling their diminishing resources in an effort to stay afloat in the face of plummeting attendance and income.

Good for them: may they sink together.

 

Was killing Osama bin Laden good?

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From here:

“This is a good day for America,” U.S. President Barack Obama said Monday, a day after announcing American forces killed Osama bin Laden in a spectacular lightning raid in Pakistan.

“The world is a better place” with bin Laden dead, Obama said after a ceremony at the White House to honour members of the military.

Those sentiments were widely echoed around the world.

It may have been a good day for America, but was killing Osama: a good act; neither good nor evil, just necessary; evil but a lesser evil than leaving him alive; or just evil?

Predictably, Hamas has decided that killing Osama was wrong, so we can immediately rule that out.

Some Christians seem to be worried that the cries of “USA USA” by rejoicing Americans is a sign that this chanting Western mob is in the same league as the chanting Arab mob that exulted in the devastation of 9/11. While I myself feel little inclination to run around in the street waving my arms in the air no matter what the celebration, this comparison is facile since one mob is celebrating mass murder and the other the death of a mass murderer. Insofar as earthly justice exists at all, the killing of a mass murderer surely falls easily into the category of justice.

So I think killing bin Laden was necessary and a lesser evil than leaving him alive because it served justice. But was it good? I suspect St. Paul would say it was: “The King is God’s minister to do good. If you do evil, be afraid, for he does not wield the sword in vain. He is God’s minister, the avenger of evil deeds.” (Romans 13:3-4).

Western Christianity has become too embarrassed – too nice perhaps – to confront evil; not to confront it, though, it to be complicit in it.

So should Christians rejoice in bin Laden’s death?

I don’t see why not.

A Christian might protest at this point that Jesus tells us we must forgive those who have wronged us. And, of course we must – or, at least we must try. A person whose life has been decimated by bin Laden should, if he is a Christian, do his best to forgive him – even while recognising that he should die. One thing we cannot do, though, is forgive a person on the behalf of someone else; for most of us whose lives have been more or less untouched by bin Laden, to say we forgive him is to indulge in a sentimental, meaningless, vicarious, mealy-mouthed kind of forgiveness to which we are not entitled. It is enough for us simply to be glad he is dead.

I think Sen. Lindsey Graham’s reaction was about right: “we got the bastard.”

 

On buying a royal cow

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It takes an Anglican archbishop to bring the recent wedding event down to earth.

In this case, the Archbishop of York:

The Archbishop of York has given his backing to Prince William and Kate Middleton’s decision to live together before marriage.

The Archbishop of York backed Prince William and Kate Middleton’s decision to live together before marriage, saying that many modern couples want to “test the milk before they buy the cow”.

Dr John Sentamu argued that the royal couple’s public commitment to live their lives together today would be more important than their past.

But Anglican traditionalists criticised the Archbishop, the second most senior cleric in the Church of England, for failing to reinforce Christian teaching which prohibits sex outside marriage.

The row came as Prince William and Kate Middleton unveiled their choices for the royal wedding service, which include classically British music and hymns, and an updated choice of marriage vows in which the bride omits the word “obey”.

In a television interview, Dr Sentamu was asked whether it was appropriate for the Prince, who is in line to become head of the Church of England as King, to have been living with his bride before marriage.

He said he had conducted wedding services for “many cohabiting couples” during his time as a vicar in south London.

“We are living at a time where some people, as my daughter used to say, they want to test whether the milk is good before they buy the cow,” he said. “For some people that’s where their journeys are.

“But what is important, actually, is not to simply look at the past because they are going to be standing in the Abbey taking these wonderful vows: ‘for better for worse; for richer for poorer; in sickness and in health; till death us do part.’”

I didn’t get up at 3:00 a.m. EST to watch the royal wedding. I didn’t watch the recording of it I made for my wife. I couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for the whole grand pantomime, even though a number of people attempted to entice me with the promise that I would find the music magisterial, the pageantry exquisite and Elton John ducky.

All true, I’m sure, but I’m left pondering the dubious merits of cooing over an exaggerated aesthetic whose purpose was partly to conceal a proportional lack of substance. Will William “honour and keep” the cow he has already milked? The incentive to maintain the appearance of living in “holy matrimony” will undoubtedly be enormous: so perhaps the wedding was a fitting start.

 

No happy ending for Jack Layton

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From here:

TORONTO – What Jos Chiu remembers most is the sign. A long, red, illuminated sign with big white letters: MASSAGE. The sign was for years vertically attached to number 787 Dundas St. W.

It was a massage parlour, but no ordinary massage parlour.

It was the kind suspected by police as one of the many in the city where women were offering the “extra service” of masturbation — a place known on the street as a rub-and-tug.  It’s the same massage parlour where in January 1996 Toronto Police say they walked in on NDP Leader Jack Layton — then a Metro councillor — with his pants down — literally.  In a statement Friday night, Layton said he was there for a massage and that he was told by police he had done nothing wrong.

“It was a big vertical sign on the side of the building,” said Chiu, who has owned and operated a custom T-shirt shop across the street for over 20 years.

The question is, should anyone who is daft enough to go into a massage parlour that advertises its services on a long, red, illuminated sign and naïve enough to expect his protestations of innocence to be believed, be put in charge of running a country?

Perhaps, as his wife says, “Sixteen years ago my husband went for a massage at a massage clinic that is registered with the city of Toronto. He exercises regularly; he was and remains in great shape and he needed a massage.” Or perhaps Olivia Chow’s desire for vicarious power is sufficient to temper her outrage at her husband’s desire to graze in other pastures – publicly, at least.