Farlops Industries

• Get on your bad motor scooter and ride!
• As I said a few months ago, I think Africa should be the setting for cyberpunk fiction. It’s burgeoning urban sprawl has all the right feel.
• Not a year seems to pass these days without some startup trying to send broadband through the same wires that deliver power. This has become something of a holy grail because it would, in theory, eliminate the last mile problem in most post-industrial countries.
• Three-dimensional imaging technology continues to advance but, the subject of this article is still not as neat as real holovision.
• With speech recognition and pattern matching voice mail may soon be as easy to organizes as e-mail.
• The hunt for a profitable business model continues on the Internet. Is this The End of Free?
• More nanoscale elements are finding their way into conventional chips, this is not nanotechnology but it could, by association, help drive it.
• President Shrub may be an idiot for letting US automakers slack off on fuel cell development but in the end it won’t matter.
• In Evitable Conflict Issac Asimov wrote a story about robots that analysed, planned and guided our economy. I wrote another entry about this subject nearly a year ago. This has actually been going on since the nineteenth century when the ancestors of computers, calculation machines, were applied to census data and bookkeeping data. IBM was built on this.

When I had my last contract job at The Company that Must Not be Named a lot of my officemates would print out and photocopy almost everything. This always struck me as a wasteful slaughter of trees for the sake of a few useless notes made at a few useless meetings.

Today I read a New Yorker book review that offered a good explanation as to why paper still persists in this post-Internet world–paper and the notes we make on it are a way of embodying internal mental processes.

Today there are a lot of links to very interesting articles on Nanodot. For example, the use of diatom shells in MEMS or as drug delivery capsules. Another interesting one is about the construction of three-dimensional polymer crystals (Think of nylon or carbon fiber only in three-dee.). Traffic on Nanodot seems to be picking up now that the industry in general is taking off and it has become a hot issue among the capitalists.

In another science news, scientists have figured out a way to coax tissues to grow in a serum of growth factor proteins and nutrients. In fact they can now coax meat (such as muscle tissue) to grow outside the body. This implies that one day we could dispose of slaughtering animals entirely and just cut steaks from a continuously growing haunch of cow sitting in a vat of blood-like fluid somewhere. In theory the process could be much more energy efficient and environmentally sound then cutting down rain forest to raise huge herds of wasteful beef or mining the oceans bare of . It might even be possible to apply these techniques to wood production and thus cease cutting down old-growth forest.