Farlops Industries

My History with Gizmo Wristwatches

When I was in college back in the middle Eighties, I had a Casio calculator watch. This was the expensive apotheosis of nerdery back then. In the Eighties Japan was kicking everyone's ass in consumer electronics. At the time microchips had become so cheap that towards the end of the decade, they were giving away cheap watches in cereal boxes. Smart people in the wristwatch industry--that is to say, nobody in Switzerland or the US--realized that the only way to keep the prices up was to jam more functions in the box, thus the Casio C 80 calculator watch. Walking around with this thing strapped to my wrist made me feel like Mr. Spock or Dr. Who.

Anyway, fast forward to the beginning of the Twenty-first Century.

My Xonix wristwatch, which served me very well for more than four years partially broke several months ago. Actually it would have served even longer. It's just that I broke the stem for the analog watch when trying to replace its battery. I now have no way of setting the watch but, everything else still works--the digital recorder, the thumb drive, the ear buds, everything. In our diminished expectations of product quality in these modern times, I consider that pretty good endurance. But if the analog watch doesn't work, I just can't stand to wear it on my wrist. I'm keeping it as spare parts for a friend's Xonix watch of the same model.

Continue reading "My History with Gizmo Wristwatches" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 3:51 PM on February 23, 2008

Hm, it's been a while since I've said anything

So I haven't wrote anything here for all of January and most of December. Actually I've been writing up tentative entries on the bus to and from work but nothing has jelled up into a good article to post here.

It's the digital equivalent of the horror of the blank page that all authors must face at some point. Sometimes something comes, sometimes it seems like it's all been said and said by people smarter than you.

One of the ways I think I can get around this problem is to talk about my hobbies. I have a game session coming up and that will give me a write up then. My gaming pals love my summaries of game sessions. But I could broaden this by talking about table-top role-playing games in general. (Sigh. I remember when just saying role-playing games was sufficient. But software has changed all this now.):

• I did start a couple of entries on the history of my role-playing campaign: Udra. I really should finish this up.
• I could make these histories very detailed or at least as detailed as my memory and 29 year old paper can allow for.
• I could talk about table-top RPGs in general. Commentaries of rules and variations. I've done a little of this already. For example I could talk about how to use computers to aid in bookkeeping and note-taking in game sessions. It would great to have a computerized miniatures map that would help everyone keep track of the physics. As a game master, I'd love to have this so I could concentrate on the descriptive stuff and mood.

Anyway, maybe some other subjects will come to me. I've been thinking about ways to force people to use encrypted mail and whether I want to sign up for EVDO service for example. Something will come.

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:06 PM on February 8, 2008

Got the curry? Not to worry!

Yeah, I've ranted about this before. I think it bears repeating.

What is Thanksgiving for? Really?

If it's supposed to celebrate national identity, we've already got a zillion holidays for that, Veteran's Day and Independence Day for starts--and some that some of you out there wouldn't consider as days of national pride like MLK Day and Labor Day.

Is it really for gratitude?

Continue reading "Got the curry? Not to worry!" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 12:57 AM on November 21, 2007 | Comments (2)

Now this is really neat!

Some guy went and built himself a giant robot suit to cruise around in! I mean, think of the legions and legions of ten year olds and former ten year olds who've always wanted to do something like this! What kid hasn't dreamed up building something so terrifying that they'd have to call in the air forces to stop it! Calvin would be proud.

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:15 AM on August 2, 2006

I browse, I link, I'm back.

• So I'm quoted, or rather my alter-ego is quoted, talking about drugs that boost certain limited aspects of intelligence. This, in all things, in Spin Magazine--tsk, tsk. Ah me, famous at last.

• DARPA researchers develop a method to accelerate our ability to sift through visual data. If you're caught on video, they will find you a lot faster now.

• IBM astounds the world by supposedly inventing a new use for class and id attributes in markup. Web technicians, who've been hacking various ways to do this for about five years now, are shocked.

• Speaking vaguely of which, here's a method (Which I've known about for year now.) for future-proofing style on XHTML1.1 documents. (Or sending XHTML1 as XML instead of text.)

• A scientist works out a clever way to use bacteriorhodopsin as a new data storage method. Potentially optical disks using such a technique could have capacities of up to 50TiB! The mind reels.

• At the turn of the previous century, progressive, public-spirited thinking, increased public health by providing common, free sources of clean, potable water from fountains in every public space in the industrialized world. In the post-industrial world, however, they make us pay for it.

• Recent research with an autistic savant may give us some clues about the remarkable talents of these people.

• Tissue engineering marches ever onwards: We've figured out how to coax heart and brain tissues to regenerate and repair themselves.

