Alexis C. Madrigal

You know that little ring on Facebook that sounds off when you get an incoming call? Here, it sounds like this:

Well, that's not an off-the-shelf sound effect. It is the Facebook ping, and it was very well considered.

We know this because that ping has a fan, and that fan asked on Quora, "How much research has gone into developing the Facebook ping sound? The sound is so pleasant sometimes that it makes me wonder how much effort has been put into its development."

A flattered former Facebooker named Everett Katigbak, who "designed most of the audio currently in the product," chimed in with a most comprehensive answer.

Let's start with the best part. The chord is an F Major 7 (Fmaj7), which means it is composed of four notes: F, A, C, and E. That the perfect ping sound also spelled FACE was a "serendipitous discovery."

The chord had the additional good qualities, in Katigbak's estimation, that it's "a jazz chord... less formal, improvisational, and has a positive feel to it" and "contains a few interesting intervals within the chord that have certain connotations, and these form the modules for other notifications." It was improvisational and easily extensible, you could say.

"The [interesting] intervals are: 2 major thirds, F-A, and C-E. The major third trill is what is used on old school telephones," he explained, embedding this video of an old-school phone ringing.

Within the common Fmaj7 framework, Katigbak also could find "a minor 3rd interval, A-C. Descending, this interval is the same used in the common doorbell (ding-dong), which conceptually reminded me of when a friend would show up at your house," he wrote. "It is also the quintessential 'DIINNNNEERRR' or 'LAASSSIIIEEE' call out, which again, is a very nostalgic pattern."

"The audio suite was designed to be a modular system," he continued. So the various bits and pieces could be recombined to make new sounds within a common framework for different applications.

For example, take the inbound video calling sound. "It is the base arpeggio in two pulses: F-A-C-E, F-A-C-E," he wrote. (An arpeggio is simply when the notes of a chord are played in sequence.) "We went with the two pulses because this resembles a majority of international ring variations."

The lesson for me is: Someone has to make every decision about every website that you visit, from the widths of the lines to the sizes of the photos to the notes in their notification sound. While startups often run-and-gun, hoping what they make works, larger companies have a process for making things happen within their boundaries. What this means is that a company's culture and ideology really can push their way into each and every pore of a design, which is why it's worth considering the little things about the way Twitter and Facebook work and look. Fractally, they show us what the company wants to be.

As for Katigbak, he's moved on to Pinterest now. You can see more of his work at Typochondria.com.

Updated: Originally had the wrong sound up at the top. Corrected with thanks to Mark McDonald and the commenter below.

There isn't much context to this video. Two storm chasers, Brandon Ivey and Sean Casey, got hit by a tornado in their armored Tornado Intercept Vehicle 2, which is designed to be hit by tornadoes.

Simply, this is what it looks and sounds like inside a twister. For me, there's also something about the alien movement of the rain on the windshield that's almost scarier than the effects of the swirling wind.

It all began in June of 2010 when a photographer spotted Keanu Reeves eating a sandwich on a New York park bench. In one shot, Reeves looks dejected for reasons unknown. The image was metastatic: he was isolated from the original and pasted into new scenes all over the web. Sad Keanu was born, and then reborn, as a life-like 3D rendering.

But that was all in the computer. Now he'd been printed. This was the real world. What had the the flip-flop done to him? 

Light did not reflect off Sad Keanu the way it was supposed to. It was as if the photons knew he did not belong here.

I remembered reading The Indian in the Cupboard, and hoped Sad Keanu would come to life. Maybe he would be voiced by a former comedy star -- Pauley Shore perhaps, tuned to that Serious-Robin-Williams pitch. I imagined what Sad Keanu might want. A sandwich, I decided. And we rode to the store.

The light kept catching him at odd angles. He was all odd angles, it seemed.

Would he want to make his own sandwich, picnic-style? I placed him in the cheese case.

But he wasn't interested.

He seemed more at home with the pre-made stuff.

At the green grocer, he tried grapefruit.

But liked melon best.

Nothing could cheer Sad Keanu up, though.

I kept trying. I took him to play basketball.

Sent him down a slide.

Let him ride a metal horse.

Listened to records.

But he was not cheering up.

Perhaps what he needed was a friend, another Sad Keanu. I took him to the photocopier place and sat him down on the bed.

The clerk informed me that I could not leave the cover open, that it would use too much black ink. But I feared crushing him inside the machine. So, we covered the glass.

The replicator did not work.

So, if he was going to be alone, I encouraged him to commune with nature.

Stop and smell the roses, I advised.

Take in the glory of the California succulent.

Hang out with the green garlic.

Flowers are beautiful.

Climb a tree!

Maybe do some gardening. Smell that mint.

Kale's delicious if you cook it right, I insisted.

I turned to culture. Why don't you read some more books, Sad Keanu?

Maybe investigate Eastern religion?

You used to love the piano!

Perhaps take up drawing?

Just go pet the cat. That works for everyone.

But he was so sad.

So, so sad.

So, so, so sad.

He could hardly get out of bed.

Sad Keanu needed a lady, I decided. I brought him binders full of women. He wasn't interested.

I tried to get him to try online dating. He turned his back on the computer.

I put him in front of a sign that said FUN, hoping some of the magic would rub off.

He was sadder than ever. So sad, he found a milk crate and sat among the ratty dandelions.

We'd been going so many places that maybe it was inevitable. I lost track of him. Where could he be? 

I had to find him! I called out to him. Sad Keanu! Sad Keanu! Anyone seen my Sad Keanu?! But no one even seemed to even know the meme.

Finally, I retraced my steps, figuring he could not have gone far, being an immobile 3D-printed toy. And it was just a few blocks from my house, on a fence covered in flowers that I found Sad Keanu. 

He'd met someone. And he was happy. I let him be.

You all may have just started to pay attention to cicadas this year, when they're emerging from the ground to mate and die, but filmmaker Samuel Orr has been working on a documentary about the special species since 2007. That effort has paid off, as you can see in the beautiful trailer embedded here.

The doc itself is not complete, but Orr has a Kickstarter up to help him finish it off.

If Orr's funding reaches above his $3,000 goal, he'll increase the amount of time-lapse photography he will do of this year's brood (the name for the cicada hatch), which would be a very good thing.

Skip to about minute two of the preview above and you'll see a remarkable set of time-lapses of the cicadas turning from creepy-crawly insect into winged bug. To watch the wings unfurl at about 2:20 is to see one of the glories of evolution.

Happy Memorial Day weekend.

H/t Jad Abumrad

Benedict Evans

Benedict Evans has a great post describing the market for smartphones (and phones more broadly) in three charts and about 600 words. Admirable economy! Let me try to compress the argument even further.

If one looks at profits, only two companies make a substantial amount of money: Apple and Samsung. (Just look at that chart above!)

If one looks at market share in smartphones, Google's Android platform is increasingly dominant. The Android operating system is grabbing an ever larger share of an ever larger market.

"To put this another way, looking at 'smartphone share' or 'profit share' or 'platform share' all tell you something about the industry, but all three metrics mislead you if you try to treat them as a way to see who's 'winning', because 'winning' means different things for Apple, Samsung or Google," Evans concludes. And in one way or another, all three are making out all right.

One thing is clear from these charts, though, is who is losing, and that is everyone else.

You ever heard of the cookiecutter shark, Isistius brasiliensis? I hadn't either until Phenomena's Ed Yong told me about it today. "It's a small cat-sized animal with chocolate-coloured skin, a rounded snout, and large green eyes. Beneath the bizarre head, its lower jaw contains what looks like a saw--a row of huge, serrated teeth, all connected at their bases," Yong wrote earlier this year. "When the cookie-cutter finds a victim, it latches on with its large fleshy lips and bites down with its saw blade. With twisting motions, it scoops out a chunk of flesh, leaving behind circular craters."

They have been known to attack great white sharks and killer whales and even nuclear submarines (the last of which suggests to me that they may not have the most developed nervous systems).

And in one case, and one case only, a human. This was noteworthy enough that researchers Randy Honebrink, Robert Buch, Peter Galpin, and George H. Burgess wrote this up in the journal Pacific Science: "First Documented Attack on a Live Human by a Cookiecutter Shark." And Deep Sea News' Al Dove actually interviewed this human, a 65-year-old marathon swimmer named Michael Spalding. I run marathons, but I gotta say, marathon swimmers are crazy in an amazing way. Case in point: Spalding wanted to swim every channel between the main Hawaiian islands. He'd finished them all except the longest, Alenuihaha, which required more than 30 miles of swimming.

Apparently, in order to complete the crossing, you have to start in the middle of the night and with very calm conditions. There's a boat out ahead of him and a kayak paddling next to him. Both are using floodlights so that they can see where he is, and that begins drawing attention from squid.

OK, that's all the setup you need. Now here's Spalding telling the story of what happened when the cookie cutter attacked:

Spalding: I was swimming along in perfect conditions. The wind kicked up a little and I was hoping that it was a local condition that would disappear. We were on 30 min feeding schedule. At 8:15 I was trailing the boat by about 80 to 100 yards. The boat captain liked to run ahead and then go out of gear and wait for me to catch up. On the previous feeding stop he complained about not being able to see the Kayak and requested we turn on our emergency light so he could see us better. He also turned on his cabin lights at the same time. 15 minutes after we turned on the lights and I had my feeding I started to feel squid bumping into me. I assumed they were squid as they felt soft. I did not like this at all it worried me. It felt eerie and was waiting for something more dramatic. There was nothing I could do at this point but put my head down and do my job. After the 4th bump I felt a sharp prick just to the left of my sternum. It was excruciating and I gave a yelp. As soon as that happened I knew I had to get out of the water and the swim was over. I reached the front of the kayak and turned off the light and started climbing into a one person kayak. As I was about to push onto the kayak I felt a hit on my left calf. I ran my finger down my leg and felt a 2.5" by ¾ inch hole where I had been hit. I continued getting out of the water with blood everywhere. We called the boat on our radio and they were on us in a minute. I got off the kayak and into the boat and they put gauze and duct tape on the bite as the boat charged full blast to Kehei boat ramp. I was extremely disappointed to have to abort the attempt. As soon as I could get my wits about me I know it was a cookie cutter bite and the captain also concurred.

