With a side order of hot grits! A tip: if you can fit your message in the subject line, then do it, particularly when you/know/ that you're going to get modded down.
I remember back when that comment would have gotten +5 "Whoa duuuuude" mods.
Yet you can still get good mods if you say:
"A petaflop that fits in a closet for just $9M for the first one? You could make more for a couple million, at least by the time you got your [impressive knowlegeable-sounding ultra-tech adjectives] cluster interconnect together - why not spend a quarter of a billion and push the limits of computing out another couple orders of magnitude? This thing can do protein folding, so it can likely do bomb physics and a bunch of other big-money problems that can be represented in similar math."
Which translates to: "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!"
Context-sensitive adaptive parsing seems to be effective in parsing English even with very small (http://www.sand-stone.com/Meta-S.htm for an introduction. (The 2nd reference is on natural language parsing.)
I read the article - don't waste your time. No doubt it's a cool machine, but the artile was the flimsiest puff-piece I've ever seen linked on Slashdot. Complete lack of technical detail, moron-level explainations of common terms - I feel stupider having read it.
Are there any good articles on this machine that anyone would care to share?
Batteries still suck. A non-exploding variety of Li-ion is an improvement, but still not durable, affordable, energy- or power-dense.
I hope the tech mentioned on Wikipedia works out - it would change the equation totally:
As of spring 2006, EEStor Inc. claims to have a supercapacitor with a barium titanate dielectric nearing production. The company claims a unit with 31 farads capacitance and an operating voltage of 3.5 kV, capable of storing up to 340 Wh/kg (1232 kJ/kg)and charging or discharging at up to 3.5 kW/kg (52 kWh = 187 MJ and 520 kW - 6 minute charging time - for the 152 kg unit), lifetime of over 1,000,000 discharge cycles and leakage of less than 0.1% per month [[4] US Patent 7,033,406] with a cost of $40-$60 per kWh ($3,200 - $2,100 per unit). [BusinessWeek, 3 September 2005]. The technology is scheduled for third-party verification during the summer of 2006.
In 1959, Columbia Pictures released "I Aim At The Stars: the Wernher von Braun story". Humorist Mort Sahl said he thought the title should have been "I Aim At The Stars, But Sometimes I Hit London."
Tom Leher got a few digs in, too:
Gather 'round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun, A man whose allegiance Is ruled by expedience. Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown, "Ha, Nazi, Schmazi," says Wernher von Braun.
Don't say that he's hypocritical, Say rather that he's apolitical. "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.
Some have harsh words for this man of renown, But some think our attitude Should be one of gratitude, Like the widows and cripples in old London town, Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.**
You too may be a big hero, Once you've learned to count backwards to zero. "In German oder English I know how to count down, Und I'm learning Chinese!" says Wernher von Braun.
True. I like your meta-joke of nudging some people into the belief that this could be a factoid, thus exemplifying the strategy you are talking about. This is why you should always go after the premises before even looking at the logic of an argument, and why cracking a computer always involves getting it to accept certain false data as true (this is the code you should be running, I know the password, I'm really on your local network, etc.). In math, you can derive literally anything from an inconsistent set of assumptions.
Implanting and exploiting false beliefs is the most fundamental strategy there is in all con games and magic. There are advanced techniques in marketing, rhetoric, neuro-linguistic programming, psychology, religion and other fields which allow a high success rate in slipping false data into a person's beliefs which can then be further exploited. Counter-intelligence depends on feeding false information to the enemy as much as denying access. The Brits became so adept at this that they could construct information that would mess the enemy up whether he believed it or not.
"Why not invest this US$ trillion or so into fusion research, quantum computing, neuroscience (so we can finally understand and replicate our brains, create a true AI)."
The big breakthroughs in computing, scientific data collection, energy and goods production, healthcare and intelligence increase as well as affordable space exploration and colonization are clearly only going to come from Drexlerian molecular nanotechnology. That needs to be the funding priority - logically only when that field has absorbed all the funding it effectively can should other priorities get discretionary spending.
If we really made a push, within 15 years the world could have nearly complete control of matter, and within a few years after that (virtually all that time due to politics) essentially every physical problem in the solar system that we are concerned with now would be solved. New concerns would arise, but most would be dealt with by design - no self-replicators, only mill and constructor tech, and pervasive, in depth security, for example.
