Bec's second Horror Heights book "Now LiveScreaming" has come out. Matt makes a cameo as the first message in a stream chat room. Some of Bec and Matt's book-related discussions were had around the fire pit from episode 012 (update).
Matt has been sent a tensegrity fire pit built by a fan, which now replaces his barbecue with the legs taken off (yes, he paid for it). He's escaped the fire pit cycle. This evening will be the inaugural fire; Bec has brought marshmallows.
Can one produce less smelling or even well smelling farts by eating or drinking a certain food?
Bec is uniquely qualified because she has IBS and the sense of humour to match. High protein foods cause smelly farts, but that was not enough for Bec. She contacted experts Dr. CK Yao and Dr. Jessica Biesiekierski, the latter of which recorded a voice message with lots of detail and food suggestions for both nicer and worse smells.
Bec has also found a french fart pill (Pilule Pet) which is meant to make your farts smell like roses. Of course Bec ordered some. Jessica is sceptical, but suggested charcoal fart pads. The fart pill ingredients list was turned into a parody song by Gareth Turkington.
A "ding" by Matt and a raspberry by Bec, even with the pill test results still pending
When does a computer become a supercomputer, and do publicly purchaseable personal computers surpass the capabilities of the first/early supercomputers? If so, how much would it cost?
A supercomputer is just a very powerful normal computer. Actually, supercomputers are a lot of processors joined together for one or more big tasks. Matt got to walk around inside two supercomputers.
Supercomputers are measured in floating point operations per second (FLOPS). The iPhone 12 can do roughly 10¹⁰ FLOPS, an M1 Mac's GPU has 10¹² FLOPS, while current top supercomputers can do 10¹⁷ FLOPS. In the past, Moore's law predicts computers become twice as powerful every two years (though it has to be taken with a grain of salt), so in 50 years, a phone should have the equivalent power to a modern-day supercomputer. Looking into the past, the old Cray supercomputers were doing around 10⁸ FLOPS, or roughly 1% of a modern-day iPhone.
A "dinglet" by Bec
Listener Matthew requests: "I think you need a website/wiki page so that we can easily see the previous questions asked and their solutions. There, you could also include links to your sources, or the spreadsheet/code Matt makes for certain problems, as well as pictures." Matt and Bec promise to help with a wiki/definitive list, e.g. by providing assets and code, and request anyone undertaking such a project to get in touch.
Such a wiki was previously requested in episode 013 (note) and in episode 027 (note).
It is not Bec's card.