Dove: Did you go back and try the swim a second time?

Spalding: I waited 2 years for my second attempt. The healing process took 5 months and then I had to regain the conditioning that I lost in the healing process. I also had a number of other things that I had put on hold training for the first attempt that came up on the agenda limiting the amount of time I could commit to training. Again I started looking for the ideal window of weather and this time planned the swim to avoid being in the same place in the dark. I planned the departure for 3 am which would keep me in shallower water in the dark and allow me to land with minimal dark swimming. At almost the same location as the bit I encountered an oceanic white tipped shark. They are more feared to me than a tiger shark. I knew their reputation as a opportunistic hunter and became wary when it showed up on the scene. I watched it as it came in to get a look and then disappeared only to reappear at my rear some minutes later. It finally left for good but I was on full alert for the rest of the swim. The biggest obstacle to completing the swim was getting hit by a Portuguese man of war 5 hours from the end of the swim. This was very painful and created spasms in my leg and stomach. I kept swimming and a few hours later the pain subsided. Three miles from shore in the dark I was bumped by a fish. This got my speed up and I was thankful it did not return.

[Mr. Spalding completed the swim in 19 hours and 43 minutes, landing at Nu'u on February 27 at 10:43 PM]

Want to avoid a similar fate to Spalding's? A shark researcher offered this appropriately snarky response, "Don't swim at night, over a deep sea trench, while being lit from above by boat-based floodlights."

I think I can manage to avoid this situation.

Over at Wired Science, a photographer caught a stunning sequence of a killer whale in Monterey Bay flipping a dolphin out of the water and then eating it. Apparently, they do this regularly! "I have seen this with several different species of dolphins from various places around the world, so I think that killer whales probably do this regularly but not commonly," a NOAA ecologist told Nadia Drake. "With slower swimming species, like seals and sea lions, killer whales prefer to use their tails to swat them out of the water." Just go look at the ridiculous photographs.

Yikes. So that's reason number one: they kill dolphins, and who doesn't love dolphins?

Perhaps, though, we should more firmly establish that they are evil.* They kill baby things. So many baby things and in so many innovative ways! Baby seals. Baby sea lions. Even baby sperm whales!

Reason number three: they eat penguins. Penguins!

Reason number four: they kill sea turtles. If you're animal that appears on the folders that elementary school students might carry, LOOK OUT. 

And let's not forget: even other whales don't like them. In this BBC video, two humpbacks try to stop a pod of orcas from killing a gray whale baby. They don't succeed, but spend six hours trying to stop them from feeding on the body.

Reason number six: they know martial arts. Or at least they have a killer move that one orca biologist calls the "karate chop" in this Daily Mail article. This is it:

Reason number seven: they swim in unison to 'wave wash' seals off ice floes. In other words, they don't respect home base! In any game, there's got to be somewhere off limits. And in the deadly game between Weddell seals and killer whales, you'd think the safe zone would be ice floes. But look at what these killer whales go and do: they wash the seals off the ice and into the water by swimming in unison to create a wave. That's evil! Also, genius.

This strip of paper records the first ever message sent by telegraph, a feat that occurred on this day in 1844. Standing in the chamber of the Supreme Court, Samuel B. Morse sent a 19-letter message to his assistant Albert Vail in Baltimore, who transmitted the message back. Members of Congress watched the demonstration with fascination much like their countrymen did in future demonstrations. 

The piece of paper you see above records three things: a note Morse appended to the top detailing its importance, the actual Morse code marks, and their translation into letters at the bottom.

In most accounts, like the one maintained by the Senate (which used to house the Supreme Court chamber), the words Morse sent get short thrift: "A young woman provided the first message he sent: 'What hath God wrought.'" 

But the telegraph's long-distance application marks the beginning of a new era of communication, in which information can travel faster than any human by any means of conveyance. If you run the videos of the deployments of all the telephone and Internet and social networks around the world in reverse, they'd all wither and contract until there were only two points on the electric-information network: that Supreme Court chamber and the Mount Clair railway depot in Baltimore.

In light of all that, the words of Morse's friend's daughter, Annie Ellsworth, take on more meaning than she probably anticipated: What hath God wrought, indeed.

Sears! Once the catalog king, then an eminent brick-and-mortar retailer, and now, perhaps, a real-estate holding company that leases out space for computers that power the cloud.

Data Center Knowledge reported today that Sears had created a new unit -- Ubiquity Critical Environments -- to look into repurposing its shuttered stores as datacenters, starting with this one in Chicago.

Yes, this is this week's sign that the 21st century is upon us.

Sears Holdings has a portfolio of 2.5 million square feet of retail space. Not all of it will be suitable for housing server farms, but some percentage of it will be. Ubiquity is tasked with figuring out which stores could be converted. 

Right now, mall sites are out, but you never know. "I don't think the industry is yet ready for a mall-based data center," Ubiquity's manager told the site. "That may take some time. The stand-alone location is optimal." 

(Imagine wandering an empty mall. Closed, closed, closed. But behind each grate, you hear the whir of a shard of the Internet. Finally, you come to an open storefront. It's a Starbucks and there are 30 IT guys at makeshift standup desks.) 

Sears is considering other options for its closed stores: renting them out as "disaster recovery facilities (euphemistically: "business continuity centers") or leasing their roofs to wireless carriers.

It's weird out there.

H/t: Motherboard

Marc Whitten stands in front of an army of servers (Microsoft).

Watching the reveal of the Xbox One this week, one particular claim about Microsoft's new console caught my ear. Marc Whitten, the executive in charge of Xbox Live, the company's online gaming network, charted its historical progression.

"When we launched Xbox Live in 2002, it was powered by 500 severs. With the advent of the 360, that had grown to over 3,000," Whitten said. "Today, 15,000 servers power the modern Xbox Live experience."

Then Whitten said something extraordinary, "This year, we will have more than 300,000 servers for Xbox One, more than the entire world's computing power in 1999."

Now that's impressive! The statement even turned into an (unplanned?) applause line that tripped up Whitten's presentation. Because 1999 is not some distant date. It was the height of the dot-com bubble, after all. On an average home computer, you could play complex 3D games and download MP3s, edit video and mess around in Photoshop. Tens of millions of people had computers in their homes and Microsoft Office was nearly universal in business. Deep Blue had already beaten Garry Kasparaov!

And now, not even 15 years later, that same amount of information processing -- all the nuclear physics and climate simulations and videogames and spreadsheets and databases -- was being dedicated to running just one entertainment network, just one videogame network.

Stoners the world over were mumbling, vaguely, "Moore's Law, man. Moore's Law."

But then I started thinking: how did they figure this out? And can it be true? I contacted Microsoft's press people, who told me, "We do not have information to provide on these calculations."

Luckily, last year, Martin Hilbert and Priscila López estimated the world's information processing capacity at various points in time for a paper published in the journal Science: "The World's Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information." I got a hold of Hilbert over email and asked him if Microsoft's assertion held up to inspection. Let me walk you through his answer.

First, because Hilbert and López were dealing with historical terrain, they used a measure called MIPS, short for million of instructions per second. They broke out the world's computation resources into two broad categories: 1) General-purpose computing tracks mostly the CPUs in personal computers and videogame consoles (see chart) and 2) Application-specific computing, which is composed of digital signal processors (say in a DVD player), microcontrollers, and GPUs. By those two measures, in 1999, the world had 180 billion MIPS in general-purpose computing power and 800 billion MIPS in application-specific computing power for a total of 980 billion MIPS. With me? OK.

Hilbert said, let's create an upperbound, by taking the average performance of the bottom 100 supercomputers on the Top 500 supercomputer list, and imagine that Microsoft has 300,000 of them. Under those (improbable) conditions, they'd reach 300 billion MIPS, more than the general-purpose computing power of 1999, but not even a third of the total processing power available. 

Of course, we know Microsoft is not deploying 300,000 top supercomputers, so their claim is very likely an exaggeration.

But here's the weird thing: It's not that big of an exaggeration, according to Hilbert. "Realistically, since they are using less powerful (but specialized) servers, and orienting ourselves on the computing powers that are common in the gaming industry," he said, "I think the reality is rather that the computing power of this cluster is equal to the world's total computing power in 1994 or the world's general-purpose computing power in 1996."

As he summed it up, "I'd say they are some 5 years off... but nevertheless very impressive!" 

Because 1995 is less than 20 years ago. More than a quarter of American households already had a computer. This is not a comparison to the Apollo guidance computer or some IBM machine that used punch cards.

And now all of that power, all of it, resides in some cluster of computers served up by one company in Redmond, Washington, so that we can all play Call of Duty and watch movies together. How strange exponentiality (re)makes the world.

Oh, god, Science Channel! What are you doing to us?

As if a continental-scale INSECT INVASION was not enough.

As if the fact that the cicada invasion is a "frenzy of sex and death" was not enough.

As if widespread interest in eating these insects was not enough.

Now, the Science Channel has created a livestream of of a terrarium filled with cicadas crawling and sitting and flapping their wings and crawling some more.