The biggest negative from the current point of view is that for nanotech security, privacy will go away almost completely, but in truth this will happen anyway, at some point. The consequence of this is not usually recognized: most of the selectively applied laws and punishments will also have to go away, and while the use of nanotech will never be private, it will still be hugely empowering for individuals (most of whom will be AIs, but that's another discussion).
You got it right. Finer division of the projectile mass reduces penetration and overall damage.
I know a guy who tried to kill himself with a shotgun blast in the mouth directed upward toward the back of the palate. I'm not sure about the gauge, but his x-rays show a remarkable galaxy of fine birdshot still lodged throughout his sinuses and lower skull, so I guess it was likely a large shell. There's also a lot of metal reconstructive mesh in there. The blast caused a fair amount of disfigurement as it rebounded foreward out of his face, but overall he's remarkably physically healthy. If it had been buckshot or a solid shell instead of birdshot, he would definitely be dead.
APSIS - an Artificial Planetary System in Space to probe extra-dimensional gravity and MOND [MOdified Newtonian Dynamics]
Authors: Varun Sahni, Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Post Bag 4, Ganeshkhind, Pune 411 007, India Yuri Shtanovm, Bogolyubov Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kiev 03143, Ukraine
13 pages
A proposal is made to test Newton's inverse-square law using the perihelion shift of test masses (planets) in free fall within a spacecraft located at the Earth-Sun L2 point. Such an Artificial Planetary System In Space (APSIS) will operate in a drag-free environment with controlled experimental conditions and minimal interference from terrestrial sources of contamination. We demonstrate that such a space experiment can probe the presence of a "hidden" fifth dimension on the scale of a micron, if the perihelion shift of a "planet" can be measured to sub-arc-second accuracy. Some suggestions for spacecraft design are made.
"I'm trying to imagine what would qualify a chicken as "un-natural"?"
Apparerntly you never saw the stressful family dinner in Eraserhead - the eponymous protagonist starts to carve a roast chicken when it starts to bleed then comes ALIVE.
I was with you until the end. In '88 shooting Fuji 1600 slide film pushed to 3200 (can you even get that anymore, though?) in sunlight, I got absolutely frozen hummingbirds with no detectable grain in 3x5 prints. Every finest vein in every feather was razor-sharp - You would need a loupe to tell it from ISO 200.
"I would be much more excited about a CCD or CMOS sensor that can capture 11 stops of light or some other type of technology that would get around the problem of high contrast scenes, than more megapixels."
The next advance in cameras is becoming a reality at the University of Rochester....
The new designs use as few as three transistors per pixel, reserving nearly half of the pixel area for light collection. First tests on the chip show that at video rates of 30 frames per second it uses just 0.88 nanowatts per pixel--50 times less than the industry's previous best. It also trounces conventional chips in dynamic range, which is the difference between the dimmest and brightest light it can record. Existing CMOS sensors can record light 1,000 times brighter than their dimmest detectable light, a dynamic range of 1:1,000, while the Rochester technology already demonstrates a dynamic range of 1:100,000. ....
What makes Bocko and Ignjatovic's method work so elegantly is its feedback design. Traditional CMOS image detectors apply a voltage to charge up a photodiode, and incoming light triggers a release of some of that charge. An amplifying transistor then checks the remaining voltage on the diode, and the diode is recharged again. Bocko and Ignjatovic's design also begins with a charged photodiode that discharges when light reaches it, but the discharge is then measured against a one/zero threshold and the resulting bit is delivered off the chip. If the result of a measurement is a one, then a packet of charge is fed back to the diode, effectively recharging it. The design also uses significantly less power than existing sensor designs, which is especially important in smaller devices like cell phones and digital cameras where battery size is restricted.
The second advance has taken many researchers by surprise. Called "Focal Plane Image Compression," Bocko and Ignjatovic have figured out a way to arrange photodiodes on an imaging chip so that compressing the resulting image demands as little as 1 percent of the computing power usually needed..... [Pixels arranged non-uniformly at cosine peaks allows discrete cosine transform compression without any multiplication, cutting power required by 80% and reducing circuitry.]
