Invisibility Cloaks, here we come:
Researchers at the University of California in Berkeley have developed a material that can bend light around 3D objects making them “disappear”.
The materials do not occur naturally but have been created on a nano scale, measured in billionths of a metre.
The team says the principles could one day be scaled up [...]

Filed under: Geek Stuff | 1 Comment »

I’ve long believed it, despite facing a lot of dismissive doubters. And yet, I’ve encountered people through my blog who were provoked by something I said to consider the faith, or who were bolstered in their pursuit of it. I’ll probably never know how the things I write influence those that read them.
In a column [...]

Filed under: Catholicism, Geek Stuff | 3 Comments »

Wired takes a gander at the way scientific discovery is changing due to massive amounts of data aquisition and storage, Google style:
Faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete. Consider physics: Newtonian models were crude approximations of the truth (wrong at the atomic level, but still useful). [...]

Filed under: Geek Stuff | No Comments »

This morning, trying to get a Flash plugin for my shiny new Mozilla Firefox 3 open source browser to work, I was compelled to google search for solutions that work around my particular issue, read through an online forum until I landed on the right process, download a plugin archive in .XPI format, extract it [...]

Filed under: Digital Life, Education, Geek Stuff, Interesting Stuff | 10 Comments »

Magneto, always one of the more interesting Marvel villains, was able to levitate through forces of pure magnetism. Unlike some supers who could simply fly, with no explanation as to how, Magneto was (sort of) backed by a scientific explanation.
Today, I discovered an article from last summer about scientists achieving a Casimir Effect in the [...]

Filed under: Cool Beans, Geek Stuff | 1 Comment »

(Update2: NO REALLY, IT’S FIXED THIS TIME!! In case it doesn’t work, go here.)
(Update: Link is fixed.)
Yes, this is the heady topic you can find me waxing poetic about at Inside Catholic this morning:
As a comic book fan, what I have never detected in Iron Man, or Spiderman, or the Fantastic Four, is a specifically [...]

Filed under: Geek Stuff | 1 Comment »

I’m nearly finished with Halting State, by Charles Stross. The book is a not-quite-cyberpunk/near future emerging infotech conundrum story that would probably be entirely unintelligible to anyone who hasn’t spent way too time nerding about with computers. I have spent a lot of time doing that, and there are plenty of points where I have [...]

Filed under: Books, Geek Stuff | No Comments »

(Warning: Extreme Nerdiness Ahead)
According to Wikipedia, “Moore’s Law describes an important trend in the history of computer hardware: that the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit is increasing exponentially, doubling approximately every two years…Almost every measure of the capabilities of digital electronic devices is linked to Moore’s Law: processing [...]

Filed under: Geek Stuff | 4 Comments »

Unless you’re a total geek, you probably won’t even have a clue about why I would be excited by this. Dreamworks has aquired the rights to produce a live-action, 3D version of the Japanese anime and manga series, Ghost in the Shell.
Steven Spielberg, the fanboy who brought my dreams to life in last year’s campy-but-enjoyable [...]

Filed under: Geek Stuff | 8 Comments »

So, I’m sitting at the Apple Store’s “genius bar” so I can get my failing iPod Touch swapped out. (Yeah, more techno fun today.)
The guys working here (and I’d maim myself if I had to tell someone with a straight face that I worked for the “genius bar”) look like they fell out of one [...]

Filed under: Funny, Geek Stuff | 2 Comments »