Big Brother Shares Data

The CIA World Factbook is pretty cool. My most recent use was when I was discussing Iran with an Iranian coworker. I told her I'd heard of Ayatollah Khamenei, but my pronunciation was so bad that she had no idea who I was talking about. The CIA World Factbook cleared that up for us. By the way, his title is Supreme Leader, which I think is kinda wacky.

Datastar, here I come!

I received word from the San Diego super computer people that my application was approved, so I now have 10,000 cpu hours on their Datastar system! Isn't that exciting?!? (Yes, yes it is.)

As of November 2005, Datastar is ranked as the 35th fastest computer in the world. It has 2464 processors. I could, like, map the human genome or some shit.