The "infinite temerature" theoretical stuff isn't helpful to readers and is essentially a mathematical artifact a.k.a. bullshit. Put simply, "negative" temeratures can come from considering the order in degrees of freedom that are not counted in ordinary definitions of temperature, for instance the order in populations of atoms' nuclear spins. The problem with calling these sorts of spin-ordered states "negative temperature" is that the more-ordered N.T. state has more energy than the positive temperature state and so energy will flow from the "lower" temperature body to the "higher" temperature body when they come in contact.
Most of the signal path is through copper or aluminum, no? IIRC the velocity in copper is about 0.3c. Also, this tech is for millimeter-wave RF, not digital, so the complexity of the critical circuit paths should be less. 100-300 microns is enough to do quite a bit when the feature size is low.
Mod up. This is not about CPU transistors, but about transistors as RF amplifiers. These would not even be likely to work at the stated frequencies, since at max frequency the gain would presumably drop to 1x. With fancy engineering and distributed amplifier techniques, a moderately lower frequency could be achieved in useful devices such as communications trancievers and phased-array millimeter-wave radars.
1480 has always been >99.9% in the overall population. The difference lately has mostly been in making the verbal SAT less accurate at measuring intelect by eliminating analogies and putting in more "reading comprehension" questions that do not really have clear, uniquely correct answers. (I got a 760V in 1988 and hated the new verbal section when I took a practice test while applying to tutor last year. New score:680) Less accurate tests lessen the politically incorrect score differences between the sexes and races. Less accurate tests also let the dimwitted head of the College Board, ex WV gov. Gaston Caperton, get back at those who are smarter than he. Also, a useless machine-scored essay has been added which primarily tests handwriting speed. The math test has been affected less, but the objective quality of the test takers has been slowly rising due to increasing non-verbal intelligence (Flynn effect). (I got 780M on the new test vs. 700 in 1988, but I've been doing a lot of math since I was a HS sophomore.) Both math and verbal sections of the test now have less "top" and are thus less useful for distinguishing abilities in the sort of students who have the ability needed at MIT.
As far as MIT goes, in 2004 the 25th percentile scores were 680V 730M and the 75th percentile 760V 800M. The composite and 50th percentile scores cannot be determined, but are certainly well over 1500.
If you raise the minimum wage and set the maximum wage properly, there is no net expansion of the wage base and, assuming corrections in the calculation for spending patterns at different wage levels, demand-side economic stimulation, and increased welfare for those who truly aren't worth the new minimum wage, there will be no net inflation. If corporate profits drop due to increased wages, that can serve the same function as a personal wage cap, although the corporate spending patterns are different, and coming up with an estimate of excess profits that would otherwise have been wasted in unproductive investment and other expenditures is going to make some corpratist apologist economists turn green and froth at the mouth.
There is a limited pool of people fit to teach at the unversity level, however they are seldom hired by the top schools. The top schools couldn't care less about ability to teach - all that counts is the prestige of the prospective hires' degrees, their publications list and whether they have the "diversity" that the school wants. Top scools do not get their reputations from teaching well but by admitting top students. The best teaching is at the schools that do the least research.
A better standard for judging the quality of education a school provides is how well it improves its stuents' abilities. One objective measure of this is how far to the right is shifts its student body's standard test score distribution between matriculation and graduation (without overtly "teaching to the test", of course).
No, only certain trades which require certification or expensive equipment such as electricians, plumbers, heavy equipment operators, etc. If you live in the Southern US or near a big city that attracts Mexicans and Central Americans, you better speak Spanish and expect illegal-immigrant wages if you want to work in construction.
The big one, I think, will be allowing the SI definition of current to be changed from the present unwieldly method of "an ampere is the steady current that when flowing in straight parallel wires of infinite length and negligible cross section, separated by a distance of one meter in free space, produces a force between the wires of 2 × 10-7 newtons per meter of length", then defining the Coulomb as "the charge delivered by a current of 1 ampere in 1 second".
The new, accurate electron counting capability alows the quantum of electrical charge to become the base unit, as it should be, and then to define current as the number of charges per second.
We already know the answer to that. "Wave propagation" and "particle interaction" are redundant expressions; "wave interaction" and "particle propagation" are oxymoronic. "Waves" and "particles" are not entities or properties but rather behaviors - wave propagation is the constant or increasing lack of information about the quantum relative to the observer/instrument/indicator and particle interaction is the creation or transmission of information relative to the observer/instrument/indicator.
