Count the Triangles

Depending on your interest in puzzles esp. of a mathematical variety then this may be nearly trivial (I say nearly because I had to stop myself once or twice from declaring a too quick answer and look deeper).

I'm going to let Chiara tackle it, should be a good challenge for her and help teach her her to take her time and be thorough!

http://www.msn.com/en-ca/lifestyle/whats-hot/no-one-can-work-out-how-many-triangles-are-in-this-picture/ar-AAoUVES?ocid=ientp

Coding is the new Cursive!

Great article in the Globe & Mail...I've been saying this for awhile now!  This is why we'll be sending Chiara to coding camp in a few years.  Many great points in the article, the 1 I want to highlight is that kids learning coding now doesn't mean they are on the path to be software developers, 1 study estimates 65% of kids entering primary school now will end up in jobs that don't even exist yet!  And you can bet whether those jobs are in biology or media they will involve some futuristic form of coding!

A Climate Change Solution

One of my LinkedIn connections shared this link with the caption "someone please share this with POTUS"

The Story of Soil - not sure if it can solve all of the Climate Change problem but if we move to renewables and implement this, could make a big dent in it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08TI1RKj54g

Witty & Concise Summary of Politics

I saw this on LinkedIn, so true...so true

I told my son, “You will marry the girl I choose.” He said, “NO!” I told him, “She is Bill Gates’ daughter.” He said, “OK.” I called Bill Gates and said, “I want your daughter to marry my son.” Bill Gates said, “NO.” I told Bill Gates, My son is the CEO of World Bank.” Bill Gates said, “OK.” I called the President of World Bank and asked him to make my son the CEO. He said, “NO.” I told him, “My son is Bill Gates’ son-in-law.” He said, “OK.” This is exactly how politics works . . . HAVE A LOVELY WEEKEND FRIENDS!

Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!

I guess a fitting start to new post about jobs is to let my friends know that I'll be starting work at BMO next week!  I'll be in a different area and floor than my wife Carol but we'll both be at FCP which is cool!

It was amazing to spend 6 months at home with my family and then to get a great job at just the perfect time!

Anyway, from Barry Ritholtz's great site I saw a link for a Bloomberg article on what sectors of the job market are losing them the fastest (often now that means never to return).  Also a great interactive table on what jobs are at Risk, you can enter the name of your job/area/field.  It is only so granular,  it didn't of course have my obscure job of Quantitative Analyst or even Risk Manager but you can get a general idea and it's very cool!  

That general idea is unsurprisingly the higher education level required for a job the less likely (usually) it will be replaced by AI/Robots quickly.  When I was job hunting this year, I noticed I got way more interviews for jobs I applied to that needed Grad school degrees as a minimum, clearly I had much less competition there.  For my work, requires balancing Math/Finance/Computing knowledge so that's pretty safe (for now) but another field that's highly educated is Accounting and they are not so safe...which makes sense as it is a very systematic/rules based field...for anyone that can program even a little, you know code to automate such tasks is not that hard.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-jobs-automation-risk/

Finally, has a great section on Coal Mining vs. Retail Sector (esp. bricks and mortar dept. stores)...Trump goes on so much about Coal Mining but the job losses there are but a tiny fraction of the loses in Retail...on one of my fave shows covered this and showed if I recall correctly that JC Penny is facing more job cuts than the entire coal mining industry!!!

New top-end Intel i9's have 18 cores/36 threads!

In 2013 when I built my current rig, I thought my i7 4930K was impressive with 6 cores/12 threads but Intel has blown past that with 12 core/14/16 & the big daddy at 18 cores!  More importantly these CPU's are in the Tera Flop range now finally...GPU's have been there for awhile ;-)

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3198430/components/intels-core-i9-starts-a-bloody-battle-for-enthusiast-pcs.html

If anyone's thinking of getting it...careful as aside from price, it requires a brand new chipset of course (this is why I build new comps every 5y or so instead of trying to upgrade parts ad hoc).

Meanwhile, checking the latest Top Supercomputers list

https://www.top500.org/lists/2016/11/

we see that China has the top 2, no way US closes that gap with Trump in charge ;-)  Seems the peak speed of which is 125K Tera Flops or 125 Peta Flops!  That's now in the ballpark of Exa Flops = 1000 Peta Flops...that's key because the best computational neuroscience estimates are that the Human brain computes at the Exa scale level!

You may be wondering, this new Intel chip with it's 18/36 cores can only do 1 or 2 Tera Flops while the supercomputer can do 125,000 Tera Flops???  Did I forget to mention that supercomp has >10 million cores!!! haha

Star Trek: Discovery

Finally, a real actual Trailer is out for the new installment of Star Trek!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8mesUEFjas

It "looks" very good, we'll have to see how the stories, characters and most important for me, the science of the show is!  ST has always been one to focus more on the Sci part of SciFi (and of course the human element, reflecting current issues etc) except maybe with the previous subpar installment ST: Enterprise (barely watchable!).

It's tentatively scheduled for Fall release...fingers crossed!  Can't wait!!