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Hawking Is First User of "Big Brain" Supercomputer
miller60 writes "Calling your product the 'Big Brain Computer' is a heady claim. It helps if you have Dr. Stephen Hawking say that the product can help unlock the secrets of the universe. SGI says its UV2 can scale to 4,096 cores and 64 terabytes of memory, with a peak I/O rate of four terabytes per second and runs off-the-shelf Linux software. Hawking says the UV2 'will ensure that UK researchers remain at the forefront of fundamental and observational cosmology.'"
Hawking has always been a second rate scientist with a first rate promotional skill. Like Germaine Greer, he took advantage of what society perceived as a weakness in order to propel himself to the top of his field, and then morphed into a crass celebrity.
In Hawking's case, he gives the false impression that "very disabled people can do anything", which is patent bullshit and diminishes the extent to which the very disabled are increasingly marginalised - it is true only to say that exceptionally clever people with a merely physical illness have a small chance of being appreciated by society. In Greer's case, she's managed to make it cool for women to shake off all the unique qualities of a traditional woman and adopt all the bad qualities of traditional men: instead of people acting as equals and loving each other more, all we have a more cutthroat world in which both partners must leave the kids and go out to work.