Posted by Pace Arko at 5:00 AM on July 12, 2006

Louisiana 1927

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 SNAFU. Relief has finally arrived after days of delay and now justified anger is setting in. Heads are going to roll for sure on this one. In Gulf Coast states, in the cities of those states and especially in the District of Columbia, heads are going to roll. They had computer simulations and studies for years that something like this would eventually happen and instead they slashed budgets and did nothing. Heads are going to roll. Shame on us.

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:01 AM on September 4, 2005

In case we forget

Today is the sixtieth anniversary of the use of nuclear weapons on Japan in World War II. Rather than go into the justification or lack of justification for those events, I'd rather point to the fact that there are still about 20,000 of these weapons in the world today. And just remind us how horrifying these weapons are, Eric Meyer has built a tool that maps the effects of a one megatonne ground detonation over Seattle.

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:15 PM on August 5, 2005

PKD's doppleganger

I got some mail from a fellow named Don who has a site of his own that he thought I'd be interested in. It looks like it's just starting out so, I don't know where it will go but, so far it seems to be a slightly squeemish take on transhumanism. I think Don's a little disturbed by all this stuff he's reading and seeing about various technological advances. And well he should be. It means he's paying attention.

One of the stories Don wrote that stuck in my mind was his reaction to a Phillip K. Dick android he saw at a convention in Chicago. (As is well known to his fans, Phillip K. Dick's stuff dwelt, almost pathologically, on the nature of reality and on artificial life. I myself have read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Second Variety.) My reading of Don's reaction was that he had mixed feelings about it. Ironically Don's reaction might have been very like the reaction Dick himself would have had, were he alive, disturbed yet utterly fascinated at the same time.

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:29 PM on July 11, 2005

A wide ranging set of links

• By way of Stephen's Web comes Quality Tips for Webmasters, a short list of simple yet powerful ways to improve your site accessibility, usability and ease of maintanence.
• Neat, energy efficent gadgets (by way of Metafilter.)
• From the starving, yet well nourished, mice department: reseach may have isolated the molecular link between eating and aging. Apparently it might be as simple as making drugs that bind to proteins resulting from a gene called Sirt1.
• By way of CogNews, this BBC article about editing a person's memory--disturbing how close to fruition some of this stuff is.

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:24 PM on June 3, 2004

New Year's Cleaning

After spending a few hundred dollars on a used laptop (Of the same model as my old one with a cracked screen and which now stands to be cannibalized for parts.), a roomy drive and an 802.11 (b+g) transceiver, I know have a new office to work in. Just spent the last few days transferring my data and installers and optimizing my settings. The first thing I noticed is how quiet everything is. My old desktop had a cheap power supply fan which whined and squealed endlessly, slowly eroding my sanity.

I still plan to replace the fan and upgrade the desktop for gaming, but that will have to wait for the next series of paychecks. Despite my nerdly heritage, I am not as gadget happy as some. I still don't own a mobile phone or PDA.

Anyway a few links to share with my tiny audience:

• Remember the hype last month about the Administration's "bold new space initiative?" What does Shrub's promised space adventure really mean, considering he's not really going to pay for it.
• Bruce Schneier (Mr. Counterpane himself) dispels illusions concerning terrorism and indentification cards.
• A tip of the hat to Gyre for a nice dose of reality to counter the simplicity we've been getting from some quarters these last four years.

Posted by Pace Arko at 1:32 AM on February 13, 2004

First Post of the New Year

Let's have a show of hands. How many of you out there think that "Spirit" and "Opportunity" are incredibly stupid names for the rovers now photographing and crawling around Mars? The first one sounds like a glee club from high school and the second sounds like some vague and visionary investment commercial.

Robots shouldn't be given names like this. Voyager, Explorer, Zond, Lunakhod, Cassini, Mitner--these are names that make sense. Name them after scientists, name them with nouns that suggest science and exploration, name them after their specific function or just name them with abbreviations and numbers.

Changing the subject, a friend of mine pointed to me to an ASCII art version of Star Wars: A New Hope.

Argh. I probably should be in bed by now.

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:28 AM on January 6, 2004

Excel games, the definition of noise, CSS selectors and screen captures

• Some cat from Japan has worked out how to get Excel's grid of cells to play Pac-man and Space Invaders.
• Apparently a group of artists and technicians over in the UK are exploring the difference between noise and information. I haven't had a chance to explore their site fully, but plan to.
• I pointed to a site that takes Safari screen shots on Monday (The entry previous to this.), well there is a site that takes Konqueror screen shots too. Since I have Linux, the need for this isn't so pressing, but I guess I can load Gnome and still see how things look in KDE. The nice thing about the Safari and Konq screen shot sites is now there is no need to pay for such things. And yes, so far, my sites look just fine!
• I know a thing or two about style sheets but I haven't gotten into rule selectors yet. Now I plan to.

