cce blog

BG/L in the news

With the release of the latest TOP500 supercomputer list comes more press coverage of the project I work on (#8 on the list is down the hall). BBC gives good details about the list itself, IBM taking half of it, etc; NYTimes has an interesting article on BG/L's future as a product (perhaps I can get an employee discount?); InformationWeek on low-power designs.

All this worrying about and jockeying over TOP500 rankings reminds me of another expensive sport -- Formula One racing -- at times, but I suppose it does give us something to get excited about. Not that I'd mind being #1.

update: Just noticed this at the bottom of the NYTimes BG/L article:

The commercial market for Blue Gene/L designs will require much smaller machines. I.B.M. says it has had serious discussions with two dozen companies, which it will not name. Google is quite interested, according to one industry executive, but has price reservations.

Really, Google? Odd ...

MoveOn and movies

When did MoveOn.org go into the film marketing business?

A few weeks ago they emailed me to promote The Day After Tomorrow, that silly global-warming disaster movie that elicited too many comparisons to The Poseidon Adventure and some pretty poor reviews (my favorite: "The only truly scary thing about this doomsday popcorn flick is the momumental ineptitude of the acting, writing and directing").

What did MoveOn.org call it? "The movie the White House doesn't want you to see." They even enlisted Al Gore to help out. You've got to be kidding me -- just by loosely tying a weather-disaster grab-bag of floods, hailstorms, hurricanes, and snowstorms around a "global warming" theme, you can get activists to "grab a few friends" and go try to make Dennis Quaid's percentage points worth a little more? I still haven't seen DAT, but I did see the director's past film, Godzilla, a chilling warning about the dangers of nuclear proliferation and the importance of the test-ban treaty. I wonder why the NRDC didn't take advantage of that opportunity?

I'd imagine the White House cares very little about The Day After Tomorrow (though apparently NASA does). But this year there's been a fresh new crop of semi-mass-market lefty political documentaries, encouraged partly by the success of Bowling for Columbine. Rob Walker, in his really-great NYTimes magazine column Consumed (about, err, consumption) calls the commercial success of such films the "alienation market", but I'm a documentary junkie and am still happy to see'em. Off the top of my head, there was Super Size Me (fast food), Control Room (Al-Jazeera, Iraq, the media), The Fog of War (Vietnam, war in general, McNamara), and The Corporation (corporate personhood); still coming up is The Hunting of the President (Clinton impeachment), The Yes Men (the WTO), and of course Michael Moore's new Fahrenheit 9/11.

And now MoveOn is marketing for Michael Moore, using the same system that tracks members' phone calls to Congress to ask us all to take the pledge: "I will help make the opening weekend of 'Fahrenheit 9/11' a success by seeing the film and recruiting my friends to join me." What the hell? Of course F911 is more on-focus than DAT, but I stopped pledging allegiance to the flag in 10th grade, and I'll be damned if I do it for Michael Moore. "And to Lion's Gate Films, for which they stand, two Weinsteins, under God ..." GRR!

They're preaching to the converted, anyway -- sure, I'm going to see Fahrenheit 9/11 (and what MoveOn member isn't planning to?), but it's my $10 and I'll see it when I want. Pledging is something I do for charities, NGO's, and public radio stations, not entertainment companies. MoveOn is doing a great job with online activism, yada yada, but I didn't sign up with them to be peddled products, left-leaning (F911) or not (DAT). These movie-promotion campaigns are clearly "unsolicited commercial email" (UCE), aka spam.

mystery solved

update: the mystery bunch of green things have been identified. they are pea sprouts. munch munch.

collard greens

i cooked collard greens last night. it was very exciting.

new-flatmate ben and i strolled up to Isham Park yesterday to receive the season's first harvest of farm-fresh vegetables from the Inwood CSA. each tuesday, the CSA -- that stands for "community-supported agriculture" -- distributes "shares" of the harvest from Little Seed Gardens, near Albany, to happy Inwood city-dwellers like myself. this week's share consisted of salad greens, lettuce, bok choi, turnips, cilantro, collard greens, and a few other green things that i can't longer identify (probably should've taken notes at the pick-up site).

now that i'm thinking globally, eating locally (hee hee), i won't have guilty Fast Food Nation-inspired visions of agribiz megafarms when I eat -- instead, smiling farmers and free-range cabbage roaming the pasture. and damn tasty collard greens.

procrastinating even in moviegoing, saw the last showing of the last night of Control Room at the Film Forum. it was rockin'. now it's moved to lots more theatres so you should see it.

got a new phone finally. it's wholly unremarkable (free) except that it's a 212 number. whee

tiananmen

Today is "六四" (6/4), the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, which, as massacres go, was pretty brutal (and recent!), but is still a hush-up affair in China, as The Economist put it:

The government has tried hard to dull memories of the upheaval of 1989 and its violent suppression. Public discussion of what happened between April 15th and June 4th that year is completely taboo. Notwithstanding the supposed power of the internet to provide uncensored information, Chinese outside Beijing, and even younger residents of the capital, often appear unaware of the scale and ruthlessness of the military action that left hundreds of unarmed protesters and bystanders dead. This week's 15th anniversary of the crackdown will likely pass unnoticed by most Chinese, except in Hong Kong where thousands were expected to attend an annual candle-lit vigil on Friday.

Today's NYTimes editorial was also good (plus Kristof's):

After 15 years, China's leaders still pretend that the Tiananmen movement was a violent counterrevolutionary rebellion that endangered China's security and its future. By not acknowledging that the brutal suppression was a tragic mistake, China keeps Tiananmen an unhealed wound. ... It is time for it to honor the idealism and courage of so many Chinese citizens and tell the true story of that terrible night.

There're vigils in many cities (including NYC) today, so you ought to go to one. I ought to go also. I'm too chicken to bring the sign I want ("FUCK YOU DALU!"), though. (Don't get me wrong: I love Chinese people, just not the ones who shoot other Chinese people with dum-dum bullets.)

Alternatively, you should look at these unsettling previously unpublished Tiananmen photographs being exhibited in Flushing right now (found via VOA, HRIC).