Adenekan Dedeke proposes that the field of computer science look into adding more laws in addition to Moore’s and Metcalfe’s Laws. One such law is Hoff’s Law of Scalability, named after Marcian Edward (Ted) Hoff Jr., an Intel engineer. The law states that the more customisable, or less standardised, a tech product is, the less potential it has to scale. Hoff convinced Intel’s then CEO to apply scalability — previously only seen in the automobile industry — to their processors, allowing them to mass-produce their products and dominate the market. Read full article here
Oddities
The Curious Case of the Ancient Brain
In 2008, archaeologists examining the University of York discovered something strange: the decapitated head of an Iron Age man and his very shrivelled but very much intact brain. How a centuries-old brain was preserved is still unknown, but research suggests that it could have been because of brain diseases like dementia. The Yorkshire man’s brain’s proteins were bunched up together, much like how dementia causes brain proteins to bunch up into plaques. This bunching up, or aggregation, could continue even after death, turning regions of the brain into hard masses. Read full article here
Merv
September 30, 2022