Posted by Pace Arko at 5:08 AM on December 3, 2003

Smalley Speaks, Roman Geeks and Safari Peeks

• In nanotech news, Drexler and Smalley throw down some fearsome science as they debate the validity of mechanosynthesis. In my opinion, Drexler won it.
• Christie's actions off an ancient Roman twenty sider. Let's see--they had pewter for figs, they could have had hex maps--hmmm--Did Dave Arneson and Gary Gagax really invent role-playing games?
• Here is a useful screen capture tool for people who see no point to spending money on Apple just to check their web design. Like me.

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:47 PM on December 1, 2003

Hilbert, hacking novelty items and hardcover books

• This is just wrong
• Umberto Eco talks the future of books in a world of pervasive information technology.
• A nice outline of David Hilbert (Of Hilbert's Hotel fame) 23 problems in mathematics showing their status as solved or unsolved.

Posted by Pace Arko at 9:07 AM on November 29, 2003 | Comments (2)

Video Phone!

So around noon yesterday, I bought a cheap video capture device. I did this to let someone remotely sit in on one of my gaming sessions. It was pretty fun but also pretty distracting, what with technical hitches and all. Of course now that I have the thing, I really don't know what else to do with it. My photographic exhibitionism is exactly nil. So far the only utility I can see to the thing is teleconferencing in game sessions. But then it also took me a few years to see the utility of scanners too.

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:29 AM on November 9, 2003

By Way of DiveintoMark's RSS Feed

• The acme of the CSS-fu, (Warning! the link that follows leads to a page that makes absolutely no sense in screen readers. Don't bother; just get someone to tell you about it.) a house built purely of CSS rules and empty markup. I suppose you'd have to be a web designer to know the full horror of the code underlying this page.
• Web blog comment spam is become more common. MoveableType seems to be getting hit the worst. Since I use a highly modified version of Greymatter and my web log is far off the beaten trail, currently I am safe. Still, interesting reading. By the way, Musings is by far the most futuristic website I've come across as far as XML and the Semantic Web is concerned. Just read the source and documentation about it.

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:19 PM on October 18, 2003

It makes a lot of sense when you think about it.

Although I haven't signed up with these folks, I think that mentally I've been a member of the Voluntary Human Extinction MovemenT (VHEMT) for many years now. We should stop breeding and get off the planet. That's the only way the ecosystem is going to recover. I found these folks by way of this interesting interview on The Speculist.

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:18 AM on October 18, 2003

In Honor of Bastille Day

A little fireworks java applet for ya! Courtesy of da Lawman!

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:48 PM on July 14, 2003

Something I should have done a long time ago

Ever since I left the Company that Shall Not be Named back in July of 2000 I've been failing to do something: set up my own proprietorship. Since 1996 until I left I was what they call a permatemp.

Continue reading "Something I should have done a long time ago" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:04 PM on April 15, 2003

Hofstadter's Title

Anyway, I've been busy this last week with work, mostly adding a bunch of content to Blinksoft and doing some network administration for a doctor's office, so I haven't really had time to post here.

Work on the Greymatter update continues however. Sockmonk now has a TODO List going.

Well, he dragged the rest of us kicking and screaming into his little adventure, but George finally got the war he wanted, that he has wanted since before he was president. Luckily we've got someone to double check the 'Gon's assessments of collateral damage. I guess I am mostly worried about what's going to happen after it's over. I am skeptical that the US really has the will and commitment to build a stable and democratic Iraq. It will take us years, infinite patience and lots of money. I also hope that rational heads will prevail and repair the rifts with our allies and the UN. Jingoism aside, we simply cannot afford to go it alone or to be the world's pariah. This was the main thing that ticked me off about George's handling of this whole affair, the fact that he alienated our allies and the UN.

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:11 AM on March 26, 2003

Interabang sent us this one

As has been mentioned, I am skeptical guy. For example, I laughed very smugly at that Southpark episode that lambasted John Edwards. Anyway, the proprietor of !?, another ardent skeptic searching for likeminded folks, recommended that I visit the Ontario Skeptics site and perhaps drop a little science on the site board.

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:29 AM on March 18, 2003

One can only hope this will end up in Memepool one day

I worked at the Lazy M Ranch in one capacity or another for four years and I saw first hand how the best brains of my time were warped beyond all recognition while there. As an example of this, allow me to point you towards the coat-hanger xmas tree.

