Month: July 2017

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images)

A handful of Twitter users, backed by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, sued President Donald Trump on Tuesday, claiming their constitutional rights are being violated because the president has blocked them from his @realDonaldTrump handle.

The suit claims that Trump's Twitter feed is a public forum and an official voice of the president. Excluding people from reading or replying to his tweets—especially because they tweeted critical comments—amounts to a First Amendment breach, according to the lawsuit.

"The @realDonaldTrump account is a kind of digital town hall in which the president and his aides use the tweet function to communicate news and information to the public, and members of the public use the reply function to respond to the president and his aides and exchange views with one another," according to the lawsuit (PDF) filed in New York federal court.

Enlarge / That weird tab at the bottom is the Omni-Path Fabric interconnect. (credit: Intel)

NEW YORK—At a trendy entrepreneurial workspace in Brooklyn, Intel formally launched a new range of Xeon processors powered by its new Skylake-SP core. The new processors offer more cores and more performance than their predecessors, with a new mesh-based design to enable greater scaling within their multicore processors.

The new chips also bring with them a new set of precious metal-based branding, with four metals—Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum—used to denote processor capabilities. Unlike AMD's new Epyc platform, Intel is continuing to segment its features.

Xeon SP ("scalable platform") chips will have up to 28 cores and 56 threads. This high core count prompted Intel to move away from the ring-based design used in prior processors. The ring design arranged cores in one or two loops with core-to-core communication having to go around the ring, potentially requiring data to travel over a dozen or more hops to move between cores. With the new mesh design, the individual cores (along with memory controllers and I/O interfaces) are arranged in a 2D grid (4×4, 4×6, or 6×6, depending on the overall core count), allowing data to move between cores in many fewer hops. This design should help keep the communication latency between the cores low, and it's a key advantage over AMD's Infinity Fabric-based design, which can suffer very high latencies in a number of situations.

Enlarge (credit: RR Auction)

For a quick break from the marvels of modern medicine, look no further than the gruesome tools used to hack people apart during the eighteenth century.

Up for auction this week are two amputation kits used during the American Revolutionary War by Dr. John Warren, a Continental Army surgeon who co-founded Harvard Medical School in 1782. The kits sport clumsy, oddly curved, and painfully jagged instruments, including dull saws and indelicate pinchers. The tools were used to coarsely remove limbs, cutting through bones and shoving aside arteries at a time when musket balls left gaping wounds, sterilization and hygiene weren't appreciated, and anesthesia often consisted of rum and a wooden stick to bite down on. Amputations were fairly common during the war, yet frequently deadly.

Because the Continental Army had little equipment, many doctors had to rely on their own personal tools. This was the case with these two kits owned by Dr. Warren (below).