Exasperated Calculator: Star Trek & Economics

[How to make a floating head hologram](http://www.instructables.com/id/Make-a-cool-hologram-illusion!/). Clever trick.

[Plug and play for bare hard drives](http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/hard-drive/hdd-dock-plugs-bare-sata-drives-like-nes-cartridges-312747.php). It’s always been a great annoyance that bare (i.e., designed for installing inside your computer) hard drives are so cheap, but buying an enclosure and swapping them around is tedious, and external drives are much more expensive. This looks like a good middle ground.

[A history of the C64](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1991/a_history_of_gaming_platforms_the_.php). No gaming platform holds a dearer place in my heart. It wasn’t so much the platform, but what the programmers did with it, of course.

[String theory in two minutes](http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2007/10/string_theory_in_2_minute.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890). Sadly, two minutes are all also all you need to hear about the experimental confirmations of string theory. Assuming your local string theorist can keep the excuse for the total lack of results down to only two minutes, that is.

[Might as well face it, you’re addicted to Civ](http://skzbrust.livejournal.com/66515.html). This game is one of the few to have encouraged me to play through the night. Something about that ‘one more turn’ nature.

[Make your own business cards using acid].(http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2007/08/how_to_make_your_own_embo.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890). That’s the acid ferric chloride, in case your mind took you somewhere else entirely.

[An application to get your contact details out of Facebook](http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/23/with-friendcsv-data-sneaks-out-facebooks-back-door/). My biggest worry about Facebook is the closed system nature – while anyone can write an application, you don’t get to control your own data. This is a partial solution, but not a complete one.

[Plasma and LCD flat panels use a lot of electricity](http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/how-green-is-my-plasma/2007/10/24/1192941120182.html?s_cid=rss_news) Frankly I doubt they’ll ever be banned in their current form, as some people suggest. Still, there is a *lot* consumer electronics manufacturers could be doing to make it easier to save energy.

[Underground coal fires contribute as much to global warming as all the cars in the US](http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/from-bagels-to-coal-fires-an-unorthodox-economist-keeps-pushing-for-change/). One of the real problems in designing the long run policy on this stuff is deciding how to assign property rights to emissions like these. A price imposing scheme (be it a tax or permit system) needs these property…