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:06 PM on February 12, 2003

Been waiting for this for a long time

Progress continues to be made on robot cars--cars that drive themselves. Like I've said many times, human are just not reliable enough to be put in charge of a tonne or so of steel and plastic.

Posted by Pace Arko at 9:57 PM on February 6, 2003

Imagine this as a transition

So I got flattened by a chest cold and only now have I got the motivation to write here again.

• Computational biology develops computer models of bacteria sophisticated enough allow us to predict evolution.
• Anyway, I discovered one of my pages appearing in someone's hotlist.
• PCWorld has some suggestions about how to recycle old hardware. Wired has a few suggestions too.
• Three dimensional printing continues to advance with subsquent benefits for engineering and prototyping.
• Future battlefields will have more and more robots.
• All emergent life on Earth uses the same 20 amino acids to build proteins with. Scientist have just built an organism that uses an amino acid outside that range.
• Big Dead Place is a web site with stories and articles about what it's really like to live in the most inhospitable place on Earth. I thought it was cool that they think that John Carpenter's The Thing was a fairly accurate portrayal of life in Antartica.

Posted by Pace Arko at 8:44 AM on January 16, 2003

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 by vibration alone.

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:29 PM on December 13, 2002

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.

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:02 PM on December 10, 2002

Web accessibility, virus throttles and QC errors

• The W3C site undergoes a redesign that is XHTML strict.
• The error rate in quantum computing could pose a barrier to its practicality.
• Joe Clark drops Web accessibility science on the clueless at Slash.
• Bright sparks over at HP invent a tricky way to slow the spread of worms on a network. I wonder if a similar trick could be used to second guess spam or other mass mailings?

Posted by Pace Arko at 9:04 PM on December 9, 2002

Trains, Laces and silly Web tricks

• In the US, passenger rail has for too long been neglected as medium haul mass transit.
• What is the optimal way to tie shoes? It's not as simple as you might think.
• Dean Allen, co-founder of the WaSP, has written a neat little PHP script that highlights the terms used in a site visitor's Google search wherever they appear on the page the script applies to.
• And of course more African cyberpunk.
• Here is an idea, that has been sitting dormant in the Windows desktop for nearly 5 years now. I gotta try this on one of my spare machines.

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:02 AM on December 5, 2002

Microsoft PCMS, Phreaking, The Temple of Mank

• Just after Halloween, I finished a big content update at the Temple of Mank.
• Wired offers this simple guide on how to use audio tones to automate deleting your number from telemarketing lists.
• With Office XP and FrontPage 2002, Microsoft quietly steps into personal content managment--Web logs--for the intranet.

Posted by Pace Arko at 2:18 PM on November 2, 2002

Junkbuster Update and the Human Clock

• Privoxy is the geek's tool (Read that as, "you have to have a vague understanding how HTTP and proxies work in order to use it.") for combating popups and other forms of obnoxious Web advertising. It is a revision of the original Internet Junkbuster code and greatly extends its power and functionality. Joe Bob says check it out.
• The Human Clock is a site that shows a new image of a person holding the current time once every minute, 24 hours a day. You can set it to be digital or analog and set it to your correct timezone.

Posted by Pace Arko at 9:18 AM on October 30, 2002

Pretty soon all the kids will be doing this.

A senatorial candidate in Montana, after a few years of imbibing colloidal silver, turns his skin blue permanently. Maybe it's just me but, why isn't it surprising that his party afiliation is Libertarian?

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:29 PM on October 9, 2002

Baby Screams, Fuel Cells, Paranoia and the Semantic Web

Over the last few weeks I read:

• About Sonic weapons based on backmastered baby screams.
• An interesting article critical of the semantic web concept. I, being a markup purist, am a true believer in the semantic web idea.
• Another interesting article about what open source is and what it means.
• I come across, speaking of the Semantic Web, a search engine that sifts and indexes web log content using something called latent semantic indexing.
• A news blurb about edible plastic. This is not really that amazing though. I mean, we've eaten the rice paper that surrounds some Asian candy, right?
• On a similar ecological, technological note, I read that President Shrub may have set back fuel cell research by more than a decade.
• That Neverwinter Nights, the much-anticipated super-MUD based on Dungeons and Dragons, is finally out, and because of certain intellectual property licensing clauses, is being roundly criticized by old school nerds. As an old school nerd myself, I've yet to jump on this bandwagon.
• More interesting developments on the Afro-cyberpunk front.

And of course this entry wouldn't be complete without some paranoia on parade!

• The men in black on are after you? You have incriminating data on your hard drive? You need a dead man's switch. Or at least a good cron script to write random numbers to all your file clusters.
• Biometrics isn't as secure as some claim it to be.
• How to evade the greedhead's databases in nine easy lessons.

