Random thoughts/Off topic/Last post wins


 
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Italy’s Rumbling Supervolcano Has Half a Million Residents on Edge

Campi Flegrei, not far from ill-fated Pompeii, has had 2,500 earthquakes in the past three months, a sign of volcanic activity deep underground.
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Pozzuoli, about 8 miles west of Naples, has had more than 2,500 earthquake tremors in the past three months. So far, few have been large, but residents are on edge: They live on top of a supervolcano, a classification given to about 20 of the world’s largest volcanoes. The constant earthquakes are a sign of volcanic activity deep underground.
 
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It’s U.S. vs. China in an Increasingly Divided World Economy

Trade and investment flows settle into new patterns around two rival power centers—with major risks.
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Jungheinrich, a Hamburg, Germany-based forklift truck manufacturer with annual revenue of nearly 5 billion euros (about $5.3 billion), put China at the top of a strategic agenda it published in 2020, aiming to expand its footprint there. The company recently replaced China with the U.S. as its priority market, said its chief executive officer, Lars Brzoska.
 
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The City That Learned to Be Proud That It SUX

Sioux City, Iowa is increasingly embracing its unfortunate airport code as a community brand. ‘Sometimes you just have to make lemonade out of lemons.’
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“There has always been this chip on our shoulder because we are not Des Moines,” said David Bernstein, a Sioux City native who helped the community pivot to acceptance of SUX while serving on the airport’s board of directors. “So, we sort of own this.”
 
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The $2 Million Coal Mine That Might Hold a $37 Billion Treasure

A discovery outside Sheridan, Wyo., could be America’s first new source of rare-earth elements since 1952.
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When Atkins acquired the mine, he says he “didn’t know the difference between rare earths and rare coins.” When he got the test results, including some as recently as September, he says he was surprised and humbled: His sleepy mine contains what might be the largest so-called unconventional rare-earth deposit in the U.S., according to government researchers.

At current market prices, it could be worth around $37 billion.
 
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The Trouble With America’s Ultra-Processed Diet

Concern is rising about ultra-processed foods in American diets, and their effects on our health.
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Ultra-processed foods now make up a majority of Americans’ diets. About 58% of the calories that U.S. adults and children ages 1 and older consume in a day come from ultra-processed foods, according to an analysis of federal data collected from 2001 to 2018. Among children, the number is higher—and is growing. In 2018, children ages 2 to 19 received 67% of their daily calories from such foods, up from 61.4% in 1999, according to another analysis of federal data.
 
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New Breed of Supercomputer Aims for the Two Quintillion Mark

That’s two billion billion operations a second, enough to explore the brain and discover drugs.
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LEMONT, Ill.—Inside a vast data center on the outskirts of Chicago, the most powerful supercomputer in the world is coming to life. The machine will be able to analyze connections inside the brain and help design batteries that charge faster and last longer.
Eventually, AI programs operating on Aurora using the automated labs might be able to act like human scientists, only much faster and less constrained by human quirks, said Rick Stevens, associate laboratory director for computing, environment and life sciences at Argonne. “If you have an AI that is able to explore on its own, it will learn relationships that are unbiased,” he said. “It could learn relationships in a different way than we do.”
 
John_NJ said:
www.wsj.com

New Breed of Supercomputer Aims for the Two Quintillion Mark

That’s two billion billion operations a second, enough to explore the brain and discover drugs.
www.wsj.com www.wsj.com

LEMONT, Ill.—Inside a vast data center on the outskirts of Chicago, the most powerful supercomputer in the world is coming to life. The machine will be able to analyze connections inside the brain and help design batteries that charge faster and last longer.
Eventually, AI programs operating on Aurora using the automated labs might be able to act like human scientists, only much faster and less constrained by human quirks, said Rick Stevens, associate laboratory director for computing, environment and life sciences at Argonne. “If you have an AI that is able to explore on its own, it will learn relationships that are unbiased,” he said. “It could learn relationships in a different way than we do.”
Click to expand...
If that's the one I'm thinking of, it's been overdue long enough that it's no longer biggest/fastest/etc., it's dropped to 2nd. plae (Article is paywalled.)
 
JKalchik said:
If that's the one I'm thinking of, it's been overdue long enough that it's no longer biggest/fastest/etc., it's dropped to 2nd. plae (Article is paywalled.)
Click to expand...
The article talks about others, but says this will probably be the biggest for now-

On Monday, the Top500, a ranking of supercomputers, said tests showed Aurora, only partly functional, was already the second-most-powerful supercomputer in the world. Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Frontier, which came online last year and was the first operational exascale computer, retained its title as the world’s No. 1 computer. Aurora will likely “exceed Frontier…when finished,” the Top500 said.

There are more of these powerful machines coming soon. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is building a $600 million exascale supercomputer called El Capitan, after the famed rock formation in Yosemite National Park. It is expected to be deployed next year and could eventually exceed Aurora’s computational firepower, a spokesman for the lab said.

Tesla is spending more than $1 billion to build an exascale supercomputer called Dojo, its chief executive, Elon Musk, has said. China might have exascale machines, but it doesn’t provide them to outsiders for testing. Computer scientists in the U.K. and elsewhere are trying to produce their own exascale computers.
 
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The Trade That Backfired for America’s Biggest Wood-Pellet Exporter

Enviva made a wager to buy pellets from a customer and resell them, but then prices fell.
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A wrong-way bet on the price of wood pellets has jeopardized America’s biggest exporter of the fuel, even though demand has never been higher among the European and Asia power plants burning wood instead of coal.

Enviva said its gambit to buy pellets from a customer, and resell them for more, backfired when prices fell, and that nine-figure losses could trigger a default with its lenders by year-end.
 
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No More Dry Burgers: McDonald’s Overhauls Its Biggest Item

In the heated competition for hamburger dominance, the fast-food chain has spent seven years making over its signature offering, down to the last dehydrated onion.
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After testing the new version in Australia, McDonald’s is now bringing the results to its 13,460 locations in the U.S., the chain’s biggest market. It began with West Coast restaurants earlier this year and Midwestern stores over the summer. McDonald’s aims to have all U.S. locations onboard by early 2024.

The company has high hopes for the revamp, which applies to most of the burgers on its core menu. McDonald’s Chief Executive Chris Kempczinski said in an October investor call that its Australia operations reached an all-time high in burger market share after it implemented the Best Burger strategy there. “Great-tasting burger perceptions continue to grow,” he said.
 
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