THE JO-TEL …believes some of what Nathaniel and John say, but believes England is still our sovreign

Sunday reading, Tuesday reading WHO GIVES A SHIT!!! Oh man, though, are you not going to get any work done today. No Sunday Reading last week since I was busy at Fle's bachelor party definitely NOT around any strippers … no strippers whatsoever … especially not two. Ew, though. But the Network really came though this week with a shit-ton of fascinating articles. So, since I haven't been funny in almost two weeks now, I'm going to just jump right in. First, nerd alert. IBM announces world's most powerful supercomputer. 3 petaflops per second! That's 3000 teraflops, son! What??!? The current most powerful can only do 360 teraflops. Weak. Fucking weak, dude. 360? [fart] Here's the problem with supercomputers. 3 petaflops means nothing to me. Even if you tell me it's x to the y times more powerful than my laptop, that also doesn't mean anything because all I can really imagine is like, my programs opening really fast. Of you you tell me my hard drive will be 1 terabyte, all I think is, Man, it will really suck when Hilary kicks that over and I lose a million times more music. So what is the giant supercomputer going to do? Simulate nuclear weapons. Natch. I bet Kasparov just breathed a big sigh of relief. Also, after you read that, or even if you didn't read that because I basically told you what was up, but read this: Using atoms to store single bits of info. Here's the lead:

UK science fiction writer Charles Stross, author of novels Accelerando and Singularity Sky, posits a future in which all human experience is record on devices the size of a grain of sand.

Come on. Accelerando? Read that shit. Next, bad news for cool dudes everywhere, the government has finally caught wind that there's an awesome drug out there that's still legal. And it's really awesome: Salvia. Unlike some other substances, I can talk about doing Salvia since it's totally on the up and up. Ideally, you want to use your largest tobacco water pipe. You have to light the stuff with a butane lighter since the chemical is activated at a high temperature. You get the tobacco pipe milky white with smoke, and then you inhale and hold it in like, a long time. When you exhale, there's no smoke. Where did all that smoke go? 5 … 4 … 3 … 2 … 1 Ohhhhhh. THAT's where it went. Then you go crazy. I think one time Tello thought he was dead. He might have actually been dead. But it only lasts for a few minutes, so … Next, from National Geographic via Johnny D — HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JOHNNY D. It was Johnny D's birthday yesterday (yesterday, from when I'm posting this, so July 9th) — another story when I'm just going to link the lead.

A single ant or bee isn't smart, but their colonies are. The study of swarm intelligence is providing insights that can help humans manage complex systems, from truck routing to military robots.

Here's an interesting paper written by a blogger (scholarly, obv) about the socio-economic class divisions between MySpace and Facebook. Basically, Facebook is for preps and jocks and the occasional cool "hippie" who has lots of bootleg Dave tapes, MySpace is for dorks, weirdos, and, of course, fatties … and that one kid with the dandruff. There's this CJR takedown of Vanity Fair's Africa Issue. I used to be all about Vanity Fair until I realized Graydon Carter is basically a useless gadabout who does something like, say, get Bono to guest-edit the Africa issue. This article pretty much sums up my exact problem with what Vanity Fair has become. First Jim Nelson ruins GQ and now this? Now I read Dwell. If you're REALLY out of blogs to read, recommend this essay by George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language." If you like PETE's English Major Dork Updates, you'll love "Politics and the English Language"!! I don't know how I can sell it better than that. No one's still reading so, in case you haven't seen this video, it's pretty sweet.

Okay. -PETE