As an engineer, one of the most absurd things on the Interwebs is the profusion of tech nonsense… wishful thinking, art projects presented as reality, and the industry of audiophile pseudoscience. I love stereo systems that are on the performance asymptote as much as any other paleogeek who grew up with vinyl, but I bristle…

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by Steven K. Roberts 1 – Under Pressure by Rebecca Parks: an Exploration of Meta-Patterns With her “Under Pressure” series, Rebecca Parks expands Outsider Art onto the virgin landscape of the rural deck, exploring the dialectic contrast between Relaxation Spaces and the technologically mediated high-velocity streams of water with which she creates thoughtful, mandala-like representations…

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The Nomadness Emulation & Telepresence System April 1, 2012 I want to tell you about the skunkworks project that is underway here at Nomadic Research Labs, shepherded by a hand-picked team of engineers. We ran an extrapolation of my progress on nautical technomadic projects, including Microship. In 20 years, a staggering amount of human time…

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by Steven K. Roberts Nomadic Research Labs Santa Clara, California April 1, 1996 (Issue #101 of the Microship Status Reports) Lots of developments since our last update! The recent infusion of investment capital from the venture partners has made a spectacular difference in our productivity here at Nomadic Research Institute, and we’ve just rented the adjacent…

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This erotic tale of publishing jargon was the product of a giggly afternoon in 1981, inspired by editorial flirtation while I was writing my Industrial Design with Microcomputers textbook (Prentice-Hall, 1982, ISBN 0-13-459461-4). In that pre-Internet age, this had a brief life as one of those nth-generation photocopies that got passed around with furtive snickers… but I never posted it…

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This little humorous bit of geek philosophizing fell out of my hours of staring at the front panel of my homebrew 8008 system – a central fixture in my life from 1974 onward, evolving, of course, as ever more robust machinery became available. I first published it in the April-June 1978 issue of the delightful…

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