Yick, ack, ugh! It is gross. But it is also impossible to stop watching. I warned you.

H/t Mashable

In late 1999, Microsoft created an ad for its upcoming 'Microsoft Reader' software. The headline blared, "This is a story about the future of reading," and underneath the story about the company's actual product, the marketers inserted a timeline based on "the best estimates of Microsoft researchers and developers" of what was going to happen to books in the future. 

The Microsoft Reader product was unremarkable and did not drive a revolution in the book marketplace. But the predictions! They're fascinating, particularly in how they attempt to anticipate the backlash and counterarguments to the increasing ubiquity of e-books that they forecast. It will not surprise you that they were overly optimistic, but interestingly, these are some of the few specific predictions that seem to have gotten better as they reached further into the future. Normally, the opposite is true. Let's go through them.

As late as 2010, electronic textbooks' market share was less than two percent.

"2002: PCs and eBook devices offer screens almost as sharp as paper: 200 dpi physical resolution is enhanced even further with ClearType."

People still argue about whether iPad resolution is as good as print. And there weren't really usable e-book devices in the market until 2004 when the Sony Librie was released.

"2003: eBook devices weigh less than a pound, run eight hours, and cost as little as $99."

Kindles didn't start selling for $99 or less until 2011. Though they were right that e-books would be very light. Even the aforementioned Sony Librie weighed less than half a pound.

"2004: Tablet PCs arrive with eBook reading, handwriting input, and powerful computer applications."

Though tablet devices have existed for a looong time, it's generally acknowledged that tablets "arrived" when Apple released the iPad in 2010. (Gartner called the 2009 tablet market sales "next to zero.")

"2005: The sales of eBook titles, eMagazines, and eNewspapers top $1 billion."

Most estimates for the e-book market in 2005 were between $10 and $100 million. The ebook market in the United States (the most developed market) only started to take off with the release of the Kindle and iPad (and increasingly big smartphones with good screens).

"2006: eBook stands proliferate offering book and periodical titles at traditional bookstores, newsstands, airports -- even in mid-air."

No. This was the old retail model applied too directly the sales of books. In reality, we buy digital books online.

"2009: eBook titles begin to outsell paper in many categories. Title prices are lower, but sales are higher."

This is the closest prediction yet: it was in 2011 and 2012 that ebook sales started to rival and overtake print sales in certain categories (in the United States). Still, not bad for a ten-year-out projection.

"2010: eBook devices weigh half a pound, run 24 hours, and hold as many as a million titles."

Pretty much nailed it. In 2010, Amazon unveiled the Kindle 3G, the first Kindle to weigh under a pound. It had about 30 hours of active battery life. Interestingly, the one miss is in the storage capacity of the device. Real Kindles hold a thousand or so books, but, of course, you can delete and then download more as you go, so you have *access* to a million or so titles.

"2012: Electronic and paper books compete vigorously. Pulp industry ads promote 'Real Books from Real Trees for Real People.' "

This one is my favorite prediction. The implication here is that the cultural pushback on e-books would focus on the authenticity of paper books and the people who read them. And if you look around, physical books, in fact, have come to signal authenticity ("real people"). 

Take Nicholas Carr's argument in the Wall Street Journal. "Readers of weightier fare, including literary fiction and narrative nonfiction, have been less inclined to go digital," he wrote on December 31, 2011. "They seem to prefer the heft and durability, the tactile pleasures, of what we still call 'real books'--the kind you can set on a shelf." The physical weight of the book instantiates the heaviness of its ideas. And setting such tomes on the shelf is an indication that the purchaser is a reader of important things. 

He concludes his essay with a vague idea that has a lot of currency among certain intellectuals: "There's something about a crisply printed, tightly bound book." Note the construction: "there's something about." I personally suspect that if anyone were to spell out precisely what that something was, it would sound kind of silly, like talking about why you like your favorite t-shirt: It would reveal too much about the qualities we want our objects to impart to us. (I say this as someone with full bookshelves and hundreds of Kindle books. I want my books to say the right things about me, too.)

"2015: Former high-tech rivals unite to fund the conversion of the entire Library of Congress to eBooks."

Get on it, dudes! You've got two years left, and I think it's a great and worthy notion.

I'll stop there as we can't really say much about the predictions for 2018 and beyond, but they're definitely worth looking at. You can find the original ad here, thanks to Flickr user catablogger.

Yesterday, the National Weather Service's Rick Smith posted a briefing to YouTube at 11:30am, which laid out a scenario for the day's weather events that was eerily precise. Specifically, he mentioned schools as an area of concern and highlighted the potential for an EF-4 tornado in the area south of I-40 and east of I-44 between 3 and 6pm. Shortly after 3pm, an EF-4 (or stronger) tornado hit Moore, which is located just south of I-40 and east of I-44.  

It's crushing to realize that this disaster's rough outlines were predicted four hours ahead of time and yet know that this did not stop lives from being lost. 

Here are three excerpts from the sadly prescient forecast:

We'll be talking about our increasing concerns for significant severe weather this afternoon and into this evening. We are expecting more significant severe weather today. The highest impacts we expect will be along and south of Interstate 44. Tornadoes and giant damaging hail are likely today. Something that's a little different today than yesterday is we are on a Monday and we do have schools in session and people driving home from work and that is a big, big concern for us as we expect severe weather potential to peak in that 3-6pm timeframe today...

Supercell storms are expected to develop in this area very quickly between 1 and 2 o'clock this afternoon. They will become severe fast, just like yesterday. We had storms that went from virtually nothing to producing large hail and tornadoes in less than an hour in some cases. So it's gonna go fast today.

If you're south of I-40 and east of I-44, you need to have a heightened state of awareness and be super alert to severe weather. We're expecting conditions today to be just as volatile if not even more so than they were yesterday for tornadoes. We've already had one EF4 tornado confirmed that occurred yesterday near Shawnee. I would not be at all surprised to have similar tornadoes occurring south of I-40, east of I-44. We're not trying to freak you out and scare you, we want you to be prepared. We're not guaranteeing a pinpoint forecast this is definitely going to happen, but you need to plan as if it is and be ready for what you're going to do.

A massive and powerful tornado hit Moore, Oklahoma this afternoon, causing widespread destruction, including at least 51 deaths. It's the deadliest tornado since 2011, and one of the worst in the last 20 years. This evening, President Obama signed a disaster declaration for Oklahoma.

Moore has a deep and tragic tornado legacy. The town could probably lay claim to being the very center of Tornado Alley, an area roughly defined from north Texas to South Dakota, and west of the Mississippi river. On May 3, 1999, Moore was hit by one of the worst tornadoes on record. That storm's winds were indirectly measured at 302 miles per hour, according to the National Weather Service, which called them "the highest winds ever found near earth's surface by any means." That tornado killed 36 people, the most deadly tornado in over 20 years, although several storms have surpassed that number of deaths since then, including 2011's Joplin storm, which killed 158.

Several sites are covering the tornado live:

• Reuters 
• Local news station, KFOR
• The Weather Channel

Smithsonian's Colin Schultz put together a comprehensive explainer on understanding the power of the storm. Weather Underground's Jeff Masters is the go-to blogger for meteorological events and has a substantial post on the tornado. 

The Red Cross is accepting donations via text message. Text REDCROSS to 90999 and you'll be billed $10. The municipal government of Moore is posting updates to a Facebook page.

We've assembled some common questions and research-based answers about the scientific and historical context of the disaster. If you have others you'd like answers to, email me at alexis.madrigal[at]gmail.com. 

• When exactly did the storm hit?
• Why do tornadoes strike Tornado Alley so frequently?
• How do tornadoes form?
• How are tornadoes measured?
• Are tornadoes getting more frequent?
• Are tornadoes killing more people than in the past?
• Are tornadoes causing more damage than in the past?
• How did Moore's emergency warning system work? Did people have time to take cover?
• What was the housing stock like in Moore?
• When do tornadoes strike most often?
• How well can we predict tornadoes?

When exactly did the storm hit?

Meteorologist Mike Smith created a map showing exactly how and when the tornado approached Moore during the three o'clock hour. (It's worth noting the tornado warning went out at 2:40pm.)

The simple answer is that warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico gets sandwiched between war, dry continental air and cold, dry air from drifting down from the Rockies. The combination creates the perfect conditions for thunderstorms to form. A more detailed explanation of the regional air movements is available here.

As these air masses collide, they can generate a type of particularly dangerous thunderstorm called a "supercell." They are characterized by their very strong, rotating updrafts accompanied by strong downdrafts. Tornadoes tend to occur at the interface between these two air movements.

While meteorologists are not quite sure why some supercells spawn tornadoes while others do not, it's clear that having strong thunderstorms makes having supercell more likely and having more supercells makes tornadoes more likely. Hence, the areas with the most strong thunderstorms tend to have the most tornadoes. 

75 percent of all tornadoes on Earth occur in North America. Per square mile, Oklahoma has the fifth-most tornadoes of any state, and the fourth-most tornadoes on an absolute basis after Texas, Kansas, and Florida.

National Weather Service

National Weather Service

It is also worth noting, however, that even in the very center of Tornado Alley, it is rare for any particular area to be hit by a tornado. As you can see in the graphic below, any location in the reddest part of the map could expect that a violent storm like the one today would touch down within 25 miles only four times per century.

How do tornadoes form?

The science of tornado formation is complex. In the video below, NASA Goddard's Tim Samaras explains what we do and don't know about the mechanics. While scientists understand the conditions that make tornadoes more likely, the final steps that lead to tornadogenesis remain mysterious.

How are tornadoes measured?

