Rambles at starchamber.com

What has six legs, room for a man on its back and an insatiable appetite for trees? No, it’s not a mutant beaver, it’s a Timberjack Walking Forest Machine. Designed and built by a Finnish subsidiary of John Deere, this baby will walk where wheels won’t go, then size up, cut down, and strip to [...]

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More than a year ago I picked up a copy of American Scientist magazine, partly because it had a cool article about nanotechnology with these beautiful images of biomolecules. Then, without reading it, I put the magazine aside for a long long time. Happily, it reappeared from under a crumbling pile of unread material and [...]

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Steven Levy writes a good piece, straightforward and reasonable, on blogs at Newsweek: Will the Blogs Kill Old Media? Answer: no. But will they be a big deal? Yes.

Here’s an example of what I can do in the age of blogs that I never could before: Alex Beam wrote an obnoxious piece on blogging [...]

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Protein folding is in the news, and it’s just going to get more so. You’re going to get sick of hearing about protein folding. Here’s a good NY Times article that lays out what’s at stake when proteins don’t fold properly: In Folding Proteins, Clues to Many Diseases. The analogy
fast folding

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Read about the Quarter Shrinker at Bert Hickman’s experiments page. The pictures alone are worth the trip. “The quarter shrinker uses a high voltage capacitor bank and a triggered spark gap to apply up to 125,000 amps through a small work-coil of #10 AWG magnet wire which surrounds the coin. Once the spark gap is [...]

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This MATLAB Programming contest has been so successful that it’s practically swamping our ability to process the entries. One person, Yi Cao, entered the contest more than 200 times during the week in which it ran. Even now, despite the fact that the contest officially ended at 5 this afternoon, we still have around 180 [...]

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Spintronics looks to be a seriously disruptive technology and another case of good investing by DARPA. Read about it here: Semiconducting Materials Advance ‘Spintronics’.

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For several years I’ve enjoyed reading Jeff Harrow’s reports from the frontier of high tech. He was sort of a proto-blogger from way back, an amateur journalist who turned into the real thing and consistently digs up good stuff. First he was at Digital writing something called The Rapidly Changing Face of Computing. He stayed [...]

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I’m the ninth Paracelsus on Google today (at least I was at 4:30 this afternoon). That puts me in the All-Internet Paracelsus Top Ten and in solid contention for the championship this season.

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It’s about time: finally the maps at maps.yahoo.com use anti-aliasing for the text. Check out this comparison of the Yahoo map of the White House, which uses anti-aliased text, vs. the MapQuest map of the White House, which does not. It makes a big difference in the total amount of meaningful data that you can [...]

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