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The laughing. Please. Make it stop. The pain. Ow, the pain.

Cookie Crumbs on the Net

Some interesting articles I've been running into, but remember what Ma used to say: always consider your sources...

Natural Genius? — Scientist tries to link the high intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews with the genes that cause Tay-Sachs and other genetic diseases.

The Better Educated A Woman Is, The Better She Sleeps At Night — Currently only shows evidence for Taiwanese women, but an interesting study on sex/gender differences.

More Education, More Headaches, New Study Finds — Another article on the disadvantages that come along with intelligence/education.

Von Neumann here we come! — pt.II

Here's yet another step to self-replicating robots: a self replicating robot that can create itself from raw materials. The article even mentions von Neumann and his idea of a "universal constructor".

Apple to dump PCC processor

For some inexplicable reason Apple has decided to drop IBM PPC line for Intel chips. Now I'm not sure whether that means they're just changing manufacturers or if they're entirely ditching PCC for IA32 (or whatever 64-bit family that turned into). The article seems to imply the latter, though it's not very specific. Unless the 64-bit Intel processor has finally done away with the legacy of backwards-compatibility that IA32 maintained, I can't see how the extreme dearth of registers is going to help a platform that has long been the de facto platform for graphical manipulation. Given how a number of IA32 programmers complain about only having eight general purpose registers, I don't think those used to having 32 of them will enjoy it much.

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