Posted by Pace Arko at 9:43 AM on July 5, 2002

Happy Fishbowls, Snow Crystals and Fame

• Remember when Sony sold that infrared camera that rendered some clothing transparent? Well, it turns out that government is working on cameras and sensing technology, using light in the terahertz range, just below infrared, that also renders clothing transparent.
• If you're like me, you're always on the look out for scientifically inspired desktop wallpaper, like false-color images of snowflakes in a scanning electron microscope.
• Total strangers are beginning to link to my site, thanks to the wonders of Google. Some folks disagree with my stance on cars. Two others, Ben James Godsill and some guy named Buck linked to my screed on irony after September 11th. A disclaimer: My policy studies are ha, ha, only serious folks.
• And I've just discovered Blogdex's social network generator. No blogs in Blogdex link to me, which isn't surprising since I haven't yet found a reason to link to other blogs in the Blogdex database. But the scripts still seem to think I have friends. This is weird, I mean, I don't even know Mr. Zeldman.

Posted by Pace Arko at 8:41 PM on June 14, 2002

Transformers, Web Design and ASCII Art

Web building:

• The Web Standards Project is kicking bottom and taking names again. This time it's personal.
• Some guy named Mark Pilgrim discusses why web sites and weblogs should be accessible by telling stories of users with screen readers and braille boards.

Unclassifiable:

• It's the XXI century, where is your robot butler?
• Expansions of the mandlebrot set as rendered in ASCII art!
• This is a particularly nerdish habit, dissin' inaccurate physics in action movies. It's a nerd thing, you got to understand!

Posted by Pace Arko at 9:32 AM on June 13, 2002

Radio by photolith, forensics, Web comics as unintentional biography

May was a very busy month for me so, most of the entries this month consisted of links with little commentary. (Actually now that I think of it most of my journal consists of this type of entry.) And this is one is the same:

• Photolithography gives us microscopic radios.
• Concerning the veracity of fingerprints in these modern times of DNA cataloging and genetic forensics.
• Government webmasters dither over what web documents should be archived.
• An island in Scotland generates electricity entirely from fuel cells.
• You don't need a 32 bit operating system to have a fully functional, graphical web browser.
• James Burke, a man who had a profound influence on my formative years, uses the World Wide Web to demonstrate how interconnected history is.
• The Guy I Almost Was. This web comic pretty much encapsulates any potential nostalgia about the nineties. Even though I am about six years older than this guy, I found a lot of resonance in it.
• Tissue engineering, genetic manipulation and cell surgery opens the door to superhuman bodies. Advances in neuroscience will to similar promises and perils for the brain.

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:59 PM on May 29, 2002

Can advertising work in these modern times?

So I just read the PBS is in a decline now that cable has stolen away some it's audience with high quality, yet ad supported content--A&E, AMC, the History Channel, etc. Also I've read a good summary about how some cable content providers are preventing DVRs from skipping ads. So despite all this new technology, the really revolutionary idea, ad-free subscription content, may never actually work.

So much for the Internet liberating us. Sigh. Can't anyone make this business model work?

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:54 PM on May 14, 2002

Son of Linkage

• Macromedia claims that Flash objects are now fully accessible but, there are still legions of web designers that need to learn how to design code that is accessible from the start.
• There's money in thinking about computer security and recovering data from obsolete computers.
• Just from sheer weight of numbers, China has become the second most Internet connected country on the planet. Meanwhile African ISPs are getting fleeced by the big telecommunications companies of the post-industrial world.
• Tessellation is the act of tiling a plane. The artist M.C. Escher built a career out it. Makoto Nakamura made some really beautiful animations based on tessellation.
• W.Bradford Paley created a tool that searches for hidden patterns in text. I wonder if this tool might be useful when applied to Web search engines?
• As has been oft repeated on this site, advertising on the Internet continues to worsen as companies search for profit.

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:23 PM on April 23, 2002

Various Linkage

• There is serious academic study of legacy code accumulation, mission creep and feature bloat in the halls of computer science.
• Some claim that Google's refusal to play by basic marketing rules may hurt it in the long run. I think this remains to be seen. I would argue that Google's unconventional behavior is part of it's success.
• As if pop-ups aren't bad enough, now some marketing weasels are using JavaScript to install software without prompting the user at all. All the more reason to simply turn JavaScript off or at least use the latest version of Internet Junkbuster.
• On another hand, the Folsom anti-spam tool works by collaboratively filtering junk e-mail in a peer-to-peer network of mail servers.

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:08 AM on April 10, 2002 | Comments (7)

Two Interesting Links

• The Business benefits of accessible web design.
• Okay, here is something that will be even more distracting to motorists than mobile phones!

