Farlops Industries

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.

Wolfram Research has a form that lets you enter equations and have them integrated. This is really really neat! Takes me back to my old calculus days. Obviously it’s a drag to do this all in ASCII. This means that you are forced to do stuff like, Legendre[n,x] for Legendre functions (A type of differential equation that often occurs in physics.) and (((x^x)^x)^x)…^x. (Where x equals the number of powers x is raised to, in other words tetration.) but so it goes. It’s also rather irritating that the output is as an image.

Mozilla finally supports MathML (A markup language specifically designed for mathematical expressions) but I know IE doesn’t. I’ve always found it deeply ironic that the Web was created by a bunch of physicists and mathematicians, yet they added MathML only as an afterthought. What was Tim Berners-Lee thinking when he omitted this?

I guess this is some contradiction to my earlier post about all the unrealized dreams of science fiction but, I just came across a company that makes three-dimensional viewing systems. This isn’t merely three-dimensional rendering on a CRT or LCD screen. This is real holovision.