Fact Checking 101
I always get a kick out of reading a science or technology news article written by someone who has absolutely no idea what they are talking about. It happens with surprisingly high frequency but much of the time only a person in the topic field can tell the person is blowing smoke out of his ass.
To digress a bit, I remember when I was teaching in a grade 3 class. We where doing a project on electricity and magnetism and I was looking through the teachers materials and handouts to find lesson ideas. I came across but a houndout showing the different effect of magnetism and what do I see at the bottom of the page but a picture of the moon with the caption "Magnetism keeps the moon in orbit around the earth." I think i actually had a seizure when i read this and the teacher didn't think anything of it. It's not the teachers lack of knowledge that supprised me. This is not knock against teachers, they are expected to be able to teach and be knowledgable on every subject under the sun but they can't know everything. When I was teaching history and English I certainly had to study up before i wrote my lessons that's why we have material and teaching aids. So the question we arrive at is how the hell was this crap published. Who decided that someone who obviously can't tell the difference between magnetism and gravity should be hired to write teaching science teaching manuals.
The article that got me thinking about this today was published in the EETimes which promotes itself as "Global news for the Creators of Technology." The report was about the workings of a 500 GHz processor which operated at 4.5 Kelvin. Upon seeing the use of the absolute temperature scale I was impressed but what came next made me and several of my lab mates laugh out loud.
"By comparison, 500 GHz is more than 250 times faster than today's cell phones, which typically operate at approximately 2 GHz, according to the organisations."
Now the same units are being used to describe two completely different things and i can understand how the average computer user might not know the difference. But, this is the author of an article in a tech journal that doesn't know the difference between the transmission frequency of a cell phone and processing speed. If this guy had any clue about computers what so ever he should realize there is sumthing fundamentally wrong with what he said. My AMD 64 only runs at 2.2 GHz and requires a massive heatsink/fan and draws a wopping 60 watts of power, I imagine it would be difficult to compress this into a cell phone. The modern cell phones run around 200 MHz, What he describes is the use of the 1.9GHz PCS band for radio transmission. If I knew it was that easy to get processing power from a transmitter/receiver I would have done it a long time ago. I think I'm going to go tune into the Fox so that i can get my radio grinding away at 93.3 million calculations a second, that should be enough to run Duke Nukem 3D =:>
To digress a bit, I remember when I was teaching in a grade 3 class. We where doing a project on electricity and magnetism and I was looking through the teachers materials and handouts to find lesson ideas. I came across but a houndout showing the different effect of magnetism and what do I see at the bottom of the page but a picture of the moon with the caption "Magnetism keeps the moon in orbit around the earth." I think i actually had a seizure when i read this and the teacher didn't think anything of it. It's not the teachers lack of knowledge that supprised me. This is not knock against teachers, they are expected to be able to teach and be knowledgable on every subject under the sun but they can't know everything. When I was teaching history and English I certainly had to study up before i wrote my lessons that's why we have material and teaching aids. So the question we arrive at is how the hell was this crap published. Who decided that someone who obviously can't tell the difference between magnetism and gravity should be hired to write teaching science teaching manuals.
The article that got me thinking about this today was published in the EETimes which promotes itself as "Global news for the Creators of Technology." The report was about the workings of a 500 GHz processor which operated at 4.5 Kelvin. Upon seeing the use of the absolute temperature scale I was impressed but what came next made me and several of my lab mates laugh out loud.
"By comparison, 500 GHz is more than 250 times faster than today's cell phones, which typically operate at approximately 2 GHz, according to the organisations."
Now the same units are being used to describe two completely different things and i can understand how the average computer user might not know the difference. But, this is the author of an article in a tech journal that doesn't know the difference between the transmission frequency of a cell phone and processing speed. If this guy had any clue about computers what so ever he should realize there is sumthing fundamentally wrong with what he said. My AMD 64 only runs at 2.2 GHz and requires a massive heatsink/fan and draws a wopping 60 watts of power, I imagine it would be difficult to compress this into a cell phone. The modern cell phones run around 200 MHz, What he describes is the use of the 1.9GHz PCS band for radio transmission. If I knew it was that easy to get processing power from a transmitter/receiver I would have done it a long time ago. I think I'm going to go tune into the Fox so that i can get my radio grinding away at 93.3 million calculations a second, that should be enough to run Duke Nukem 3D =:>
posted by Shawn Penson at
1:23 p.m.
2 Comments:
LOL!!! OH NOES! Someone stoled my megahurtz!!!111 Magnetism keeps the moon in orbit and magnetism keeps the earth in orbit around the sun! Newton discovered the laws of magnetism! O RLY?
By
Anonymous, at 6:43 a.m.
Finally we can unify all the forces!! Give this man a nobel prize :P
By
frank, at 10:53 p.m.
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