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:44 AM on April 3, 2002

Links!

• Web advertising just gets uglier and more in our face as time goes on. Good thing I got Internet Junkbuster to cut through all this junk.
• Take a look at the Small Times site, it's a good source for nanotech, MEMS and other microsystems research and industry news.
• Yet another definitive source on cascading style sheets.
• Photos of the Soviet Moon rocket.

Posted by Pace Arko at 3:11 PM on March 20, 2002

Lego: The Best Toy in the World

When I was a kid back in the Seventies, they just started to import these really neat robot toys and models from Japan. This was about twenty years before the word anime came into the common English. Anyway there's this guy named Sun Yun who builds robots, in the Japanese science fiction style, out of Lego. Apparently he's not the only one.

Lego is ideal medium for building robots, as anyone whose ever played with MindStorms has found out. I've read that lots of budding engineers at MIT use it all the time.

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:08 AM on February 24, 2002

Hard to explain why this one appealed to me--

The novelty of combining the Dead Kennedys and the Daleks, must be rewarded! I'm sure the UK kid who put this thing together probably barely remembers such misunderstood Seventies/Eighties icons as Tom Baker, Battlestar Galactica, Yoda and Jello Biafra.

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:27 AM on February 12, 2002

Neat Stuff

Here are two reasons why my decision to finally get DSL was a good thing:

• Giant Robot
• Wallace and Gromit take to the Web

• Another article on limb amplification. Part of a series. I don't know how to drive but if they offered these on the public market, I'd buy one!
• Mathematician who is also a sculptor.

Posted by Pace Arko at 9:10 AM on January 23, 2002

The New Year Brings in Big Change

Last Wednesday I self-installed DSL so, now I am downloading with the best. The following day, prior to departing for his fact finding tour of the ATO, the Baka shipped us some truly scary hardware to work with. Currently our technicians are engaged in extensive server and facilities administration. The results of these changes will be subtle at first but of growing significance.

Posted by Pace Arko at 8:43 PM on January 7, 2002

Two neat pages I just couldn't pass up.

Remember wrist rockets? They were hand catapults braced against the wrist for better leverage. Anyway, there is now a company that sells wristwatches with tiny catapults that fire tiny copper beads. Playing with one of these in a company meeting room would probably get you fired and sued for injuries.

I must admit, when I was younger, I entertained the urge to learn pratfalls and mock combat. Ever since I saw that DEVO video where the guy flips, back first, head over heals onto his back, I wanted to be that graceful. All those early breakdancing vids drove my ambition too. Of course I never did learn the art of pratfall but I did, years later, find a page with detailed instructions on how to fall down stairs without hurting yourself seriously.

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:31 PM on December 19, 2001

Links! Links! Links!

• Remember when I mentioned the solar chimney? Well it's in the news again.
• Found another article about bringing the Internet to the citizens of developing countries. While at the same time many problems remain.
• Scientists figure out a way to use quantum dots to communicate directly with living neurons. At the same time computational neurology gets better at modeling real neurons and neural networks. The line between artificial and organic is blurring.
• The idea of using retroviruses in gene therapy is old news to me but here's an update on that front.
• Here is another update on quantum computers. And another on quantum cryptography. And still another on distributed, embedded intelligence.
• As a fan of the station formerly known as KCMU, I found these articles about how the Digital Millennium Copyright Act endangers Internet radio interesting.

Posted by Pace Arko at 9:25 AM on December 19, 2001

"...the hours in an offhand way."

Another link round up:

• Yahoo bought GeoCities and got WebRing as an afterthought. Now, a year later they've sold WebRing. Not that anybody really cared being that lots of imitations sprung up after Yahoo bought it.
• People decided that the automatic forms and password completion promised by .NET, Liberty Alliance and others really isn't that worthwhile.
• Here is an interesting overview of PayPal that I found.
• Tim Berners-Lee and others have created yet another programming language called curl. This strikes me as premature because we still haven't fully standardized on all the others that already exist. How is this better than XML and the DOM?
• Farming applications continue to drive genetic engineering: First tailored plants, now tweaked bugs. I can hear the protests already.
• Phillips Research continues to improve electronic paper.
• No surprise here, e-mail is killing fax technology.
• Finally, something to improve the security of Outlook!
• It's all old hat to me but, perhaps some of you might find this interesting. Tips to improve Internet security and anonymity for Windows users.
• Yet another organization devoted to cleaning up the mental environment.

Continue reading ""...the hours in an offhand way."" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 8:35 AM on December 9, 2001

Ho. ho. ho.

I notice that I am not a daily poster in this web log. I tend to hold off on things until I have something interesting to write about and even then most of the links here are dreck anyway.

