The Words We Searched in 2010, From Google

What do the terms Chatroulette, iPad and Justin Bieber have in common? No, they are not a part of a new Internet-inspired movie; they were the “fastest rising” terms typed into Google’s search engine over the past year.

During the closing month of the year, Google releases its Google Zeitgeist report that corrals and aggregates “billions of search queries people type into Google” over the year. Google says the “Zeitgeist captures the spirit of 2010.”

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Chinese Supercomputer Is Ranked World’s Second-Fastest

Dawning 5000A , 2nd fastest supercomputer in the world.

A Chinese supercomputer has been ranked as the world’s second-fastest machine, surpassing European and Japanese systems and underscoring China’s aggressive commitment to science and technology.

The Dawning Nebulae, based at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, China, has achieved a sustained computing speed of 1.27 petaflops — the equivalent of one thousand trillion mathematical operations a second — in the latest semiannual ranking of the world’s fastest 500 computers.

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Happy Canada Day

“Frequently referred to as “Canada’s birthday”, particularly in the popular press, the occasion marks the joining of the British North American colonies of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the Province of Canada into a federation of four provinces (the Province of Canada being divided, in the process, into Ontario and Quebec) on 1 July 1867. Although Canada is regarded as having become a kingdom in its own right on that date, the British Parliament kept limited rights of political control over the new country that were shed by stages over the years until the last vestiges were surrendered in 1982 when the Constitution Act patriated the Canadian constitution.”  From Wikipidia

Entire New 13-Story Building Tips Over in Shanghai

“This past Saturday, an entire apartment building in Shanghai collapsed. To be fair, the building was under construction and thus unoccupied, but it’s still a minor miracle that there was only one fatality.”  (More pix at Gizmodo)