[PopePompous]

From the article: "The newly formed million-processor-core ‘Spiking Neural Network Architecture’ or ‘SpiNNaker’ machine is capable of completing more than 200 million million actions per second, with each of its chips having 100 million moving parts."

I kinda doubt that.

[mr_overalls]

Science journalism is generally just awful.

I seriously think that a major reason for the lack of public scientific literacy (I get an earful of anti-evolution, anti-climate change, anti-Big-Bang crap from my conservative family) is the lack of a competent institution for communicating these truths.

Outside of scientific journals, and the occasional pop-sci bestseller, the average person has to rely on university press releases, bloggers, and magazine writers - and they generally seem to be terrible at their jobs.

[umvi]

> anti-evolution, anti-climate change, anti-Big-Bang crap from my conservative family

At least anecdotally, my conservative family is like this because those topics have been used in the past to attack/bludgeon their religious beliefs which leads my family to dig in their heels, double down on their beliefs, and close their minds to accepting them.

I've made a lot of progress by instead showing how those things are not only not anti-religious topics, but quite the opposite - they bring us closer to the truth of how God accomplishes what he does. Once they feel that their core beliefs are not being threatened, but merely augmented, it's much easier to accept them.

[azinman2]

I don’t think science journalism is the reason why anti-science themes have evolved in the public mindset. Science used to be culturally important in the 50s as a way to understand truth, explore the world, improve life, and create industry. It’s since been challenged by both religion and industry via politicians for viewpoints that go against some of their desires. Politicians have since used it as a tool for dividing, reinforcing the anti-science climate. I don’t think it’s fair to blame journalists here.

[dkfellows]

> Science journalism is generally just awful.

Not just science journalism. I've yet to see a journalist get a story 100% right where I knew the facts personally ahead of time. If you're lucky, they've just garbled people's names...

[swebs]

Yeah, I've noticed the same. There's also a lot of anti-biology from my left-wing friends.

The problem is also compounded by the fact that Wikipedia discourages primary sources in favor of shoddy reporting. It makes sense to reject self published scientific articles in favor of journal-published articles. But more often than not, modern media outlets just seem like a vector for adding political bias and inaccuracies by reporting on things they don't really understand.

[liftbigweights]

"200 million million", "actions per second" and "100 million moving parts".

Why write like this?

Either the writer is trying to dumb it down to a ridiculous level or they have no idea what they are talking about and just threw technical words together.

[jwmerrill]

I think 200 million million is a British English thing because of the long scale/short scale ambiguity:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales

[transpy]

I am laughing at this. He is describing it as if it were a steampunk device.

[EamonnMR]

Maybe they are fundamentally misunderstanding what a transistor is? That number still seems low. Maybe electrons are the moving parts? (then that number would be very low.)

[tempay]

It looks like they're fairly minimal cores and the power consumption of the entire machine is (relatively) low.

http://apt.cs.manchester.ac.uk/projects/SpiNNaker/hardware/

[bem94]

I'd assume that by "moving parts" they mean transistors. Ofcourse this is somewhat confusing to people who know how computers are composed of transistors and what transistors are. But if you just want to convey to the lay person the complexity of the component, I'd say it's a reasonable way to do it.

[dpark]

> I'd say it's a reasonable way to do it.

No, it's a terrible way to do it. It's fundamentally wrong. It's not even reasonable metaphorically. It's like trying to explain the automobile to a 17th century pirate and saying it's a horse with 4 sails.

[geoah]

A modern consumer CPU has over 500m transistors, so that number is pretty low for a transistor count.