I feel sorry for Halloween these days. When I was a boy (by cracky), I could get upwards of three, sometimes four *pillowcases-worth* of candy. And Trick or treaters wore costumes, they didn’t just pull this “knock on doors and ask for candy” theme that seems to be the popular trend… or so I hear. I didn’t get any TorTers this year.

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Radical fabric is one atom thick

A new class of material, which brings computer chips made from a single molecule a step closer, has been discovered by scientists.

Called graphene, it is a two-dimensional, giant, flat molecule which is still only the thickness of an atom.

The nanofabric’s remarkable electronic properties mean that an ultra-fast and stable transistor could be made.

The physicists from the University of Manchester and Chernogolovka, Russia, published their research in Science.

“In my opinion, this is one of the most exciting things to have happened in solid state physics in a decade,” Professor Laurence Eaves, semi-conductor expert from the University of Nottingham, UK, told the BBC News website.

Graphene is part of the family of famous fullerene molecules, discovered in the last 20 years, which include buckyballs and nanotubes.

Their unusual electronic, mechanical and chemical properties at the molecular scale promise ultra-fast transistors for electronics, as well as incredibly strong, flexible and stable materials.

Ballistic promise

Scientists have been trying to exploit this for computing because smaller transistors mean the distances electrons have to travel become shorter, meaning faster speeds.

Graphene is like millions of unrolled nanotubes stuck together
Conventional transistors rely on the semi-conducting characteristics of silicon which provide the switches that change the flow of current in computers and other electronics.

“All the recent progress has been on nanotubes for transistors. These are sheets of graphite molecules wrapped in a cylinder – like a chocolate cylinder you stick in your ice cream,” explained Professor Laurence Eaves.

“Although these are interesting, because they are one-dimensional, they have limitations. Graphene is a plane transistor – flat sheets.”

Professor Andre Geim, who leads the research team, explained that the material they had discovered could be thought of as millions of unrolled carbon nanotubes which had been stuck together to make an infinitely large sheet, an atom thick.

They showed that electrons could travel sub-micron distances without being scattered, which means fast-switching transistors.

How nanotechnology is building the future from the bottom up

“At the moment, the research is in early stages,” Professor Geim said.

“The applications are too early to say, but the material is incredible. We have studied its electronic properties and no other material displays this.”

He added: “People have been trying to make transistors faster and smaller. There is a Holy Grail of electronics that engineers call ballistic transistors – ultimately faster than anything.”

A ballistic transistor is one in which electrons can shoot through without collisions, like a bullet. In other words, it has what is called a long mean free path – the distance a molecule travels without colliding into another.

Greater distances with nothing to collide with means faster speeds. Fewer collisions means less energy is lost, too.

Although they have not demonstrated a ballistic transistor yet, the latest experiments have shown that the new material could, in theory, produce one.

The team is currently experimenting with relatively small sheets of the graphene nanofabric, 10s of microns (millionths of a meter) across, but the sheets are still “large” in molecular terms.

The nanofabric would have to be produced in much larger wafers, a few centimeters in area, before electronics manufacturers could start using it.

But, said Professor Geim, judging by how quickly carbon nanotubes developed, graphene could be ready for industrial application in about 10 years.

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Dear Driving Politicos:

While it’s nice that you blow your horn to support whichever person is holding up a sign at the intersection, if people are holding up signs for both the demos and the repubs, Nobody can tell who you’re honking for.

As a pedestrian who likes to cross streets, a cacophony of pointless horn-blowing just makes me think that someone is barreling toward me and is trying to get me out of the way.

Don’t make me break out the caltrops.

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Very Strange. Someone at 64.124.85.99 reeled in a huge chunk of my website… it leads back to here. Was I just subject to a deep spidering? That one location slurped about 369 files all inside of a single session, between 6:18 and 6:56am yesterday morning. being the first day of the new month, it made for a pretty specific bump in my usage graph.

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Also, somebody’s slurping on my picture of Maynard G. Krebbs. (from a post I did back in November of 2001.)

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Al Goldstein is living in a homeless shelter in New York.

DOWN-on-his-luck smut sultan Al Goldstein has finally hit rock bottom.

The former Screw magazine publisher, who has lately faced destitution, legal woes and homelessness, called us from a shelter at Bellevue Hospital yesterday and said he was fired from his job as a greeter at the Second Avenue Deli.

“I got fired Monday night, after I slept there on Sunday,” he said. “The owner got mad at me. I feel terrible. I loved that job. It kept me out of the shelters. Now I have nothing. Last night in the shelter, a homeless guy actually gave me $5. He said, ‘Don’t have pride. Take the money.’ I’m humiliated. Everyone who hated me should be gleeful because my life has become a true horror. Like T.S. Eliot, I’m one of the empty people. I once was Al Goldstein, now I’m a pathetic homeless person.”

Goldstein, 68, once a multimillionaire porn pioneer, is now penniless. His company, Milky Way Productions, which published Screw and ran his cult classic cable show “Midnight Blue,” went bankrupt last year.

He was forced to sell his mansion in Pompano Beach, Fla., which featured an 11-foot statue of a raised middle finger in the backyard. He is on probation for harassing one of his four ex-wives in the pages of Screw. And his son, Harvard Law School grad Jordan Goldstein, refuses to speak to him.

“He must really hate me,” Al said of Jordan. “We haven’t talked ever since he didn’t invite me to his graduation from law school three years ago. He’s sold my collection of wristwatches, which was all I had left. And I was a good father. I sent him to magic camp. I took him to horse ranches. I gave him everything he wanted.”

Goldstein also complains that his porno peers have shunned him: “Larry Flynt won’t hire me. Bob Guccione is bankrupt. The business I created has turned its back on me.” He said the only one who has offered help is roly-poly porn legend Ron Jeremy. “He tried to get me a job selling porno DVDs in California, but I can’t go there because I’m on probation,” Goldstein said. ( Mr. Goldstein said that a pornographic-video company in Los Angeles recently offered him a sales job at $1,000 a week but that Florida authorities told him any move had to be approved by his probation officer in New York, where he is serving three years for harassing a former wife in the pages of Screw. On Monday, he flew to New York on frequent-flier miles. On Tuesday, he said, his probation officer denied him permission to move to California.)

Before he was fired from his two-month gig at the Second Avenue Deli, Goldstein tried his hand at stand-up comedy in “What I Like About Jew,” a music and comedy revue. He recently applied for a job at Cigar magazine. “It’s my last hope,” he said.

Still, Goldstein claims to have no regrets: “People ask me would I trade it, if I knew 35 years ago what would happen to me? I wouldn’t. It’s been a fair trade. I had the best women, the best wine and the best cigars.”

Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy (sarcasm)… Last I’d heard, he had that giant middle finger on a yacht in the big winterfest boat parade, a big hubbub with a barricaded woman in his bathroom and bought a magic shop up the road from my Pompano green grocer, just to tear it down.

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1 year ago – Magicians companion, mending, brother visits outside, Vasser-mobiles, feeling my back, through bandage

2 years ago – Naughty Newt, Sleepy Newt pics

3 years ago – PI-Opener, Junior Fired, evil news, pawnshop poll, DBC gets sold out by a competitor, hala’s cousin’s desk a box, CH is a weirdo, Kaiser/Caeser/Czar

4 years ago – first instance for voter snark, seeds, met gael, Love’s Philosophy