Numlock News: May 7, 2024 • Broods, Blades, Black Lotus

May 07, 2024

Supercomputing

The U.S. government’s Cheyenne supercomputer auction has ended, with all 313 TB of ram and 8,064 Intel processors selling for $480,085 after attracting 27 bidders. The 32 petabytes of storage were not included, but given the current prices for the materials you’re still talking a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of parts alone, provided you don’t immediately flood the market with eight thousand processors. Mostly used for weather and climate studies, the 5.34-petaflop system originally cost somewhere in the ballpark of $25 million to $35 million upon construction, with the replacement — an HP machine called Derecho — costing $35 million to $40 million.

Dallin Grimm, Tom’s Hardware

Black Lotus

An Alpha Edition Black Lotus Magic: The Gathering card sold for $3 million in a private sale between Pristine Collectables and an unnamed buyer. This is fascinating news for a couple reasons. First, the card is the only existing copy graded CGC Pristine 10, and second, it completely shatters the top price paid for any such card. The top price at auction for a Black Lotus was a signed artist proof which went for $615,000 a year ago, the top price for any single Magic: The Gathering card was the Post Malone $2 million acquisition of the The One Ring 001/001 card in 2023, and the top price for any card certified by CGC cards is a Mickey Mantle rookie card that sold for $1,253,185.

Jeffrey Dohm-Sanchez, ICv2

Blades

Starting in 2017, Global Fiberglass Solutions began temporarily storing thousands of discarded wind turbine blades at a site in Sweetwater, Texas, ahead of plans to grind them up and make them into palettes or railroad ties. General Electric has paid GFS $16.9 million to recycle about 5,000 blades, which the company went on to pile up in Sweetwater and also at a site in Iowa. Well, last September GE sued them, claiming that the company took the money, the blades, and then shut down. While the blades in Texas languish — the state fined them $10,255 and gave them a year to obtain a permit, a fine which was not paid and a permit which was not obtained until weeks after the deadline, and which was eventually rejected — Iowa has made quick work out of their thousand blades, having the state investigate, determine that GFS never owned the blades, and find another company to recycle them into decking, ceiling tiles and cupholders.

Russell Gold, Texas Monthly

Calculators

Scientific calculators are still very much in demand despite the rising availability in personal computers in many parts of the world, with Casio Computer shipping 23 million of the calculators in the 2022 fiscal year. The vast majority — 90 percent — shipped abroad, particularly to students in developing regions that lack access to the computing power many rich countries have. Despite the ascent in mobile phones and other tech, Casio is in fact projecting an increase in demand, and is pushing for a 19 percent increase in sales by 2025 to 27.3 million graphing calculators. Finally, people all over the world will take these tools to learn to speak that universal language, the algebraic music of the spheres, and overcome the problems, the constants and variables of the world itself: I refer of course to graphing calculator games Jezzball, Lunar Lander, Fast Tunnel and Galaxian, naturally.

Miu Koyama, Nikkei Asia

TVA

The government would like power companies to increase the amount of power generated from nuclear energy, which does not emit carbon and would go a long way in accommodating electricity needs while remaining on target for climate goals. The problem is that it’s not particularly easy to convince a power company to do that. The good news is, the government in fact owns a power company, the Tennessee Valley Authority, which sells power to 153 distributors, serves 10 million people, and owns seven nuclear reactors that provide around 43 percent of its electricity. The TVA would, as a matter of fact, love to build more nuclear energy, but there’s a liquidity hitch. In the 1970s, the government set the overall debt limit for the TVA at $30 billion. Lots of stuff has happened since then, and if it rose with inflation that debt limit today should be $137 billion, but it doesn’t, so it’s not, and it’s still $30 billion. That’s a bit of a handcuff when it comes to making long-term investments in infrastructure — two new Westinghouse AP-1000 reactors in Georgia cost $35 billion, for perspective — but it’s one that Congress can address.

Alexander C. Kaufman, HuffPost

Wild Dogs Cry Out In The Night

A 2019 study argued that two muscles in the eyebrows of dogs only developed during the era when they were domesticated, an evolutionary advantage that was contended to mean that the muscles responsible for “puppy-dog eyes” only emerged when the ancestors of dogs were trying to suck up to their new human companions. However, a new study casts doubt on that, finding that the undomesticated rare African wild dog does in fact possess both a levator anguli oculi medalis as well as a retractor anguli oculi lateralis, the two muscles in question, and therefore can create puppy-dog eyes. Their absence from the original study, which compared domestic dogs with wolves, can be partially attributed to their rarity, with just around 8,000 existing in the wild, down by half from 1997 to 2012. This then provokes the eternal question, if there’s a good boy in the forest and nobody is around to see their cute widdle eyes, does it yes you are, yes you are?

Gillian Dohrn, Nature Magazine

Cicada

While the emergence of cicada broods XIX and XIII will be somewhat brief, we’ll be feeling the reverberations of it ecologically for years to come. We are talking a lot of bugs here: During the swarms, a single acre of land can have over 1 million cicadas on it, which comes out to about 2,700 pounds of cicada in the aggregate. All of them are doomed, in one way or another, and that biomass will almost certainly lead to a substantial increase in the populations of birds that eat them — over 80 species, for what it’s worth — causing a population bump that will manifest across ecological generations, as that bumper crop of birds and rodents leads to a phenomenal year for the things that eat them, and so on and so on. It’s also a great year to be a caterpillar, as all the birds will be so gorged on cicada that they can’t eat all the caterpillars they ordinarily would.

Benji Jones, Vox

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