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Formula One Racing Just a Matter of Crunching the Numbers
Si24601 writes "Sauber Petronas Formula 1 team have launched Albert, their new supercomputer. With aerodynamics contributing a claimed 75% of the performance of the current bread of cars, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) calculations have become increasingly important. Dalco's 530 AMD Opteron processor, 2.3 Tflop/s Supercomputer, with 1 TB RAM and 11 TB of storage, may just be up to the task." Other readers submitted links to stories on F1 Live and Formula1.com.
The Olympics are the same way. For some time now, the Olympic Games have not been about who is the best athlete, but who is the best chemist.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Nice ignorance.
What ignorance? Is calling something stupid automatically ignorant? Is this like moral relativism, where I am no longer allowed to make a value judgement about anything?
Whether or not you enjoy it (I personally find NASCAR boring except for road racing) does not dictate how dumb it is. A good driver is a good driver. There's no doubt that NASCAR has top engineers working on its cars. What exactly is "dumb" about those people?
Yes, the people involved in NASCAR are probably all (or at least mostly) very smart. The marketing people are geniuses. But the "sport" itself is dumb, and therefore, the people who watch it are dumb. Why is the sport dumb? Because the rules constantly change to make sure that the races are close. It would be like if a soccer league decided midseason that first place team had to play a man down for the rest of the season to keep the games exciting. Furthermore, the races themselves are semi-fixed. There is almost a guarantee that about 7 laps from the finish, there will be a caution flag, so that all the cars will get bunched up for a close finish.
Of all the sports and kinda-sports out there, NASCAR is one of the stupidest. If I am not allowed to point that out (bluntly), there there is no more room for any sort of intelligent discussion. We might as well just wake up every morning any prey to the Gods of Political Correctness (or would that be the Higher Beings of Policital Correctness?) to keep our mouths shut so that we don't say anything that could be considered offensive by anyone. When it comes down to it, the very fate of our very civilization hinges on my right to call NASCAR stupid.
Well, that might be a little extreme. Maybe just the fate of Western Civilization.