In 1906 a devastating earthquake hit San Francisco. The mayor at that time was one E.E. Schmitz. Mayor Schmitz issued the following proclamation:
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This is not really meant as a reply to this blog item. (I couldn't find an e-mail address for you ... understandably, I suppose.) Just thought you might be interested in an article in the Sept. 3rd, Vancouver Sun Newspaper(requires registration): http://www.canada.com/vancouver/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=b2710eb9-195e-44b3-bed0-acce24b703c4 . The article is titled, "Pricey computer faces challenge". It's about a huge computer, named Blue Gene ("Currently, the top Blue Gene model runs on Linux and costs about $100 million US"), trying to replicate protein folding. Here's the bit that struck me: "But despite Blue Gene's power, it takes months to replicate a biological process that occures in a flash. 'A protein event one thousandth of a second long would take more than 80 years to create using a Blue Gene with 4,000 processores,' says Swope. 'That's depressingly slow.' Swope said that although protein folding has been studied for more than 40 years, even today's supercomputing power may never reach the projects end." Interesting and amazing. Enjoy and Cheers, Larry.
[Thanks for the comment. Quantum computing is supposed to speed things up. It will be interesting to see if it does. --WmAD]LJHooge