Prime Minister Putin was recently shown cutting-edge Russian 180 nanometre microchips. In just a few years, we'll push the frontier to 90 nanometers. And who cares if the Intel Corporation has already unveiled a new 32 nm microprocessor?
In October, Prime Minister Putin, along with head of Rusnano Anatoly Chubais, visited the Mikron plant in Zelenograd where the latest Russian 180 nm microchips are produced. During the visit, the government promised - in writing - to invest another 16 billion roubles into the plant, which should allow it to reach the 90 nm mark.
The microchip wavelength has been halved every eighteen months for the past ten years. On September 15, 2009, two weeks before Putin's historic visit, Intel Corporation unveiled a new 32 nm microprocessor. Almost all the major companies across the globe use a wavelength of 45 nm. In four years, when Mikron is expected to launch its production of 90 nm hardware, Intel will probably already be in the region of 5-10 nm.
It's almost as if the guys from Sitronics were showing Putin the latest Russian bomber with a speed of 160 km an hour and promising that an investment of 16 billion would get the bomber to fly at a speed of 360 km an hour.
Interestingly enough, the guys from Sitronics have not been shot or fired from their jobs.
In early June, Interfax published some mind-blowing news: "After a 2-year delay, the Russian president has received new relay planes that allow him to be on-line during his flights. On Monday, two TU-214SR planes arrived at Vnukovo Airport." The report then went on to describe radio-relay communications as the most reliable in the world.
In other words, in an age when satellite communications allow a US Army Sergeant to see a real-time picture transmitted by a drone, and an American surgeon to send a tomographic scan for analysis to Bangalore in India, the Russian President has received a "gift" consisting of two ancient flying mobile phones worth 2.6 billion roubles. The next step must be the introduction of an advanced system of message transmission by tying knots on ropes.
The makers of the "miracle mobile phones" weren't shot or fired either.
A week ago, Deputy Economy Minister Andrei Klepach, who, as far as I know, holds a university degree, announced to the world that the Economy Ministry would change the Russian law on toll roads so that the toll roads would have no alternative roads, as they do "in Germany and China".
I would like to promptly inform Mr Klepach that Germany has no toll roads whatsoever.
Similarly, China abolished the Asian-style toll road - an ordinary road with a booth in the middle - on January 1, 2009. Now, China uses only Western-style toll roads.
The Economy Ministry doesn't need to pass a law on toll roads, because such a law already exists. Under the new law, an "alternative road" means a road that is three times longer than its paid analogue.
And, again, Klepach was not shot for sabotage or sacked for being unfit for his job.
A month ago, former assistant chairman of the Leningrad District Executive Committee and current head of Rostekhnadzor Nikolai Kutyin reported on the causes of the Sayano-Shushenskaya Hydroelectric Power Station accident. The report revealed that the Turbine-2 was out of balance after being repaired in March. Why? Because specialists in the field are apparently an extinct species. Second, vibration went up four times during the time of operation, but the turbine wasn't stopped. Third, of the 80 pins that had been used to fix the roof, only two were normal, six had no nuts and 41 showed signs of "fatigue fracture", while the rest were torn out and lost, so nothing could be said for them. Basically speaking, then, if the roof had been fixed with normal pins, excessive vibration would still have jammed it, but certainly not torn it off completely. Moral of the story: Chubais is to blame for everything.
The Deputy Chairman of the District Executive Committee was not shot or forced out of work after presenting that report.
God was merciful to me: in my time, faced with a choice between physics and literature, I opted for literature. I'm a philologist by training, and thus not obliged to know about nanometres and rusty nuts and bolts. But even a philologist has enough basic education (after all, an educated person must know about Ohm's law and must have read Dostoyevsky) to understand that all a "miracle relay plane" does is plug holes in the satellite network. He must understand that from a security standpoint, there is no difference between intercepting a plane or a satellite. In both cases, the signal is transmitted by centimetre waves (because longer waves have a much lower capacity), and safe communications are ensured by the encoding system - not by the physical transmitter of the signal. I don't know what members of the Russian Academy of Sciences think when they read about the "advanced 180 nm technologies". I'm not sure if they curse to themselves or weep silently. But I do know that Russia will die without science and technology, probably even sooner than without literature.
Fortunately, President Medvedev has taken measures to seek out new technologies and solutions, starting with orders for his chief of staff to study the proposals of a blogger by the name of Maxim Kalashnikov, who hopes to create a "bioagroecopolis" by using the latest Russian construction technologies. Could it really be that they only care about their own villas and the Gunvor company?
Yulia Latynina