Single particle interactions are never in two places at once. The information that originally was one quantum may be distributed across space as it propagates as a wave or distributed across ensembles of different quanta in entangled states, but the interactions (particles) themselves are always strictly local.
That is not really hyperbole. While it is not often currently prescribed for six-year olds, methamphetamine is not illegal; it is a Schedule II substance, not Schedule I, and can be prescribed in the US as a treatment for ADD under the brand name Desoxyn, produced by Ovation Pharma. At the prescribed dose the side effect / drug effectiveness ratio is supposed to be very good compared to other stimulant ADD treatments.
Slashdot Mirror
>Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
/know/ that you're going to get modded down.
With a side order of hot grits!
A tip: if you can fit your message in the subject line, then do it, particularly when you
I remember back when that comment would have gotten +5 "Whoa duuuuude" mods.
Yet you can still get good mods if you say:
"A petaflop that fits in a closet for just $9M for the first one? You could make more for a couple million, at least by the time you got your [impressive knowlegeable-sounding ultra-tech adjectives] cluster interconnect together - why not spend a quarter of a billion and push the limits of computing out another couple orders of magnitude? This thing can do protein folding, so it can likely do bomb physics and a bunch of other big-money problems that can be represented in similar math."
Which translates to:
"Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!"
Context-sensitive adaptive parsing seems to be effective in parsing English even with very small (http://www.sand-stone.com/Meta-S.htm for an introduction. (The 2nd reference is on natural language parsing.)
I wonder how the classifier program would cope with text like that in the parent post... probably sprain its parser, or something.
I read the article - don't waste your time. No doubt it's a cool machine, but the artile was the flimsiest puff-piece I've ever seen linked on Slashdot. Complete lack of technical detail, moron-level explainations of common terms - I feel stupider having read it.
Are there any good articles on this machine that anyone would care to share?
I hope the tech mentioned on Wikipedia works out - it would change the equation totally:
In 1959, Columbia Pictures released "I Aim At The Stars: the Wernher von Braun story". Humorist Mort Sahl said he thought the title should have been "I Aim At The Stars, But Sometimes I Hit London."
Tom Leher got a few digs in, too:
Gather 'round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,
A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience.
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown,
"Ha, Nazi, Schmazi," says Wernher von Braun.
Don't say that he's hypocritical,
Say rather that he's apolitical.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.
Some have harsh words for this man of renown,
But some think our attitude
Should be one of gratitude,
Like the widows and cripples in old London town,
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.**
You too may be a big hero,
Once you've learned to count backwards to zero.
"In German oder English I know how to count down,
Und I'm learning Chinese!" says Wernher von Braun.
True. I like your meta-joke of nudging some people into the belief that this could be a factoid, thus exemplifying the strategy you are talking about. This is why you should always go after the premises before even looking at the logic of an argument, and why cracking a computer always involves getting it to accept certain false data as true (this is the code you should be running, I know the password, I'm really on your local network, etc.). In math, you can derive literally anything from an inconsistent set of assumptions.
Implanting and exploiting false beliefs is the most fundamental strategy there is in all con games and magic. There are advanced techniques in marketing, rhetoric, neuro-linguistic programming, psychology, religion and other fields which allow a high success rate in slipping false data into a person's beliefs which can then be further exploited. Counter-intelligence depends on feeding false information to the enemy as much as denying access. The Brits became so adept at this that they could construct information that would mess the enemy up whether he believed it or not.
"Why not invest this US$ trillion or so into fusion research, quantum computing, neuroscience (so we can finally understand and replicate our brains, create a true AI)."
The big breakthroughs in computing, scientific data collection, energy and goods production, healthcare and intelligence increase as well as affordable space exploration and colonization are clearly only going to come from Drexlerian molecular nanotechnology. That needs to be the funding priority - logically only when that field has absorbed all the funding it effectively can should other priorities get discretionary spending.
If we really made a push, within 15 years the world could have nearly complete control of matter, and within a few years after that (virtually all that time due to politics) essentially every physical problem in the solar system that we are concerned with now would be solved. New concerns would arise, but most would be dealt with by design - no self-replicators, only mill and constructor tech, and pervasive, in depth security, for example.
