Author Archives: Pace Arko

Nanoscopic News

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 … Continue reading

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Shameless science fictional speculation

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 … Continue reading

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Bill and Ray call for security by obscurity

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. I’m not an … Continue reading

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Thinking about labor and education

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 … Continue reading

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Useful stuff to know about XP and Linux

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 … Continue reading

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A few links and a rant about Web applications

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. … Continue reading

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The quality of gaming dice stinks

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 … Continue reading

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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 … Continue reading

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The Bet

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. This planet is … Continue reading

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Mice regenerate entire organs

Just read on Slashdot that Professor Ellen Heber-Katz and a team of scientists at the Wistar Institute (Within the University of Pennsylvania.) have engineered a mouse that appears to be able to fully regenerate damage to any organ in its … Continue reading

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