The "Enhanced Fujita" scale  attempts to quantify tornado strength. 

There is some controversy about the scale, particularly because wind speed is often inferred from damage, which is dependent on local construction practices, and not as precise as researchers would like. 

Other factors affect the destructiveness of a tornado aside from its winds: how wide it is, where it touches down, and how long it remains on the ground. 

The main thing to keep in mind is that anything EF4 or EF5 is likely to be very destructive if it hits near a human population center and stays near the ground for any period of time. Larger tornadoes do more damage for obvious reasons, too. 

The preliminary reports are that the storm today was an EF4 and that it was large. Many think it will be upgraded to an EF5 after further damage assessment. 

Only a couple percent of tornadoes are EF4 or larger. 

Are tornadoes getting more frequent?

The short answer is no, according to the National Weather Service, especially when it comes to more violent storms. "There has been little trend in the frequency of the stronger tornadoes over the past 55 years," the service notes. The longer answer is that more tornadoes are now reported than in years past, but that's probably due to an increase in the number of eyes scanning for tornadoes than the number of tornadoes. "Today, nearly all of the United States is reasonably well populated, or at least covered by NOAA's Doppler weather radars. Even if a tornado is not actually observed, modern damage assessments by NWS personnel can discern if a tornado caused the damage, and if so, how strong the tornado may have been," the Service explains. "This disparity between tornado records of the past and current records contributes a great deal of uncertainty regarding questions about the long-term behavior or patterns of tornado occurrence."

Are tornadoes killing more people than in the past?

The short answer, again, is no (the 2011 Joplin event notwithstanding). Although there are more people, and therefore a greater number of injured parties, in the United States in the regions where tornadoes strike, better forecasting and warning systems have greatly reduced the rate of fatalities per million people and the overall number of fatalities, as you can see in the following two charts. The fall was particularly dramatic before the tragedy in Missouri in 2011. (Note that the second chart shows the period from 1875-2000.)

Are tornadoes causing more damage than in the past?

No. Once loss data from the past is normalized for increasing wealth, population and building stock and also adjusted for inflation, the damage tornadoes cause has not increased and actually shows a hint of having decreased since 1950, according to a study by Kevin Simmons, Daniel Sutter and Roger Pielke, Jr. published late last year. The process of normalization is fairly statistically complex and the historical data varies in quality, but the methods used to normalize loss data are well-established.

Normalized tornado damage (Roger Pielke Jr).

The normalization methodology shows the consequences of more humans and human infrastructure concentrated in areas at high-risk for tornado strikes, so when a bad storm strikes, worse things can happen. As the American Meteorological Society's Bill Hooke wrote in 2011, "Tornadoes hitting downtown areas in the past? Rare - almost unheard of. But tornadoes hitting downtown areas in the future? Increasingly common." He gave the game Battleship as an analogy: if the board is filled with ships, then it is easier to hit them. The ships are human infrastructure and the opponents are natural disasters. (Still, Hooke would note that any particular home in tornado alley has a very, very, very small chance of being hit by a tornado in any given year.)

How did Moore's emergency warning system work? Did people have time to take cover?

The short answer is: early warning systems worked as expected.

The National Weather Service's Norman, Oklahoma office says that a tornado warning went into effect 16 minutes before the storm hit. That's three minutes faster than the current average lead time for a warning, according to NOAA.

On the ground, sirens would have gone off. Here's how the city of Moore describes their emergency procedures:

In Moore, our Emergency Management staff works closely with the meteorologists at the National Weather Service Forecast Office located in Norman. NWS personnel will generate warnings based upon not only radar information, but also information from our Moore severe weather spotters that are in the field. Therefore, when a warning is issued for Cleveland County, our EOC staff normally have played a part in the decision process. If our EOC staff determine that tornadic conditions will directly affect Moore, we will activate our local warning system, consisting of an outdoor warning siren system and a cable television interrupt. The NWS office will be triggering the alarm on NOAA Weather Radio, and local media will be broadcasting the warning as well.

The general problem with the warnings is that people might not hear or see them immediately, reducing the amount of time they have to find shelter. The second problem is that the tornado hit during early rush hour, a little after 3pm, when many people were on the move.

What was the housing stock like in Moore?

Because there was a large tornado in 1999, we have detailed information on some of the problems with the construction methods in the area. 

Engineer Timothy Marshall, in a report on the 1999 tornado, noted that much of the construction in the area does not follow best practices for resisting a tornado's winds. Marshall's damage report found that homes that affixed their walls to their foundations in certain ways had serious problems during the storm. Yet, when he returned to see the rebuilding process, he found many homes rebuilding with the same methods that had failed before. That's the housing stock that was hit by the storm today. Here's how Marshall put it in his 2002 report:

The author revisited the disaster area three months after the tornado to check the quality of new house construction. A total of 40 houses were examined in Moore and southern Oklahoma City on sites at which houses previously had been destroyed. The author found that the quality of new home construction generally was no better than homes built prior to the tornado. Most newly built homes were attached to their concrete foundations with tapered cut nails or shot pins as had been noted in homes destroyed by the tornado.

Marshall is back on the ground now investigating the current tornado damage, so we expect to find out more about what happened soon.

When do tornadoes strike most often?

Statistically, the worst months for tornado formation are May and June, though they can happen all year round. Historically, they've hit most often between 5 and 6 pm local time.

How well can we predict a tornado?

A better way of asking this question might be this: on what time scale, can we predict a tornado might form? The answer is that forecasters have a pretty good sense that a tornado is forming about 15 minutes before it touches down. On the day of a storm, forecasters have a pretty good idea of where severe storms might occur. Below, I've embedded the forecast update that the National Weather Service in Norman, Oklahoma released at about 11:30am. Generally speaking, they called the region and the time in which the tornado touched down: east of I-44 and south of I-40. Moore is less than 15 miles from where those two highways meet. But the region of worry that you see highlighted in the video is quite large: meteorologists can't provide anything like a pinpoint forecast.

On the much longer timescale, historical data, as in the map below (sent over by climate research Roger Pielke Jr), can tell you that a particular region is very prone to a tornado at a particular time of year, but not much more. 

NASA's Landsat satellites have been snapping pictures of the Earth from orbit since 1972. The most recent iteration of the project, the Landsat Data Continuity Mission, arrived at its orbital resting place on April 12, and shot this series of 56 images shortly thereafter. NASA stitched the pictures together into one long strip, which you can tour in the video above.

As always, satellite images testify to the wonder of the biosphere. This particular set of pictures, though, is a simple meditation on the diversity of conditions on Earth, and the mark that humanity has left on the planet.

Computer History Museum

Zilog was founded by Intel veterans Federico Faggins and Ralph Ungermann in 1974. Their first microprocessor, the Z80, was a hit. Intel's products, the company's Dave House admitted, "kind of got stomped on by Zilog with their Z80." But Zilog's success brought trouble in an unlikely form: Exxon.

First, Exxon made a large investment in exchange for 51 percent of the company. Then, they bought Zilog clean out, despite its next-generation 16-bit microprocessor, the Z8000, not having tremendous success. It was downhill from there. And by 1985, having invested a billion dollars, Exxon sold the company back to some of its employees and the investment firm Warburg Pincus.

I ran across this story while reporting on the history of Intel, and in those key days during the early 1980s, right before IBM decided to use Intel chips, Zilog was providing legitimate competition for the now giant company. 

What I soon discovered, though, was that Exxon was not alone in trying to make money off the computing boom. As Forbes recalled in 1997, many companies went chasing tech growth and came up empty-handed or worse.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Schlumberger was flush with cash from its oil well logging business. Fairchild Camera & Instrument was a pioneer in the semiconductor industry and in need of capital. Semiconductor chips didn't seem too far afield from Schlumberger's expertise. Didn't oil well measuring tools use electronics heavily? Schlumberger wrote out a check for $425 million to purchase Fairchild.

This was in 1979, just before the great boom in personal computers got underway. Schlumberger should have made billions of dollars from its acquisition. But it didn't. In 1987 it sold Fairchild at a $220 million loss to National Semiconductor.

You could make a long list of merger fiascos in computers and electronics: Xerox paying $900 million for mainframe manufacturer Scientific Data Systems in 1969. Exxon buying Zilog, a microprocessor company, and then some word processor companies, into which it sank $1 billion before selling and writing off the businesses. AT&T losing $4 billion on NCR during a bull market.

Faggins, for his part, still sounds a little bitter about it all. He left Intel disgruntled and wanted to take the company on. "And we almost succeeded," he recalled in an oral history. "The Z80 was our first product and it became very successful. It took the business away from the [Intel] 8080. Zilog was winning in the market, but then IBM's choice to adopt the Intel 8086 reversed the direction. That was the turning point. By the way, the key reason IBM chose Intel was that our sole investor, Exxon Enterprises, had declared war on IBM."

But it's not just sour grapes. G. Dan Hutcheson, president of VLSI Research, told Forbes, "Zilog might have been what Intel is today, if Exxon hadn't tied them down."

What exactly did they do wrong (aside from tiffing with IBM)? Bernard Peuto, who was at Zilog in the early years and later went on to Sun Microsystems, had a simple answer for what tended to go wrong: The big companies gave Silicon Valley upstarts too much money.

"Quite frankly I blame Exxon," Peuto said in a panel about Zilog at the Computer History Museum. "Exxon essentially choked us with money. They basically gave us too much money and too many directions, which we then kind of went into and in some sense there are times where you have to refuse and that's very hard to do when somebody gives you dollars. But the reality was the reason we were doing too many things is because we could afford to do it because Exxon was kind of giving us the check. That's my personal view. The elephant [had grown too] complex."

