Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Cray CX1 Deskside Supercomputer



Things might have worked out differently in Jurassic Park is they had one of these babies.  The Cray CX1 is basically a 24 core Intel Xeon CPU cluster running Windows HPC with 24 gig of RAM and 4 Terrabytes of disk, combined with a Windows 7 Blade Server and Nvidia Quadro FX GPU with 240 parallel cores and 4 gigs of memory.  If that doesn't float your boat, you can skip the Xeons and go with and an all Nvidia Tesla GPU setup which spews out a whopping 4 terraflops....hold on to your butts indeed.  All this in a dorm fridge sized box sold by Dell starting at around $8k for the chassis - each blade unit will run you another $8k.

A Home Made Chicken Plucker For The Backyard Frank Perdue


This seems like something Caractacus Potts or Tim Burton would dream up. It's kindof gross, yet strangely riveting and surprisingly efficacious

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

The Pizza Boss 3000



This handy gadget combines two of my favorite things, pizza and power tools, granted not quite as awesomely as the blender and food processor attachment I am working on for my router, but it's close.
http://www.worldwidefred.com/pizzaboss3000.htm

The Lung Flute


Best of What's New 2009: Playing the Lung Flute from PopSci.com on Vimeo.


I admit, I was a bit skeptical about this device (it reminded me of ear candles), but apparently it's for real. The inventor had evidently spent 15 years working on a loud speaker system to vibrate the chest cavity at 16hz (the same frequency as the cilia lining your airways) to loosen mucus when he hit on the flute idea accidentally. The insane thing is that you can't get one until the FDA approves it for therapeutic use, and even then you will only be able to get one with a prescription. Seriously, WTF is up with that? Why does the FDA have to get involved with a $40 plastic doohickey that has the potential to make millions of folks feel better, especially during a flu pandemic. I think we would all be better served if the FDA spent their time inspecting hamburger factories instead.