I don't think I could sustain a daily or hourly posting schedule. I try to avoid most political and personal stuff. There are other smarter people than me, who state my opinions on most matters better than I can. I love to rant about arcana but I am not really a pundit. Being an opinion maker or analyst means taking a stand on something and that means risking being wrong. I hate being wrong, like most of us, and so I'd rather not go on the record publically about something.

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:41 PM on December 4, 2001

Some Interesting Stuff My Friends Sent Me

The Mir incinerated many months ago but a friend sent me an old page about about a mold that lived off the glass, metal, cosmonaut detritus and synthetic materials of the Mir station. I remember reading about a mold that grows on camera lenses many years ago but the adatibility of fungus always amazes me.

Another friend sent me a page about magic square arrays and the ancient European, Chinese, Jain, Jewish and Muslim numerologies--not that I put any belief in numerology--but the math is interesting.

Posted by Pace Arko at 1:52 PM on November 29, 2001

Links! Links! Links!

• Most of this I already know but for you, here is a primer on how to use proxies to hide the IP address of your machine.
• Reuters released a story about beakers full of DNA used in parallel computing processes, some have mistaken this for nanocomputers but they aren't.
• When I was in grade school in the seventies lots of kids made origami throwing stars.
• If you have the bandwidth, look upon Monty Python as actualized in Lego!

Posted by Pace Arko at 3:35 PM on November 26, 2001

Yet another link round up

After a brief flurry of interest in the early ninties, haptics, telepresence and VR have continued to quietly advance. Of course the Department of Defense has been spending a lot of money on this research.

In order to buy itself respect among the affluent kids of the planet, Micrsoft has taken to advertising Xbox via graffiti, following IBM's lead. Of course Adbusters probably has a lot to say about this attempt by global corporations to buy hip.

Speaking of ads, more companies are following Google's lead in paying for text-based ad links on the Web. At the same time some have proposed using META values to decrease a page's relevence in specific keyword searches.

Posted by Pace Arko at 3:18 PM on November 26, 2001

Insomnia

I found all these links over the last month or so. I couldn't sleep so I decided to post them here.

• I don't own a mobile phone. I don't get enough calls to merit the expense. But I found an interesting news story about how European cops essentially use a denial of service attack to make the use of stolen mobile phones less attractive.
• Read an old article about negative space curvature on the microscopic level.
• Jake and Jeff disagree with each other over content managment systems.
• All sports channels run out of sports to fill up air time and turn to computer games and robot demolition as the new spectator sensations. Nerds and jocks still don't know what to make of each other.
• Why mindless patriotism scares me.
• The implications of evolutionary psychology are very depressing to me, hence my irrational attraction to the spock meme. Cultural forces must transcend biological drives!
• In these days of cheap RAM and huge clock speeds, finally some improvments are made in bus speeds.
• I also found an interesting repository of free software.

Posted by Pace Arko at 1:35 AM on November 8, 2001 | Comments (2)

Another Useless Word

After a day of dinking around with PHP script on one of my client's servers and just a few minutes ago after reading a page, I came across the the word "technologist."

Continue reading "Another Useless Word" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 2:25 AM on November 6, 2001

That Little Penguin with the Wraparounds

Mr. Tomorrow never misses an ironic angle. For example, now that the Taliban and Mr. bin Laden are "Public Enemy Number One," what is our duty as patriots?

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:38 PM on October 23, 2001

Will Rubber Bands Be Banned From Airlines?

While Surfing through Blogdex, I found a page about fighting with rubber bands. Not that I condone such behavior (Especially since, as a nerd, I never was very good at shooting rubber bands in grade school.)--but the page has a certain nerdish appeal in that it decribes the techniques and technology in exhaustive detail.

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:32 PM on October 23, 2001 | Comments (1)

No commentary, just links

• Maglev trains
• Using the ballast of fluorescent lights to transmit data
• Sending e-mail to random recipients
• Bugs working in chips
• Bugs eating chips
• One, two pages about a promising new cancer treatment
• Progress in AI and robotics, including a robot that fuels itself on slugs and another, made of Lego, that solves Rubik's Cube.

Posted by Pace Arko at 3:12 PM on October 11, 2001

Language Perplexities

Here's a question: How come we don't say "Czechia," "Czechland" or just "Czech" as opposed to "Czech Republic?" French come from France. Japanese come from Japan. Argentines come from Argentina. Poles come from Poland. Slovaks come from Slovakia. How come Czechs don't come from Czechia? Didn't they ever figure out the proper word ending for the name of the land of Czechs? What's the deal?