And maybe that's the history lesson we can apply today: Too much money too fast breeds too little focus and too much complexity.

Real C. elegans worms squirming in a laboratory agar plate. The have been genetically modified to express fluorescent proteins (Jesper Pedersen).

For all the talk of artificial intelligence and all the games of SimCity that have been played, no one in the world can actually simulate living things. Biology is so complex that nowhere on Earth is there a comprehensive model of even a single simple bacterial cell. 

And yet, these are exciting times for "executable biology," an emerging field dedicated to creating models of organisms that run on a computer. Last year, Markus Covert's Stanford lab created the best ever molecular model of a very simple cell. To do so, they had to compile information from 900 scientific publications. An editorial that accompanied the study in the journal Cell was titled, "The Dawn of Virtual Cell Biology."

In January of this year, the one-billion euro Human Brain Project received a decade's worth of backing from the European Union to simulate a human brain in a supercomputer. It joins Blue Brain, an eight-year-old collaboration between IBM and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, in this quest. In an optimistic moment in 2009, Blue Brain's director claimed such a model was possible by 2019. And last month, President Obama unveiled a $100 million BRAIN Initiative to give "scientists the tools they need to get a dynamic picture of the brain in action." An entire field, connectomics, has emerged to create wiring diagrams of the connections between neurons ("connectomes"), which is a necessary first step in building a realistic simulation of a nervous system. In short, brains are hot, especially efforts to model them in silico. 

But in between the cell-on-silicon and the brain-on-silicon simulators lies a fascinating and strange new project to create a life-like simulation of Caenohabditis elegans, a roundworm. OpenWorm isn't like these other initiatives; it's a scrappy, open-source project that began with a tweet and that's coordinated on Google Hangouts by scientists spread from San Diego to Russia. If it succeeds, it will have created a first in executable biology: a simulated animal using the principles of life to exist on a computer.

"If you're going to understand a nervous system or, more humbly, how a neural circuit works, you can look at it and stick electrodes in it and find out what kind of receptor or transmitter it has," said John White, who built the first map of C. elegans's neural anatomy, and recently started contributing to the project. "But until you can quantify and put the whole thing into a computer and simulate it and show your computer model can behave in the same way as the real one, I don't think you can say you understand it."

For example, when researchers touch a worm on the head and it responds by turning and moving backwards, what exactly is happening there? What molecular mechanisms coordinate the firing of neural networks that initiate and complete this complex behavior? This month, a paper came out in PLOS Biology describing that exact sequence as recorded in live C. elegans. But it's one of very few studies like that.

More broadly, OpenWorm raises fascinating questions about what we mean when we say something is alive. If and when this project succeeds in modeling the worm successfully, we'll be faced with a new and fascinating concept to think with: a virtual organism. Imagine downloading the worm and running it in a virtual petri dish on your computer. What, exactly, will you be looking at? Will you consider it to be alive? What would convince you?

Perhaps creations like the digital C. elegans will start to break down our binary conception of the matter in the world as either living or not living. We'll discover that we can create systems that exist in-between these two spheres, or that certain aspects of life as we know it are not required to meet our definition of being alive. 

"I suspect that we'll recognize that living systems are far-from-equilibrium molecular systems that are carrying out very specific sophisticated physical patterns and have some ability to sustain themselves over time," OpenWorm's organizer Stephen Larson wrote to me. "Thinking about it that way makes me go beyond a black and white notion of 'alive' to a more functional perspective -- living systems are those which self sustain. Our goal is to aggregate more of the biological processes we know that help the worm to self-sustain than have ever been aggregated before, and to measure how close our predictions of behavior match real living behavior, more than it is to shoot for some pre-conceived notion of how much 'aliveness' we need."

* * *

It's a complex, ambitious project, to say the least. White called it "bold." Yet it all began with a tweet. 

In early 2010, software engineer Giovanni Idili sent a tweet to the Twitter account for The Whole Brain Catalog, a project to bring mouse brain data together into more usable formats. He said, as if on a lark, "@braincatalog new year's resolution: simulate the whole C. Elegans brain (302 neurons)!" One of the Brain Catalog's founders, Stephen Larson, was scanning the @-replies and offered his assistance, "So, do you want any help with that? How are you going to do it?"

Beginning with a 1997 proposal at the University of Oregon, there have been several attempts to simulate worms. Some focused on the body alone. Others tried to simulate the worm's behavior through machine learning, with no attempt at a biologically realistic nervous system. Idilli and Larson wanted to go beyond these early efforts. When Larson was at MIT, he was influenced by Rodney Brooks, the director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the university (and the creator of the Roomba!). Brooks proposed the idea that if you want artificial intelligence, it should be situated within an environment. Is his 1990 paper, "Elephants don't play chess," he argued that "to build a system that is intelligent it is necessary to have its representations grounded in the physical world."

The great thing about C. elegans, though, is that its physical world in the laboratory is completely standardized and well known. The worms live in petri dishes with agar. If any environment can be modeled by a computer, it is a petri dish with agar. The nascent OpenWorm team could build a realistic virtual environment for a digital C. elegans. 

Which meant that their little worm brain -- the target of Idili's initial suggestion -- needed a body. For that, they reached out to Christian Grove at CalTech, who donated a 3D atlas of the worm to get them started. 

They had a map of the brain, a model of the body, and a pretty good idea of how to build the environment. Their artificial intelligence might not be embodied, but it would be "situated." The brain would direct the body and the body would interact with the environment, and all three pieces would be connected by the intricate feedback loops that permeate biology. 

Their goal became clear: they should build, as they put it on the website, "a fully digital lifeform -- a virtual nematode -- in a completely open source manner." 

Three years and 31 Google Hangouts later, OpenWorm is a going concern with Larson at the helm and a team spread across the continents. Alexander Dibert, Sergey Khayrulin, and Andrey Palyanov contribute software development from Russia, along with Matteo Cantarelli in the UK and Timothy Busbice in California. Neuroscientists Mike Vella and Padraig Gleeson are stationed at Cambridge and University College London, respectively. And of course, Idili in Ireland and Larson in San Diego. There is no central lab, nor could there be.

The OpenWorm team has broken down this immense task into five component systems. First, at the base of the project, they have a list of the 959 cells in the C. elegans body. The list includes a rough idea of what each of the cells does, thanks to decades of research on the worm. Then, they've got a life simulation engine they call Geppetto (shout out to Pinocchio!), which is the platform on which all the other software runs. Third, there is the simulated physical body. They are creating an algorithm for worm mechanics that can generate realistic muscle movements. Fourth, they have an electrical model for the muscles. What are the signals that they send and receive to move the animal? Last but not least, they must animate the connectome, the wiring diagram for the worm's nervous system. 

Their team has been making steady progress, but being at the leading edge means that they're also at the leading edge of encountering the problems that any effort to simulate a brain is going to have.

For an outsider and non-biologist, simulating the C. elegans brain seems like it should be relatively easy. You've got the map of the neurons. You know where all the cells go in the body of the worm. You know how it behaves under all these experimental conditions. What's so hard about simulating its behavior?

Basically, everything.

We don't know how to simulate every single protein and nucleic acid in a cell. And even if we could, it would be computationally staggering to try to model each and every cell in the worm down to that atomic level, figuring out each and every molecular interaction inside these densely packed cells. No experiments can output that data.

You could eschew biological realism entirely. It would be relatively trivial to create a CGI worm that *looked* realistic. Perhaps one could make it behave realistically by running machine learning on worm behavioral data in particular situations. But that wouldn't be a very interesting simulation of the processes of life. It certainly wouldn't be a model that would help biologists much.

So, between realistically simulating every atom and realistically simulating nothing, OpenWorm has had to make some tradeoffs. Larson thinks about it like this. Imagine a graph. Along the X-axis, you've got the level of biological realism baked into the simulation. Do its cells do what real cells do? Which parts of the cells do what their biological counterparts do? Do the neurons work like biological neurons? And the along the Y-axis, you've got the behavioral realism. Does this thing do wiggle like a real worm? Does it respond to chemicals like a real worm? Does it attempt to and succeed in reproducing?

The problem is, as Larson explains, "we don't know how far you have to go to the right on the X-axis to go [a certain amount] up on the y-axis." They don't know what level of biological realism will get them to what level of behavioral realism.

And, buried in that question is a deeper one: When can we say, or scream, raising our twisted fingers to the sky as lightning flashes above, "It's alive!"?

For example, they are using a model of how neurons work called the Hodgkin-Huxley model, which garnered its creators a Nobel Prize. If they were to add more detailed simulations of the neurons, would that meaningfully add to the behavioral realism of the organism as a whole? Or can the principles of neuronal firing and propagation be abstracted from their biological embodiment without losing any behavioral fidelity? 

Making decisions about these tradeoffs forms the core of the project. All biological simulation projects to date have faced similar challenges. Take the now defunct Canadian project called (cue techno!) Project CyberCell. 

Led by Michael Ellison of the University of Alberta, the team wanted to create a simple E. coli simulation. The molecules inside cells form these fantastically complex structures that are constantly moving around and changing shape. Modeling all that takes enormous computational horsepower, and that's assuming you know exactly how each protein is going to fold. It was too much to attempt. So, instead, CyberCell represented each molecule as a sphere -- "Every ribosome, every lipid molecule, every metabolite" Ellison said -- of approximately the right size. Then, they simply assigned each sphere certain probabilities of reacting with other spheres. "If the right enzyme connects with the right small molecule, there was a certain probability that a chemical reaction may take place," he explained.

Is that realistic? Not really. But it made it possible to start experimenting. "We still don't know enough about the living organisms," Ellison told me. "50 percent of E. coli is still a blackbox."

