In the light of yesterday’s post, I wondered about progress in attempts to combine microelectromechanical systems and scanning probe microscopy. I looked in this direction because I had learned that it took the team at Rice eight years to figure out ways to reliably make their little bucky-wheeled chassis with conventional chemistry. They had to [...]
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Pace Arko
A team at Rice University builds a nanoscopic car chassis out of buckyballs and nanotubes. They claim the wheels roll but, some are skeptical. Over at the Georgia Institute of Technology, they hope to domesticate microbes and coax them into building complex circuit elements and other microscopic structures for us more cheaply than photolithography. A [...]
Maybe some of you have read "Dial F for Frankenstein?" In that short story Arthur C Clarke imagines the consequences of a minor technical improvement in the global communications network. Suddenly a new lifeform emerges out of the network and it quickly learns how to protect itself and control its body. Clarke’s story is often [...]
About a week or so ago Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy condemned the publication of the genome of the virus responsible for the flu epidemic of 1918. Kurzweil in particular called for the genome to be censored.
Well it’s more than a month since I’ve said anything. Mostly this was writer’s block and other preoccupations. But to resume: It’s common now for labor to outsourced from countries with high living standards and strong regulation to countries with lower standards of living and weaker regulation. Large businesses do this to reduce their costs. [...]
coLinux: and open source Linux emulator. Run Linux inside NT5+ without buying VMWare. There are other ways to emulate Linux inside NT5+ with other open source emulators. I really don’t know why I started exploring this, either I multiboot, use Knoppix or run it pure. Well–it might be useful at some point. Run XP from [...]
First: Nice ways to style data tables. Nice ways to style forms and marginally improve their usability. Recently I’ve been reading much about AJAX, treating pages as applications, rich interactivity, and hype about the top ten tools of Web 2. As long as these AJAX scripts are designed properly with accessibility in mind, they won’t [...]
Friends have shown me and given me casino-legal craps dice. Take a look at the photograph below to see what they look like. Notice that they are transparent, have sharp, nonbeveled edges and don't have indentation to represent numbers. They are also big. This is so the user and the casino can see that the [...]
I suppose I should say something about what has been happening on the Gulf Coast these last 7 days. A Randy Newman song, which this post is titled after, has been surfacing in my head over and over again these last few days. I don’t know what else to say. The whole thing is FUBAR [...]
And before you get the idea that it’s all glowing wonders and rose-tinted glasses here at the mighty, mighty Farlops Industries, let me say few words about an essay I read over at Worldchanging the other day.