Monthly Archives: December 2002

Digital makeup, cabinet beasts and the golden section

Does digital makeup deny actors higher billing in movies? Some bright sparks from Brazil use SR to make computers more accessible. Why grow a whole cow (Or tuna or chicken or salmon or whatever.) when all you want is a … Continue reading

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Back buttons, client-side and server-side code

The PHP interpreter works thanklessly. Here are some tips for writing PHP code that reduces server load. Some good tips on how to build DOM-compliant menus. Quick, simple Web usability for the masses. Doing drop shadows the right way with … Continue reading

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Joe, we hardly knew ya

Should I stay or should I go?

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Paranoia on Parade! Grepping the spoken word

One of the chief things that intelligence agencies have been lusting after for many years is the ability to pick out certain key phrases in spoken conversations that rush over global phone lines on a daily basis. Bright sparks have … Continue reading

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Not enough sleep in the last two days

Here’s an idea: what if we are thinking too much of ourselves? What if the history of each human personality, from initial state to final state could be represented as a huge binary number? It would be a pretty damn … Continue reading

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Vibrating wires, teeth from stem cells and Web accessibility

A fellow over at Evolt offers advice on including accessibility in web design. Tissue engineering takes a big step forward–scientists grow teeth from stem cells. In as yet unexplored area of classical mechanics, a wire stands on end, held upright … Continue reading

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Bad news

I guess it was only a matter of time before this happened but today I dropped my laptop and cracked the screen. The system appears to boot up fine but the screen is divided into a mess of white and … Continue reading

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Pattern recognition improves, more spam expected

There used to be this web-based mail service called MessageTo that used a clever test to automate the process of updating an e-mail user’s whitelist. Sadly, but not surprisingly, research has cracked this clever test. The test was hard to … Continue reading

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More artficial life stuff

Paul Davies, a physicist from the UK, says that information theory and nanotechnology are likely to be areas from which artificial life will emerge. He also seems to think that we won’t be able to fully understand how chemical evolution … Continue reading

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Spam and solar energy

The evolution of defenses against spam: essay one and essay two. A detailed site about some folks down in California and their attempts to go totally solar.

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