That figure might be even larger for C. elegans, but it's still the best characterized animal that researchers have got. It remains the only organism for which a complete connectome actually exists. Working in Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner's Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge during the 1970s, White and his team spent 13 years creating the wiring diagram. Electron microscopist Nichol Thomson cut the one-milimeter worms into 20,000 very thin slices, which -- because the worms are transparent -- he could then image with his microscope. "The thing that gave [Thomson] the biggest pleasure of all was to cut a long series of quality images," White told me.

Then, with White's direction, a technician named Eileen Southgate painstakingly labeled each nerve cell and connection in the micrographs. Through their work, they discovered C. elegans has 302 neurons that form approximately 10,000 connections. And Southgate traced each and every one. "I found out several years into her collaboration that as a hobby, she put huge jigsaw puzzles together," White recalled. "She has a wonderful visual memory." She began work at the lab when she was 16 years old and stayed until she retired.

The brain map was only one of several scientific feats accomplished with C. elegans. The worm was also the first multicellular organism to have its genome sequenced. And scientists precisely tracked its development from embryo to adulthood. There's even a database (WormBase) that contains more complete data about the organism's functioning at the molecular level than one could find for any other animal. Dozens of labs work with this little species.

"Brenner planned to use the worm to discover how genes made bodies and then behavior," wrote Andrew Brown in a book on C. elegans. "And this was in 1965, before anyone had found and analysed a single gene for anything." It is only today, in 2013, that his disciples' disciples' are beginning to fulfill that original vision.

In a 1974 paper quoted in the talk he gave accepting the Nobel Prize for Medicine, Brenner put it like this, "Behavior is the result of a complex ill-understood set of computations performed by nervous systems and it seems essential to decompose the question into two," he wrote, "one concerned with the question of the genetic specification of nervous systems and the other with the way nervous systems work to produce behaviour." In other words, how do genes build brains and how do brains direct bodies?

Now, finally, OpenWorm may be able to integrate the strains of research that began with Brenner into one simulation that, as it wiggles along in its digital petri dish, might be the first realistic virtual animal, a boon to research, and a Kurzweilian foreshadowing of the challenges humans face when we begin running life on silicon chips.

I asked several researchers whether simulating the worm was possible.  "It's really a difficult thing to say whether it's possible," said Steven Cook, a graduate student at Yale who has worked on C. elegans connectomics. But, he admitted, "I'm optimistic that if we're starting with 302 neurons and 10,000 synapses we'll be able to understand its behavior from a modeling perspective." And, in any case, "If we can't model a worm, I don't know how we can model a human, monkey, or cat brain."

Ellison echoed that thought. "They stand a much better chance of success than the people working on mammalian brains," he said. White, who led the creation of the worm connectome, said OpenWorm "seemed appropriate really" as a way of integrating all the data that biologists were producing. And the Kansas worm scientist Ackley figured that even if OpenWorm didn't work, something like it would. "C. elegans is probably going to be the first or very close to the first [multicellular organism] to be simulated," he said

David Dalrymple, an MIT graduate student who has contributed to OpenWorm and is working on a worm brain modeling project of his own, pointed out what he sees as a limitation to the effort. OpenWorm has incorporated a lot of anatomical data -- the structures of the worm's nervous system and musculature -- described by scientists like White. But these studies were carried out with dead worms. They can't tell scientists about the relative importance of connections between neurons within the worm's neural system, only that a connection exists. Very little data from living animals' cells exist in the published literature, and it may be required to develop a good simulation. 

"I believe that an accurate model requires a great deal of functional data that has not yet been collected, because it requires a kind of experiment that has only become feasible in the last year or two," Dalrymple told me in an email. His own research is to build an automated experimental apparatus that can gather up that functional data, which can then be fed into these models. "We're coming at the problem from different directions," he said. "Hopefully, at some point in the future, we'll meet in the middle and save each other a couple years of extra work to complete the story."

In his cubicle at Intel headquarters, Paul Otellini shows a chip-circuitry diagram that is stitched into the lining of his sportcoat. (Alexis Madrigal)

Forty-five years after Intel was founded by Silicon Valley legends Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce, it is the world's leading semiconductor company. While almost every similar company -- and there used to be many -- has disappeared or withered away, Intel has thrived through the rise of Microsoft, the Internet boom and the Internet bust, the resurgence of Apple, the laptop explosion that eroded the desktop market, and the wholesale restructuring of the semiconductor industry.

For 40 of those years, a timespan that saw computing go from curiosity to ubiquity, Paul Otellini has been at Intel. He's been CEO of the company for the last eight years, but close to the levers of power since he became then-CEO Andy Grove's de facto chief of staff in 1989. Today is Otellini's last day at Intel. As soon as he steps down at a company shareholder meeting, Brian Krzanich, who has been with the company since 1982, will move up from COO to become Intel's sixth CEO.

It's almost certain that the chorus of goodbyes for Otellini will underestimate his accomplishments as the head of the world's foremost chipmaker. He's a company man who is not much of a rhetorician, and the last few quarters of declining revenue and income have brought out detractors. They'll say Otellini did not get Intel's chips into smartphones and tablets, leaving the company locked out of computing's fastest growing market. They'll say Intel's risky, capital-intensive, vertically integrated business model doesn't belong in the new semiconductor industry, and that the loose coalition built around ARM's phone-friendly chip architecture have bypassed the once-invincible Intel along with its old WinTel friends, Microsoft, Dell, and HP. 

And yet, consider the case for Otellini. Intel generated more revenue during his eight-year tenure as CEO than it did during the rest of the company's 45-year history. If it weren't for the Internet bubble-inflated earnings of the year 2000, Otellini would have presided over the generation of greater profits than his predecessors combined as well. As it is, the company machinery under him spun off $66 billion in profit (i.e. net income), as compared with the $68 billion posted by his predecessors. The $11 billion Intel earned in 2012 easily beats the sum total ($9.5) posted by Qualcomm ($6.1), Texas Instruments ($1.8), Broadcom ($0.72), Nvidia ($0.56), and Marvel ($0.31), not to mention its old rival AMD, which lost more than a billion dollars. 

"By all accounts, the company has been incredibly successful during his tenure on the things that made them Intel," said Stacy Rasgon, a senior analyst who covers the semiconductor industry at Sanford C. Bernstein. "Tuning the machine that is Intel happened very well under his watch. They've grown revenues a ton and margins are higher than they used to be."

Even Otellini's natural rival, former AMD CEO Hector Ruiz, had to agree that Intel's CEO "was more successful than people give him credit for."

But, oh, what could have been! Even Otellini betrayed a profound sense of disappointment over a decision he made about a then-unreleased product that became the iPhone. Shortly after winning Apple's Mac business, he decided against doing what it took to be the chip in Apple's paradigm-shifting product. 

"We ended up not winning it or passing on it, depending on how you want to view it. And the world would have been a lot different if we'd done it," Otellini told me in a two-hour conversation during his last month at Intel. "The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do... At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn't see it. It wasn't one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought."

It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. "The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut," he said. "My gut told me to say yes."

In person, Otellini is forthright and charming. For a lifelong business guy, his affect is educator, not salesman. He is the kind of guy who would recommend that a junior colleague read a book like Scale and Scope, a 780-page history of industrial capitalism. To his credit, he fired back responses to nearly all my questions about his tenure, company, and industry at a dinner during CES in Las Vegas and later at Intel's headquarters. And when he wasn't going to answer, he didn't duck, but repelled: "I'm not going to talk about that."

On stage, however, during the heavily produced keynote talks CEOs are now required to give, Otellini's persona and company do not inspire legions of cheering fans. When he steps on stage, there is no Jobsian swell of emotion, no one screams out, "We love you, Paul!" And yet, this is the outfit that pushes the leading edge of chip innovation. They are the keepers of (Gordon) Moore's Law, ensuring that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit continues to double every couple years or so. If Otellini's CV is lacking a driverless car project or rocketship company, it may be because the technical challenges Intel faces require a different kind of corporation and leader.

"He's super low-key guy. He's not a Steve Jobs. He's not a Bill Gates. But his contribution has been just as big," said the new president of Intel, Renee James, who has worked with Otellini for 15 years.

His management secret was his own exemplary drive, discipline, and humility. He came in early, worked hard, and demanded excellence of himself. "He didn't yell and scream. He never dictated. He never asked me to come in on a Sunday. He never asked me to stay late on a Friday. But he had this way of getting you to rise to the occasion," said Navin Shenoy, who served as Otellini's chief-of-staff from 2004 to 2007. "He'd challenge you to do something that we'd all be proud of."

Peter Thiel might complain that the Valley hasn't invented rocket packs and flying car because investors and entrepreneurs have been focused on frivolous nonsense. But Paul Otellini's Intel spent $19.5 billion on R&D during 2011 and 2012. That's $8 billion more than Google. And a substantial amount of Intel's innovation comes from its manufacturing operations, and Intel spent another $20 billion building factories during the last two years. That's nearly $40 billion dedicated to bringing new products into being in just two years! These investments have continued because of Otellini's unshakeable faith that eventually, as he told me, "At the end of the day, the best transistors win, no matter what you're building, a server or a phone." That's always the strategy. That's always the solution.

Intel's kind of business and Otellini's brand of competent, quiet management are not in fashion in Silicon Valley right now. And yet, almost no one has can claim the Valley more than Otellini. Every day for four decades -- in a career that spans the entirety of the PC era -- Intel's Santa Clara headquarters have been the center of his working world.