The biggest negative from the current point of view is that for nanotech security, privacy will go away almost completely, but in truth this will happen anyway, at some point. The consequence of this is not usually recognized: most of the selectively applied laws and punishments will also have to go away, and while the use of nanotech will never be private, it will still be hugely empowering for individuals (most of whom will be AIs, but that's another discussion).
You got it right. Finer division of the projectile mass reduces penetration and overall damage.
I know a guy who tried to kill himself with a shotgun blast in the mouth directed upward toward the back of the palate. I'm not sure about the gauge, but his x-rays show a remarkable galaxy of fine birdshot still lodged throughout his sinuses and lower skull, so I guess it was likely a large shell. There's also a lot of metal reconstructive mesh in there. The blast caused a fair amount of disfigurement as it rebounded foreward out of his face, but overall he's remarkably physically healthy. If it had been buckshot or a solid shell instead of birdshot, he would definitely be dead.
"I'm trying to imagine what would qualify a chicken as "un-natural"?"
Apparerntly you never saw the stressful family dinner in Eraserhead - the eponymous protagonist starts to carve a roast chicken when it starts to bleed then comes ALIVE.
I was with you until the end. In '88 shooting Fuji 1600 slide film pushed to 3200 (can you even get that anymore, though?) in sunlight, I got absolutely frozen hummingbirds with no detectable grain in 3x5 prints. Every finest vein in every feather was razor-sharp - You would need a loupe to tell it from ISO 200.
"I would be much more excited about a CCD or CMOS sensor that can capture 11 stops of light or some other type of technology that would get around the problem of high contrast scenes, than more megapixels."
p s.asp
...
....
.... [Pixels arranged non-uniformly at cosine peaks allows discrete cosine transform compression without any multiplication, cutting power required by 80% and reducing circuitry.]
http://www.dpreview.com/news/0512/05121201new_chi
The next advance in cameras is becoming a reality at the University of Rochester.
The new designs use as few as three transistors per pixel, reserving nearly half of the pixel area for light collection. First tests on the chip show that at video rates of 30 frames per second it uses just 0.88 nanowatts per pixel--50 times less than the industry's previous best. It also trounces conventional chips in dynamic range, which is the difference between the dimmest and brightest light it can record. Existing CMOS sensors can record light 1,000 times brighter than their dimmest detectable light, a dynamic range of 1:1,000, while the Rochester technology already demonstrates a dynamic range of 1:100,000.
What makes Bocko and Ignjatovic's method work so elegantly is its feedback design. Traditional CMOS image detectors apply a voltage to charge up a photodiode, and incoming light triggers a release of some of that charge. An amplifying transistor then checks the remaining voltage on the diode, and the diode is recharged again. Bocko and Ignjatovic's design also begins with a charged photodiode that discharges when light reaches it, but the discharge is then measured against a one/zero threshold and the resulting bit is delivered off the chip. If the result of a measurement is a one, then a packet of charge is fed back to the diode, effectively recharging it. The design also uses significantly less power than existing sensor designs, which is especially important in smaller devices like cell phones and digital cameras where battery size is restricted.
The second advance has taken many researchers by surprise. Called "Focal Plane Image Compression," Bocko and Ignjatovic have figured out a way to arrange photodiodes on an imaging chip so that compressing the resulting image demands as little as 1 percent of the computing power usually needed.
The "infinite temerature" theoretical stuff isn't helpful to readers and is essentially a mathematical artifact a.k.a. bullshit. Put simply, "negative" temeratures can come from considering the order in degrees of freedom that are not counted in ordinary definitions of temperature, for instance the order in populations of atoms' nuclear spins. The problem with calling these sorts of spin-ordered states "negative temperature" is that the more-ordered N.T. state has more energy than the positive temperature state and so energy will flow from the "lower" temperature body to the "higher" temperature body when they come in contact.
Most of the signal path is through copper or aluminum, no? IIRC the velocity in copper is about 0.3c. Also, this tech is for millimeter-wave RF, not digital, so the complexity of the critical circuit paths should be less. 100-300 microns is enough to do quite a bit when the feature size is low.
Mod up. This is not about CPU transistors, but about transistors as RF amplifiers. These would not even be likely to work at the stated frequencies, since at max frequency the gain would presumably drop to 1x. With fancy engineering and distributed amplifier techniques, a moderately lower frequency could be achieved in useful devices such as communications trancievers and phased-array millimeter-wave radars.
