Hopefully Interesting

So, for a long time I didn't really get H.P.Lovecraft , the author of a bunch of books and short stories set in a mythos  that has been used by many authors since.  Even if you've never read anything by him, I hope you've at least heard the name  Cthulhu  at some point.  The problem is that the sense of cosmic dread that he sought to convey in his works didn't really work with me.  I've grown up knowing of the vast voids between the stars.  I've always, for as long as I've known about history, known that history began long before mankind was around and that the time between the first campfire and the present day is just a small slice of all the time that came before.  All this familiarity means that I can't really appreciate his works the way that maybe people at the time could, familiarity breeds contempt. The first time I really got a taste of real cosmic dread was when I ran into the concept of Boltzman brain's .  To explain it simply, if the un

Way back in 2011 I wrote a  fairly optomistic blog post  about the prospects of resistive RAM (RRAM), a new storage technology that could end up replacing both the RAM and main hard drives in computers.  Well, things haven't progressed as fast since then as I might have hoped they would, but there has been one interesting development lately.  Apparently HP (who owns most of the patents for the most promising take on RRAM) has been poring a huge amount of resources into building a machine to take advantage of it, as well as exploring a few other interesting technologies. The news reports I've seen have tended to exaggerate how radical this is a bit, and it's also been an interesting illustration of Paul Graham's  essay  on how corporate PR works.  But it looks like HP is doing serious systems level research into how new technologies can change computing.  As far as I can tell there hasn't been a lot of work done by people looking at changing both hardware and soft