Another thing I find annoying is the Internet slang term, newbie. I hate this word. It's too cutsie--sort of like webmaster is too cutsie--smacks of AOL and Compuserve. Why aren't perfectly servicable words like neophyte, greenhorn and novice sufficient?

I also loath all those recently coined chat acronyms like LOL, IIRC, FWIW, RTFM and so on. I prefer to write all my cliches and phrases out in full, TYVM!

Posted by Pace Arko at 8:54 AM on October 8, 2001 | Comments (3)

Business Models Continue to Fail on the Internet

The content here is free. However I get some of this content from other sources which have to pay for it somehow. Advertising, despite becoming more and more obnoxious in its presence, doesn't seem to be able to cut it. Is this the end of free content on the Internet?

Posted by Pace Arko at 9:35 AM on September 26, 2001

Odinmank Should Like This

Back in the late Eighties, a soon to be old dear friend of mine introduced me to the Flaming Carrot. My sensibilities have been warped ever since.

Posted by Pace Arko at 3:16 PM on June 13, 2001

Neat little single panel Web comic I found.

What I need is some more commentary on this site. Hmm. Maybe I should have two sites. A personal site and professional site. Have to think about that.

Anyway, in the spirit of Gary Larson, B Kliban and Gahan Wilson is The Parking Lot is Full. PLIF explains why the afterlife is overrated and Christmas presents involving severely distorted spacetime.

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:49 AM on June 11, 2001

Some weird links sent to me by friends

Mr. Gamut sent me a story about a boyscout who tried to build a breeder reactor in his mother's backyard shed.

Lord Odinmank sent me the result of using Lego to pry into secrets humanity was not meant to know.

I found a story about some nerds from IBM and Cambridge University who managed to coax carbon nanotubes to grow in coherent, extremely pure, crystals--more shades of nano.

For better or worse, humans love to tinker.

Posted by Pace Arko at 9:04 PM on June 5, 2001

A Note from One of Our Chief Scientists, Victor Von Doom

This is a public announcement! Do not enter the main factory! Apparently, a misplaced plutonium bolt has mutated serveral termites into giant, man-eating monsters! We repeat, do not enter the main factory building! Our last testing cow came out 30 senconds later with no marrow at all! This has been a public service announcement from Victor Von Doom, representing your friends at Farlops Industries.

Posted by Pace Arko at 3:56 PM on May 28, 2001 | Comments (1)

Noteworthy links

Today a friend sent me The Silicon Graphics Refrigerator Project. And last night I finished tweaking this page of images.

Joe Bob says check it out.

Posted by Pace Arko at 12:55 PM on March 29, 2001

Just coined some slang!

You know those wireless gadgets with the little thumb keyboards that people use to send e-mail and chat with? I've decided to call those "mbiras." An mbira is an African musical instrument, most commonly found in Zimbabwe, that is held in the hands and plucked with the thumbs. Seeing a friend use one these things reminded me of an mbira player so the name stuck in my mind.

Please feel free to use my coinage.

Posted by Pace Arko at 1:14 AM on March 23, 2001

Mad Scientists Take Note

Memepool is a great source for obscure, interesting and useful pages on a wide array of subects. The gadget section and the science section ought to be required reading for any MIT hopeful.

Posted by Pace Arko at 1:40 PM on March 22, 2001

Things Every Superhero Should Know

How do you build a superhero base?

Continue reading "Things Every Superhero Should Know" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 1:58 AM on March 22, 2001

The Glory that Was Meroë

1668 BCE: Freed from Egyptian domination, two Nubian kingdoms unify into one state, known to the Egyptians as Kush, with its capitol at Kerma. Currently Egypt is in decline and is ruled by foreign invaders: the Hyksos.

1700-1400 BCE: Minoan culture reaches its apex.

Continue reading "The Glory that Was Meroë" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 9:01 AM on January 17, 2001

Alternate, Alternate Histories

I'm tired of what-if stories about the Second World War and the Civil War. Those are allohistories that have been fictionally done to death. I'd like to see something different.

I graduated from university with a degree in history. I did three years of physics, astronomy and mathematics but, in the end, I was too lazy to complete a degree in that so, in order to get out of university as quickly as possible, I chose history because, out all things I had distribution courses in, it was the one subject I disliked the least.

Continue reading "Alternate, Alternate Histories" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 8:03 AM on January 17, 2001

Thoughts to Spur Discussion

Or, what few, vapid ideas Mr. Farlops could think of to spur discussion in his bulletin board.

History is not a fractal and history is not a cycle. History is an infinite landscape that always changes, and while looking self-similar in parts, never repeats. Progress doesn't lead to some final resolution. Progress replaces old problems with new ones.

Continue reading "Thoughts to Spur Discussion" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 5:46 AM on August 5, 1999