Spelling Police
Two mistakes, a missing s and a missing capitalisation.
http://www.jhuapl.edu/
Johns Hopkins University - Applied Physics Laboratory
Critics have had half a century to pick apart and predict the end of Moore’s Law, which marked its Big Five Zero birthday this week. It’s unlikely that Gordon Earle Moore, the former electrical engineer who authored the eponymous law for a 1965 article, and who two-years later co-founded Intel, has any doubts over its value. …
I was also bemused by this:
... the number of transistors used in a typical CPU — the CPU transistor count — would double ....
Given that this is a techie site I should think most readers would be able to guess that the number of transistors used in a typical CPU is also known as "the CPU transistor count".
If reading the Daily Mail and nutritional advice from Experts on facebook has taught me anything, it's that chemicals are uniformly bad news. It's a little-known fact but the ingredients for table salt include both sodium (which explodes on contact with water and is also used by the nucular industry) and chlorine (used as a poison gas in world war one), baking soda (chemical food additive designation E500) also contains sodium, hydrogen (highly flammable and responsible for the Hindenburg disaster) and carbon (used, amongst other things, for extremely sharp industrial cutting tools).
I think putting stuff like that in the hands of a child and encouraging them to "play" with them isn't only a recipe for disaster but should also be classified as dangerous abuse.
Well more fool you. Scientists say that over 85% of cancer victims have been routinely exposed to dihydrogen monoxide* on a regular basis and as Wilseus points out, it's a key component of tumours. Perhaps I'm just a better parent than most but I bring my children up in a completely DHMO-free environment and so far not one of them has died from cancer.
* Even this term is making light of the issue and is a flagrant tool of hiding behind science-tiffic jargon to make this terrifying chemical seem less dangerous. The proper term is hydronium hydroxide or hydroxyl acid.
You could really put yourself in harms way by adding a bit of a highly inflammable and volatile liquid with the chemical formula C6H6O which is known to have serious psychoactive effects on human brains and make them do stupid things but it does guarantee that us ugly buggers get to have sex.
The brother of a dear friend of mine who has since passed away; blew the cornice of the building (of the college dorm he stayed in) completely off while making nitro and waiting for it to cool. Obviously this was back in the early 1940's or he would have been branded a criminal.
Sometimes the best scientists are just normal people who ignore the rules that were put in place by lesser men.
The brother of a dear friend of mine who has since passed away; blew the cornice of the building (of the college dorm he stayed in) completely off while making nitro and waiting for it to cool.
Damn hipster chemists, they had to be blowing up buildings with nitro before it was cool...
More correctly, it's catenating words. That is, the words are connected in a series. "Theregister" is a catenation in the url above. Some exponentially increasing technological trends conflate to form what's called "Moore's law".
Confused about "conflate"?
http://www.cjr.org/language_corner/language_corner_020915.php
It's concatenation, not catenation.
Catenation is a term in chemistry. A url is not language. Running words together as in the article and several comments is simple ineptitude (although I'll grant that a commentor may have had the intention of highlighting the writer's ineptitude).
You've done a good job of highlighting your own ineptitude with misuse of 'catenation' and not knowing 'concatenation'.
What kind of techie are you?
Catenation is also a term in linguistics. It's less frequently used than concatenation, but nevertheless you can catenate words.
Sadly the wikipedia article about the word doesn't include that definition, which is presumably why this isn't so widely known today.
And, for the record, I'm still waiting for you to back up that accusation of plagiarism you made against me. But then I've noticed something of a pattern in your posting recently. Accuse someone of something, declare yourself superior in some way and then bugger off when you're called on it.
re cat vs concat, I learned many years ago that the Unix 'cat' command was short for 'catenate' which is an obscure and/or archaic variant of 'concatenate'. Personally, I have no problem with 'catenate' as a synonym for 'concatenate' (and yes, either is probably what the OP meant instead of 'conflate').
/said in an isn't-it-interesting-that-the-thread-talks-about-both-catenation-and-proper-use-of-hyphens* kind of way
(*no doubt that's a proper word in German, but let's not get distracted)
I think it's a mistake rather than language drift. I could take a two-year sabbatical, and the hyphen is acceptable (and normal) usage there, but I'd be back to work two years later (no hyphen).
edit: I didn't see the later post by J.G.Harston that makes the same point, but uses grammar-type words.
"Moore’s idea not only predicted the development rate of computing power, it set an ambitious pace for all IC manufacturers to maintain"
And that's where its real relevance lies. Moore's Law has for a long time now been the expected rate of change that all chip designers and manufacturers have had to try and keep up with, and as such has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Imagine where we'd be now If only he'd tweaked the numbers a bit and "predicted" a tripling or quadrupling or more. Heh heh heh.
Don't you mean Crook's Law? (The crookedness of an ithing after being in one's jeans pocket will double with each iteraiton of said ithing.)
Cooks Law is a fundamental law of physics:
Sod's Law: The experimental result always turns out wrong.
Cooks Law: Raise or the denominator as required the get the expected result.
Sturgeon's Law: Remember to allow for experimental error or the result will appear fishy.
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In the days when he played with such chemicals it may have been illegal, with some consequences but if he were to do this in the UK today (I do not know about the US where I assume he was) as a youth that would be his entire future probably blighted, in the legal sense, beyond any hope of redemption.
Similarly the modern equivalent, cracking systems, seems to lead (from other comments I have read here in the past) to a very significant proportion of the IT security community vowing never to employ such a person regardless of any real talent* they might have.
Yet among many readers of this article there's probably a combination of admiration and yearning for the things he did in his youth. Certainly I would wish to be able to let my nipper do such things (within certain safety boundaries) but probably even raising the issue with his teachers to try to do so in a responsible way would get me reported for, well, something. Probably terrorism. And child abuse.
I feel it doesn't bode well for the ability of the human race to discover and incubate talent**. It's a shame really.
*Not script kiddies
** I concede that doing a "Sheldon" and building a fusion reactor in the garage might be going a bit far.
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In the 1960s the corner chemist happily sold schoolboys sulphur, potassium nitrate, strontium nitrate etc - as well as glass tubing to bend, blow, and stretch into various equipment configurations. GCE "O" Level Chemistry placed an emphasis on practical lab work.
These days it is probably impossible to buy even the ingredients for a "chemical garden" from a local source. Although I did see a kit, possibly with the Science Museum branding, in the charity shop - "unused - as new".
Yes, times have changed, and not for the better methinks. I can remember making explosives, as part of O-level chemistry practicals - working with chemials like chlorine, ammonia, (great togeather - the head always put the manufacture of chlorine and ammonia on the same bench for open days) hydrogen sulphide, phosphorus...
Chemistry WAS FUN then. A-level even more so.
MInd you, a colleage at work in the seventies did tell me that questions were asked when he was sent by his firm to the local chemist for choloform and some glass syringes and needles.
Perspex gluing for the enquiring minds out there. Chemist would not supply without a letter from the company.