1480 has always been >99.9% in the overall population. The difference lately has mostly been in making the verbal SAT less accurate at measuring intelect by eliminating analogies and putting in more "reading comprehension" questions that do not really have clear, uniquely correct answers. (I got a 760V in 1988 and hated the new verbal section when I took a practice test while applying to tutor last year. New score:680) Less accurate tests lessen the politically incorrect score differences between the sexes and races. Less accurate tests also let the dimwitted head of the College Board, ex WV gov. Gaston Caperton, get back at those who are smarter than he. Also, a useless machine-scored essay has been added which primarily tests handwriting speed. The math test has been affected less, but the objective quality of the test takers has been slowly rising due to increasing non-verbal intelligence (Flynn effect). (I got 780M on the new test vs. 700 in 1988, but I've been doing a lot of math since I was a HS sophomore.) Both math and verbal sections of the test now have less "top" and are thus less useful for distinguishing abilities in the sort of students who have the ability needed at MIT.
As far as MIT goes, in 2004 the 25th percentile scores were 680V 730M and the 75th percentile 760V 800M. The composite and 50th percentile scores cannot be determined, but are certainly well over 1500.
If you raise the minimum wage and set the maximum wage properly, there is no net expansion of the wage base and, assuming corrections in the calculation for spending patterns at different wage levels, demand-side economic stimulation, and increased welfare for those who truly aren't worth the new minimum wage, there will be no net inflation. If corporate profits drop due to increased wages, that can serve the same function as a personal wage cap, although the corporate spending patterns are different, and coming up with an estimate of excess profits that would otherwise have been wasted in unproductive investment and other expenditures is going to make some corpratist apologist economists turn green and froth at the mouth.
You are completely, 100% wrong.
There is a limited pool of people fit to teach at the unversity level, however they are seldom hired by the top schools. The top schools couldn't care less about ability to teach - all that counts is the prestige of the prospective hires' degrees, their publications list and whether they have the "diversity" that the school wants. Top scools do not get their reputations from teaching well but by admitting top students. The best teaching is at the schools that do the least research.
A better standard for judging the quality of education a school provides is how well it improves its stuents' abilities. One objective measure of this is how far to the right is shifts its student body's standard test score distribution between matriculation and graduation (without overtly "teaching to the test", of course).
No, only certain trades which require certification or expensive equipment such as electricians, plumbers, heavy equipment operators, etc. If you live in the Southern US or near a big city that attracts Mexicans and Central Americans, you better speak Spanish and expect illegal-immigrant wages if you want to work in construction.
You've been reading John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education (full text link), I see. Great book!
The big one, I think, will be allowing the SI definition of current to be changed from the present unwieldly method of "an ampere is the steady current that when flowing in straight parallel wires of infinite length and negligible cross section, separated by a distance of one meter in free space, produces a force between the wires of 2 × 10-7 newtons per meter of length", then defining the Coulomb as "the charge delivered by a current of 1 ampere in 1 second".
The new, accurate electron counting capability alows the quantum of electrical charge to become the base unit, as it should be, and then to define current as the number of charges per second.
We already know the answer to that. "Wave propagation" and "particle interaction" are redundant expressions; "wave interaction" and "particle propagation" are oxymoronic. "Waves" and "particles" are not entities or properties but rather behaviors - wave propagation is the constant or increasing lack of information about the quantum relative to the observer/instrument/indicator and particle interaction is the creation or transmission of information relative to the observer/instrument/indicator.
Single particle interactions are never in two places at once. The information that originally was one quantum may be distributed across space as it propagates as a wave or distributed across ensembles of different quanta in entangled states, but the interactions (particles) themselves are always strictly local.
Yes, Ritalin is not methamphetamine, but Desoxyn is.
That is not really hyperbole. While it is not often currently prescribed for six-year olds, methamphetamine is not illegal; it is a Schedule II substance, not Schedule I, and can be prescribed in the US as a treatment for ADD under the brand name Desoxyn, produced by Ovation Pharma. At the prescribed dose the side effect / drug effectiveness ratio is supposed to be very good compared to other stimulant ADD treatments.