Podcast #151 6/9/2008
Interview with Jon Blumenfeld
News Items: NPR Psychics, Mars Lander Update, Petaflop Supercomputers, Optical Illusions
Your Questions and E-mails: Casey Predictions
Science or Fiction

It was a HHGTTG reference.

Grats, Febo WINZ !

"The Great Hyperlobic Omni-Cognate Neutron Wrangler," said Deep Thought, thoroughly rolling the r's, "could talk all four legs off an Arcturan Mega-Donkey -- but only I could persuade it to go for a walk afterward."

A Hitchhiker's reference AND a Caddyshack reference in the same news story.
Good job, guys.

I've never really enjoyed sites like thescambaiter.com because I find it hard to believe that the actual scammers are the ones suffering.  It strikes me as easier for the scammer to simply grab any schmuck off the street and bribe or otherwise coerce him into getting a tattoo, wearing clothespins, or performing some other dangerous or humiliating act for the camera.

I wouldn't want to risk encouraging the deception or abuse of innocent bystanders.

But jhs, you'll often find scammers baited numerous times in different scams. They can not possibly have grabbed some random person from the street if the same person shows up in the photos various times. Perhaps they keep forcing the same person, but to me it seems more likely that the person in the pictures is at least partially in on it.

Anyway, it's not just the tattoos and silly pictures. Some scambaits get the scammers to send them wood carvings, money, paintings and various other items. I'm pretty sure the scammers pay for those.

  Hey Can't download episode 151 either in iTunes or directly from the web page!

Is it just me? Or is the server haunted? Or is it an elaborate conspiracy to prevent  us from hearing the Skeptics' Guide? Or have aliens taken over the internet?

What else could it be?

Mine worked fine, although I'm part of the conspiracy. Good show. Always had the idea the financial folks were full of bs.

great show, as always.  it's good to hear from skeptical economists 8D

also: i completely back jay's right to say the quote how he wants.  viva la revolución!

Hey guys....

Mars stuff was sticky....

http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200806131

Oh by the way what Jay said about the xbox 360 and PS3 having far better graphics than any PC is so wrong it's painful. The Ati graphics chip set in the xbox 360 is r500 based (AMD/ATi has been shipping the r700 chips for moths now). The Nvidia GPU chip set on the PS3 is essentially the 7800GTX, G71 chip (Nvidia is has for months now been shipping it's 9xxx sires GPU card, G9x chips.).

Some links, or just google what I'm talking about...

http://www.gamersreports.com/news/708/ati-says-ps3-is-unrefined/
http://www.gamersreports.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=3942
http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2005/11/04/g71-is-the-playstation-3-rsx-chip    

I love the show but it just bugs me when you guys get wrong stuff I know about, oh and that video technology applied to super computers you where talking about in conjunction with stranded opteron CPU is just using many high end consumer graphics cards as high bandwidth stream processors which has been around for years now. AMD/ATi calls their multi GPU technology cross fire and Nvidia calls their version SLI. Both compilers compilers to write and execute code on their GPU to be used as stream processors. IBM's cell chip is just the newest version of their Power PC architecture.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_get.html
http://ati.amd.com/technology/streamcomputing/index.html < specifically what this super computer was using.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_microprocessor Some info on the cell architecture which is really just get newest incarnation of the old power architecture.

Again I think what you guys do is awesome, but sometimes you get some tech stuff wrong and that's my area. Or in the case of the super computer reporting just a natural progress of old technology finally coming together and plain of transistor density increasing .      

yeah i noticed jays error, he must have a really crap PC : )

and now hes unknowingly become embroiled in the consoles vs PC's war!

It's just so ridiculous to here someone say that because all of the most graphically intense and cutting edge game engines (id tech 5 by ID, unreal engine 3 buy epic, and CryEngine2 by Crytek) Are all developed on PC's then ported to the consoles. Often with huge memory restrictions on map texture sizes, the PS3 only having 256 MB of system RAM and the Xbox 360 only having 512 MB of RAM with a slower bus speed than the PS3 system RAM.

http://skepchick.org/skepticsguide/index.php/topic,11337.0.html
It is on.

Since we were talking about processing power it's not even an argument. It's measurable, and current gaming PC's are far more powerful.