gx – Page 3 – Random 101

How polyester bounced back

Fifty years ago, polyester seemed like a wonder fabric. It freed women from their ironing boards, and they poured into the workforce, feeling liberated in their double-knit pantsuits. Polyester held bright colors better than old-fashioned materials, making it ideal for psychedelic prints, disco attire, and sports teams clashing on color television. It was inexpensive, andContinue reading “How polyester bounced back”

The birth of Tcl

The Tcl scripting language grew out of my work on design tools for integrated circuits at the University of California at Berkeley in the early 1980’s. My students and I had written several interactive tools for IC design, such as Magic and Crystal. Each tool needed to have a command language (in those days peopleContinue reading “The birth of Tcl”

Why Is Inflammation a Dangerous Necessity?

The immune system protects us from a full spectrum of pathogens, but without balance, it can end up hurting us over time, too. The immunologist Shruti Naik explains how our defenses can turn on us. Read more…

A Plastic Bag’s 2,000-Mile Journey Shows the Messy Truth About Recycling

When the British supermarket chain Tesco Plc first started collecting plastic bags and wrappers from customers to be recycled in March 2021, Caroline Ragueneau was thrilled. She was working as a retail assistant at a Tesco store in southwest England when the first white deposit boxes appeared, promising to turn what’s typically discarded back intoContinue reading “A Plastic Bag’s 2,000-Mile Journey Shows the Messy Truth About Recycling”

Digging Up the Rich Viking History of Britain

A massive 1,100-year-old graveyard leads to a surprising new view of the Nordic legacy in Britain Cat Jarman led me through a dense tangle of forest called Heath Wood. We were in Derbyshire, close to the very heart of England. There was no path, and the forest floor was overgrown with bracken and bush. ItContinue reading “Digging Up the Rich Viking History of Britain”

The Cult of Posits

Computers are incapable of representing arbitrary real numbers exactly. This is due to two intractable facts of real numbers: Uncountably Infinite Domain: There are an infinite number of real numbers.Uncountably Infinite Precision: Some real numbers require infinite precision.Since computers use a finite number of bits, computer architects must settle on capturing a finite number ofContinue reading “The Cult of Posits”

How Elden Ring Succeeds by Ignoring 20 Years of Open-World Design

Elden Ring is the current hot topic and for today’s piece, I wanted to talk about how From Software made an excellent open-world game, by ignoring the conventional trends of the genre. If you’re one of the few people who missed the news, Elden Ring, the latest game by From Software is now out. MyContinue reading “How Elden Ring Succeeds by Ignoring 20 Years of Open-World Design”

Monitorian: Desktop tool to adjust the brightness of multiple monitors

Monitorian is a desktop tool to adjust the brightness of multiple monitors with ease. The user can change the brightness of monitors, including external ones, either individually or in unison. For the system with an ambient light sensor, the adjusted brightness can be shown along with configured one. In addition, the user can change theContinue reading “Monitorian: Desktop tool to adjust the brightness of multiple monitors”

NVIDIA Introduces Grace CPU Superchip

144 High-Performance Cores and 1 Terabyte/Second Memory; Doubles Performance and Energy-Efficiency of Server Chips NVIDIA announced its first Arm® Neoverse™-based discrete data center CPU designed for AI infrastructure and high performance computing, providing the highest performance and twice the memory bandwidth and energy-efficiency compared to today’s leading server chips. The NVIDIA Grace™ CPU Superchip comprisesContinue reading “NVIDIA Introduces Grace CPU Superchip”