As we stood outside Otellini's corner cubicle, marked by a makeshift waiting room with a television, a couple of display cases, and a plucky plant, I asked him to reflect on what the end might feel like. "It is strange. I've been pinning this badge on every day for 40 years," he said. "But I won't miss the commute from San Francisco." After making thousands of trips down 101 and racking up 1.2 million miles on United through hundreds of trips around the world, he seemed ready to stop going.

The "hallway" to Otellini's "corner office."

The Many Computer Revolutions

Despite the $53 billion in revenue and all the company's technical and business successes, the question on many a commentator's mind is, Can Intel thrive in the tablet and smartphone world the way it did during the standard PC era?

The industry changes ushered in by the surge in these flat-glass computing devices can be seen two ways. Intel's James prefers to see the continuities with Intel's existing business. "Everyone wants the tablet to be some mysterious thing that's killing the PC. What do you think the tablet really is? A PC," she said. "A PC by any other name is still a personal computer. If it does general purpose computing with multiple applications, it's a PC." Sure, she admitted, tablets are a "form factor and user modality change," but tablets are still "a general purpose computer."

On the other hand, the industry changes that have surrounded the great tablet upheaval have been substantial. Consumer dollars are flowing to different places. Instead of Microsoft's operating system dominating, Apple and Google's do. The old-line PC makers have struggled, while relative upstarts such as Samsung and Amazon have pushed millions of units.

The chip challenges are different as well. Rather than optimizing for the maximum computational power of a device, it's energy efficiency that's most important. How much performance can a processor deliver per watt of power it sucks from a too-small battery?

The semiconductor industry itself has seen perhaps even larger changes. In the early days of Silicon Valley, chipmakers had their foundries right there in the Valley, hence the name. During the 1980s, Japanese chipmakers battled American ones, beating them badly until Intel turned the tide in the latter half of the decade. The factories moved out of the valley to places like domesticallyChandler, Arizona and Folsom, California, as well as to Asia, mostly Taiwan.

Meanwhile, each generation of chips got technically more challenging and the foundries required to build them got more expensive. Chipmakers needed to sell massive amounts of chips in order to make up the huge capital equipment costs. The industry became cruelly cyclical, booming and busting with a regularity that defied managerial skill. For all those reasons and more, during the last twenty years, the chipmaking industry has been consolidating. Almost all semiconductor companies are now "fabless," choosing to outsource the production of their silicon to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC), or GlobalFoundries, a venture backed by the United Arab Emirates. The new fabless chip designers don't have to build plants, which allows them to have more stable businesses, but they lose the ability to gain competitive advantage by tweaking production lines. The transition to this state of affairs killed off many companies and allowed others to thrive.

Add it all up and there are only a few chipmakers left standing. The aforementioned contract manufacturers like TSMC, Samsung, and, of course, Intel.

These two structural trends at the consumer and industry levels intersect at a formerly obscure British company called ARM Holdings. Originally founded as a partnership between Acorn Computers (remember them?), VLSI (remember them?), and Apple, ARM now just creates and licenses the chip architectures that other companies tweak and have manufactured. In a sense, they sell a chip "starter kit" that companies like Apple, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Marvel, and Nvidia build upon to create their own products. 

Chips based on the ARM intellectual property are generally not as high-performance as Intel's, but they're fantastically energy efficient. While ARM did make chips for Apple's ill-fated Newton device, in the early 2000s, ARM became the dominant architecture supplier to the so-called "embedded" market.  These chips are not general computing devices, but have specific jobs in (for example) cars, hard drives, and factories. This specialization is also one of the reasons that ARM chips are cheap. An Intel microprocessor could sell for $100. ARM-based chips might sell for $10, and often less than a dollar. In the first quarter of this year, 2.6 billion chips using ARM's architecture were shipped.

The two key attributes of ARM's architecture -- energy efficiency and low cost -- developed before cell phone phones, but they were exactly what mobile designers were looking for. As the smartphone market exploded, so did ARM's share price as investors realized what a key node ARM had become in the burgeoning computer-on-glass phone and tablet market.

For companies who are trying to decide whether to go with Intel or an ARM-licensee, it's a bit like being asked whether you'd rather deal with Switzerland or the Aztec empire. "With ARM, when you are tired of Qualcomm you can go to NVIDIA or another company," Linley Gwennap, the boss of the Linley Group, a research firm, told The Economist last year. "But in Intel's case, there's nobody else on its team."

ARM-based designs are now found in more than 95 percent of smartphones. ARM may not be dominant in the way Intel is dominant in PCs, but the system it underpins is.

Simon Segars is the man who will have to deal with the fallout from all of ARM's successes. He begins as the new CEO of the company on July 1. I met him after he spoke on a panel about "multi-industry business ecosystems" at the Parc 55 hotel in the heart of San Francisco. He was tall and genial, happy to patiently and thoroughly explain why ARM had found itself in possession of so many friends and so much good fortune.

"I can genuinely say that our approach is to work within an ecosystem that is a healthy ecosystem. By that I mean the people in it are making money from what they do," he said. "We get questions on a regular basis, Why don't you quadruple your royalty rates? Because you're so strong, what are you customers going to do? We could do that and we could probably enjoy some more revenue for some time, but our customers would go off and do something else or have less healthy businesses. If we tried to extract lots of money out of the ecosystem, we'd have less companies supporting the ARM architecture and that would limit where it could go."

ARM is a company that finds itself in the right place at the right time with a philosophy of innovation that lots of companies want to believe in.

"Through the '90s and early 2000s, we saw an explosion in the number of people who could build a chip. That led to a lot of innovation and all the electronic devices that we see today," Segars said. "The role we've played is providing this core building block, this microprocessor, that many of these devices require. We've provided that in a very cost-effective way to anybody who wanted it. And that's allowed people to put intelligence into devices that they couldn't have afforded to do because they would have had to do it all themselves."

Many of the structural changes that occurred in these industries now seem predictable. It feels like somebody else could have positioned Intel differently to take advantage of these trends. At the very least, Otellini should have seen where the changes were leading the silicon world.

And the thing is, he did. He just wasn't able to get the Intel machine turning fast enough. "The explosion of low-end devices, we kinda saw as a company and for a variety of reasons weren't able to get our arms around it early enough," he admitted.

It was Otellini, after all, who had made the call to start developing the very successful low-power Atom processor for mobile computing applications. And it was Otellini, who upon ascending to the throne, drew a diagram that I'll call the Otellini Corollary to Moore's Law at the company's annual Strategic Long Range Planning Process meeting, or SLRP. He duplicated it for me in an appropriately anonymous Intel conference room, calling it half-jokingly "the history of the computer industry in one chart."

On the Y-axis, we have the number of units sold in a year. On the X-axis, we have the price of the device, beginning with the $10,000 IBM PC at the far left and extending to $100 on the far right. Then, he drew a diagonal line bisecting the axes. As Otellini sketched, he talked through the movements represented in the chart. "By the time the price got to $1000, sort of in the mid-90s, the industry got to 100 million units a year," he said, circling the $1k. "And as PCs continued to come down in price, they got to be an average price of 600 or 700 dollars and we got up to 300 million units." He traced the line up to his diagonal line and drew an arrow pointing to a dot on the line. "You are here," he said. "I don't mean just phones, but mainstream computing is a billion units at $100. That's where we're headed."

"What I told our guys is that we rode all the way up through here, but what we needed to do was very different to get to [a billion units]... You have to be able to build chips for $10 and sell a lot of them."

"This is what I had to draw to get Intel to start thinking about ultracheap," Otellini concluded.

"How well do you think Intel is thinking about ultracheap?" I asked.

"Oh they got it now," he said, to the laughter of the press relations crew with us. "I did this in '05, so it's [been more than] seven years now. They got it as of about two years ago. Everybody in the company has got it now, but it took a while to move the machine."

It took a while to move the machine. The problem, really, was that Intel's x86 chip architecture could not rival the performance per watt of power that designs licensed from ARM based on RISC architecture could provide. Intel was always the undisputed champion of performance, but its chips sucked up too much power. In fact, it was only this month that Intel revealed chips that seem like they'll be able to beat the ARM licensees on the key metrics.

No one can quite understand why it's taken so long. "I think Intel is still suffering with the inability of this very fine company to enter a new major segment that changes the game," Magnus Hyde, former head of TSMC North America told me. "That's been a problem before Paul, been a problem during Paul, and will probably be a problem going forward. They have all the things they need on the paper: the know-how, the customers, the cash to take over whatever they need. But somehow a little piece is missing."

"This is a company with 100,000 employees with a 40-year legacy. They are unbelievably good at what they do. No one can touch them," said Rasgon, the analyst. "There is a certain degree of arrogance that goes align with that."

"As CEO, that's your job: steer [the ship]," he continued. "It doesn't necessary mean [Otellini had] a failure of vision, but he couldn't get the ship to turn."

Ruiz, who led AMD's last battle with Intel while he was CEO from 2002 to 2008, told me he thought Intel's mobile progress had been slowed by their concentration on his company. "The focus the company has had for the past three decades on squashing AMD caused them to lose sight of the important trends towards mobility and low power," he said. "They should have focused more on their customers and the future than on trying to outdo AMD."

Some people seem to think someone else could have done better. And it's nice to believe in the transformative leader. Call it the Fire-the-Coach Fallacy. Sometimes, installing a new leader of an organization leads to better performance. But far more often, as some simple Freakonomics blogpost would tell you, we overestimate the importance of changing the coach or the CEO. It's not that CEOs are not important, but the preexisting conditions within and surrounding a company are just more important.

Unlike a lot of leaders, Otellini seems aware of this fact. "Intel's culture is blessedly not the culture of a CEO, nor has it ever been," he told me. "It's the Intel culture."

