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Increasing Inequality
Inequality is increasing in the U.S. The real income of the bottom 20% is stagnant or even decreasing. The real income of the top 1% is skyrocketing. The effect is that the difference between the rich and the poor is getting steadily larger. Is this bad? Extreme disparities of wealth is common in third world…
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Hyperthreaded Memory
One thing I didn’t really touch on in my earlier notes on multi-threaded programming is memory. As processors become increasing hyperthreaded and multicored, access to shared memory becomes the bottleneck. The obvious recourse of processor designers will be to break the sharing: each processor will have its own memory. We already see this in the…
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Gone Baby Gone
I grew up just outside of Boston. Boston is one of few places in the U.S. where people are from a very definite area, and you can hear it in their accent. New York may be like that too–certainly there are distinctive patterns of speech in Brooklyn and Queens–and not doubt a few places in…
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Future Fishwrap
I still read a daily newspaper, but we all know that newspapers are in decline. Their circulations are dropping slowly but steadily. I haven’t seen any data on the average age of newspaper readers, but I’m sure it must be increasing. Over time newspapers will have fewer and fewer readers. As technology advances, they will…
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All the Myriad Ways
Larry Niven’s classic science fiction short story “All the Myriad Ways” points out a problem with the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics: if there is no collapse of the quantum wave function, then all possibilities actually happen. That would seem to imply that we make all possible personal choices, including the really bad ones. This…