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Day: April 27, 2005

Andy Ihnatko’s 24 Hour Audio Book

MacExpert Andy Ihnatko sends a link for downloading the audiobook that he created according to the rules for 24 Hour Comics Day. “Jeeves and the Object Class” is slightly less than 1 hour and 30 minute story conceived, written, and performed in bad British accent by Andy in just over 24 hours. The noise in the background is P. G. Wodehouse spinning in his grave. That said the story is pretty good and has as a major character a librarian from North Carolina. Not like too many that I immediately recognize, but very believable — except for the accent.

First He Invented Easter Eggs then…

Warren Robinett invented Easter Eggs hidden in computer games when he hid a famous first one in his Atari Adventure. He writes now to tell us about his publication of some of the results of his nanotechnology research, “Defect-tolerant interconnect to nanoelectronic circuits: internally redundant demultiplexers based on error-correcting codes.”

Got that?

If not, Warren explains a bit:

If the abstract doesn’t quite make sense to you, some context is that a “crossbar” is a very small circuit structure we can fabricate where one set of parallel wires crosses another set of parallel wires. A bit can be stored at each junction, so that the crossbar can act as an extremely high-density memory. Our group at HP has made wires as narrow as 6 atoms wide (2 nanometers wide). A problem we have with stuff this small is that there are sure to be defects in what we fabricate, and the paper is about a defect-tolerance technique — a way to make the crossbars such that they will work in spite of having a lot of defects present. The “demultiplexer” the paper talks about is a kind of digital circuit needed to select individual bits in the memory being accessed.

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