Otellini, of course, knew the Intel culture well. It had formed the substrate of his entire career. Starting out in finance in 1974, he'd worked his way up the chain on the business side of the operation, eventually landing the key gig of managing Intel's IBM account in 1983. It was right before Intel abandoned the memory business. He'd worked closely with Andy Grove, watching how he processed information, managed, and made decisions. He'd spent two years in the executive suite with Craig Barrett, watching him steer Intel in the rocky days after the Internet bust.

The Intel culture has been remarkably successful, of course. But it has also shown a resistance to change. It has managed to successfully surf massive transitions like getting out of the memory business in 1985 to focus on microprocessors and retaining a leading position in the move from desktop processors to laptops, but the same focus and scale that make Intel so powerful also prevent it from changing tacks quickly. If you've got 4,000 PhDs and 96,000 other people working for you, it's hard to turn on a dime.

Perhaps, though, the transformation that Otellini began in 2005 will finally be complete during Brian Krzanich's tenure. Intel's technical lead, perfectionism, and scale will create amazing chips at prices that cause phone and tablet makers to give up their commitments to the ARM ecosystem.

"They already have products in the marketplace that are competitive and I would not be surprised if they had best-in-class products in a few years," Rasgon said. "What they are doing on the [manufacturing] process has really driven that."

Otellini sees an analogy to the current situation in Intel's performance with Centrino laptop chips. "Intel made the big bet. [Chief Product Officer] Dadi [Perlmutter] and I made the big bet in 2001 to bet on mobile. This was when the desktop was 80 percent of all PCs, maybe 90 percent, and unabated growth and notebooks were luggables," Otellini said. "And we thought that there was an argument about what a computer could be and that led to what would become Centrino."

Centrino chips won over Apple's Steve Jobs because the silicon was so good they could not be ignored. "The head-to-head of comparison of an Intel based notebook and an Apple notebook were night and day in terms of performance, battery life, etc," he said. "That's what got their attention."

And if Apple -- so notoriously anti-Intel that a 1996 Mac commercial showed a burning Intel mascot -- could come to love Intel processors, couldn't all the current ARM licensees see the blue Intel light?

The cover image of Intel's 1983 history of itself, "A Revolution in Progress."

Silicon Valley has been, rightly or wrongly, synonymous with innovation for four decades. Now, it's as much a notion as a place. When Paul Otellini joined Intel in 1974, a year of bloodletting at the company that also saw two of its future CEOs hired (Otellini and his predecessor Craig Barrett), the peninsula south of San Francisco and the Santa Clara Valley had merged in the American mind into the crucible for the future. Though Intel would only make $20 million that year, it was clear that these chips, and their tendency to get cheaper so quickly, were a new force unto the world. The whole enterprise was shaped by individual humans, structured by capitalism, and aided by Cold War R&D money, but the effects of all this memory and computation, its exponentiality, were hard to predict. A story led the New York Times business section a couple years later with the banner headline, "Revolution in Silicon Valley." The subheadline read, "'The basic thing that drives technology is the desire to make money,' says one executive. Now, where can they use the technology?" 

Think of that as a kind of ur-mainstream media Silicon Valley story. It's got all the elements: an early reference to the orchards that used to exist, "low-slung" buildings as the unlikely seat of revolution, hot consumer products, hypercompetitive industries, massive innovation, great men, something like a formulation of Moore's Law, and the exceptionalist sense that this could only happen in this one place in California. 

There are two conflicting narratives about all this Silicon Valley innovation. On the one hand, there is the notion that Silicon Valley is an ecosystem of entrepreneurs and inventors, financiers and researchers. Companies can break up and reassemble. Spinoffs can pop out of larger corporations. Startups can disrupt whole industries. Competitors can cooperate and then compete and then cooperate. And when you add up all these risk-taking, failure-forgiving people, the sum is greater than the parts. Fundamental to this notion is the idea that innovation happens best in networks of firms and individuals, in an ecosystem (a word that itself gained credence thanks, in part, to Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich in the late 1960s). 

The ARM biosphere, from the cover of the company's 2009 annual report (ARM).

On the other hand, we have Intel. Intel structured and thought of itself like a research laboratory, according to long-time Silicon Valley journalist Michael S. Malone, in his 1985 book, The Big Score. "The image of a giant research team is important to understanding the corporate philosophy Intel developed for itself," Malone wrote. "On a research team, everybody is an equal, from the project director right down to the person who cleans the floors: each contributes his or her expertise toward achieving the final goal of a finished successful product."

From Intel's 1984 annual report (Intel)

Malone went on that the culture of Intel was not that of a bunch of loosey-goosey risk takers, but true believers, almost robotic in their dedication to Intel's goals. "Intel was in many ways a camp for bright young people with unlimited energy and limited perspective," he continued. "That's one of the reasons Intel recruited most of its new hires right out of college: they didn't want the kids polluted by corporate life... There was also the belief, the infinite, heartrending belief most often found in young people, that the organization to which they've attached themselves is the greatest of its kind in the world; the conviction they are part of a team of like-minded souls pushing back the powers of darkness in the name of all mankind."

This is a very different vision of innovation. This is an army of people tightly coordinated, highly organized, and hardened by faith. It was this side that competitors and suppliers have long encountered and complained about (sometimes appealing to the regulatory authorities).

"They are tough to deal with. I know some of the executives privately and they say, 'We're not really nice people to deal with.' They admit it. And it's true," Magnus Hyde, former head of Taiwan Semiconductor North America, told me. "They are really nasty when you get into negotiations."

And as for this whole "failure's cool!" mantra that seems to re-echo around Silicon Valley, Intel's Andy Grove enshrined what he called "creative confrontation," which encouraged and rewarded people to get after each other for flagging performance or mistakes. 

The cover of Intel's 1982 annual report (Intel).

Taken as a whole, Intel is a self-contained research, development, and deployment machine. That is not an ecosystem. Though obviously Intel has many partners with whom it makes money and has good relationships, on the leading edge of innovation, Intel goes it alone. 

Time and again, this strategy has worked as almost all of their competitors have fallen by the wayside. Intel is the only chip company in the world that's been able to hang on to its vertically integrated business model. "They have these methods, these Intel methods, that have worked very well for them," Hyde said.

The way Otellini vanquished AMD is a classic example of the Intel way. AMD had always played Brooklyn to Intel's Manhattan. Otellini himself had offers from both companies coming out of business school, and the competition remained fierce all the way until he took the reins. AMD was resurgent then. They had beat Intel to market with excellent 64-bit chips that were perceived to provide more performance for less money than Intel's processors. AMD's stock was on a climb that would take it to dizzying heights. By the end of 2008, Intel had destroyed AMD's momentum and sent the company into a tailspin. Finally, in early 2009, AMD spun out its fabrication facilities, exiting the chipmaking game. It was TKO in the longest-running bout in Silicon Valley. "They buried AMD," Rasgon put it bluntly.

Of course, there were several ugly court battles about Intel's hardball tactics in keeping AMD out of more machines. Intel eventually paid AMD $1.25 billion to settle the case in late 2009.

What's clear is that when Intel has a single competitor to focus on, they are hard to beat. "The thing about Intel is that we always come back," Otellini told me. "We put resources on it. We get focused. And watch out." They outinnovate, outmanufacture, and outcompete any company that comes into their targets. 

Which brings us back to the question of mobile, the space that has eluded Intel for a decade. What's fascinating is that it's a battle between Intel and a swarm of companies licensing chip designs from a relatively small IP company, ARM. Intel has bulk and strength, but they've come up against that other model of innovation: the ecosystem. It's two ideas about how Silicon Valley works locked in combat. If you're the swarm, with Qualcomm as the queen bee, the question is: How do you hold the coalition together? 

If you're Intel, which fly do you fire the shotgun at? Not ARM, that's for sure.

"ARM is an architecture. It's a licensing company," Otellini said. "If I wanted to compete with ARM, I'd say let's license Intel architecture out to anyone that wants it and have at it and we'll make our money on royalties. And we'd be about a third the size of the company."

"It's important for me, as the CEO, that I tell our employees who it is that we have to compete with and who we're focused on, and I don't want them focused on ARM. I want them focused on Qualcomm or Nvidia or TI," he continued. "Or if someone like Apple is using ARM to build a phone chip, I want our guys focused on building the best chip for Apple, so they want to buy our stuff."

I asked ARM's Segars about what I'd heard from Otellini, namely that Intel would beat the individual members of his coalition because they make the best transistors, and that would ultimately carry the day.

"There is a long track record of Intel investing very heavily on the leading edge of technology and implementing innovations of process technologies ahead of everybody else. That is a statement of fact and nobody would dispute that," Segars responded. "The transistors are, of course, important. The way in which the transistors are used is very important and really what the explosion of the technology space over the last couple of decades has shown is that there is a need to innovate and you can't focus innovation in just one company. If all the world's chips came from one vendor, whether it's Intel or anybody else, naturally that's going to limit innovation because there are only so many people and there will be a philosophy that's followed."

But Otellini, or Krzanich, can't focus Intel on ARM's "intangible" rhetoric. The questions industry watchers should be asking, Otellini said, are these ones: "Do you think Intel can beat Qualcomm? Do you think Intel can beat Nvidia? Do you think Intel can compete with Samsung?" 

The answer might be yes, Intel can compete with each one, but maybe not with them all. 

Or, maybe, the great machine will dominate once again. That's how Stacey Rasgon, the analyst who's been watching Intel and its rival chipmakers for two decades, sees it: "If I'm looking out five, ten years, they could potentially bury everybody else."