Plummeting cost of rapid prototyping

The cost of rapid prototyping has been plummeting lately with open source products like the RepRap and MakerBot, but now it’s hitting a new low…$500 for an extrusion style rapid prototyping machine from Solidoodle.  What you save in money, you sacrifice in layer resolution…this Solidoodle, for example, uses 1.75mm extruded material so the parts have a definite stairstep look to them.  Still, it’s awfully impressive and even that limitation can be acceptable for a lot of uses (especially if you sand or fill the parts to smooth out the layers after building).  While material selection and build resolution are nowhere near as good as more expensive processes like SLS and SLA, this is a market that just didn’t exist a few years ago, and is quickly growing.  For those who don’t want to learn how to make their own 3D files, there are even websites like Thingverse where people can download files ready to print.

Frog sitting on a bench

See, this is what’s so amazing about the information society we’ve built up.  This is a video of a frog sitting on a bench in a human-like pose.  It’s 43 ridiculous seconds that over three million people have viewed so far.  The global reach of technology is astounding…the challenge is how to harness that to make the world a better place (frog videos are not accomplishing that…).

Sidewalk wifi

Deploying any wifi network requires a multitude of wifi base stations…where do you place them?  Street lamps?  Ceilings?  Now there’s another choice…the sidewalk.  These 16×16″ tiles can be installed about 66 feet from one another to create a wifi mesh network (which doesn’t seem all that great when you consider the 1kW power consumption).  However, they do require power to be hardwired to them…too bad they can’t take advantage of the footsteps above to generate the necessary power.

The product name…well I have a hard time typing this, for they’ve jumped on the ‘i’ bandwagon that I’m so sick of by now.  Yeah.  This product is ‘iPavement‘.  There, I said it.  Yes, they’ve even worked in the more modern buzzword, in their iCloudPavement management software (no, two wrongs do not make a right).  Poor product names aside, it does provide a nice way to deploy a broad urban wifi network (apart from the high power consumption per device).

(via Gizmag)

Super glass

Glass is one of those things that gets better the less you see it, and researchers at MIT have found a way to make it pretty awesome.  By creating a precise surface pattern of nanoscale cones on it, they’ve produced a material that is extremely clear, while also being anti-reflective, anti-glare, and superhydrophobic (water beads up on its surface, so it’s like an anti-fog coating).  About the only thing it doesn’t talk about is impact strength, but if you apply this surface treatment to something like Corning’s Gorilla Glass, you have a formula that’s sure to be a hit in any portable electronics application.

Bleak outlook for Earth

Things aren’t looking good for this planet.  The well-respected group of scientists known as the Royal Society is concerned about the combination of excessive consumption and population growth, and is suggesting increased birth control and global redistribution of wealth to combat that.  Two things that are politically untouchable in this country at least.  This is the problem I see…scientists look at the path we’re on and have recommendations for how to fix it, but the political and social reality is not guided by science, it is guided by other influences.  Scientists, in general, just don’t seem to get this…they keep talking about what should be done to solve the world’s problems, without recognizing what can be done.  We don’t need talk about ideal solutions, we need talk about practical, realistic solutions.  Changes that you can possibly expect might be implemented.  You can read more about the Royal Society’s position on these issues in Scientific American.  And no, I don’t have the answer…I’m just really pessimistic about global governments’ abilities to enact change, and get frustrated when the best answer I hear from scientists is to let global governments solve these problems.  It’s not going to happen, we need new ideas.

In separate, but related, news, the executive director of the International Energy Agency is warning governments around the world that, globally, fossil fuel consumption is increasing and we need to shift our focus to renewable energy sources.  On our current path, we’re looking at a global temperature increase of 6C by the end of the century, triple the international ‘goal’ of 2C (though I’d argue that the goal should be zero!).  We’re just nowhere near where we need to be, and there’s no real drive for change.

Bleak news, but then, it’s not really news…it’s just more of the same.  We recognize the problem but instead of taking responsibility for our actions, we’ll pass this off to the next generation and make them deal with it.  This is our legacy, but I hold out hope that we can find technological solutions to these social problems before it’s too late.

Mining Asteroids

So, it comes to this.  Natural resources are becoming scarce enough that people can have serious conversations about mining ASTEROIDS and be taken seriously.  Not that it can’t be done, but wow…we are so far from living in balance with this planet that we need to exploit other areas of the solar system to sustain our lifestyle?!  Although, it may not be as bad as it first sounds.  Rather than bringing those resources back to this planet, it’s far most cost effective to use them to supply spaceships and colonies on the moon or Mars and that seems to be the main intent of Planetary Resources Inc.  Which makes so much more sense considering we struggle to get enough public support for a mere six person orbiting space station.  Maybe capitalism will succeed where every world government has failed…

25GB Skydrive upgrade for free

I’m a huge fan of Dropbox, so when I heard that Microsoft released new apps for accessing its Skydrive service (which is really just a lot like Dropbox) I was a bit ho-hum, but then I found out that you can get a free upgrade from the baseline 7GB of storage to 25GB!  Well OK, that did it.  I signed up, not sure if I’ll use it for anything but at least this way it’s reserved for future potential use.  Follow the links above if you want to sign up.

If you’re not already using one of these services, I highly recommend you check them out.  It basically just creates a folder on your computer that you treat like any other…drag and drop files to it, whatever.  The key is, whatever is in that folder is also replicated on a server elsewhere.  Not only does this create a backup for you, but where it gets really cool is when you have more than one computer (or devices, like iPads).  You’ll see that same folder on each device you set up.  Add a file to that folder on one computer, and it almost instantly appears on that same folder on your other computers.  Sharing files with family and friends also becomes easier; Dropbox allows you to share a folder (you can create a new one within your main Dropbox folder) with other Dropbox users.

Microsoft posted a pretty good comparison chart that shows how SkyDrive stacks up against iCloud, Google, and Dropbox.

The cost of oil, part 2

As a follow up to my earlier post about the Cost of Oil, comes this article from the Huffington Post.  More facts, more examples, more of the same to many of you, but for those of you who aren’t quite convinced, check it out for yourself and see if it makes sense to you.  There’s a lot of talk in the media about the cost of oil, and discussions about different options for getting more of it (Keystone XL pipeline, drilling in the gulf, etc).  It’s worth realizing that these solutions will provide oil, but not CHEAP oil.  Or as the article above so nicely put it,

The simple truth of the matter is this: most of the world’s easy reserves have already been depleted — except for those in war-torn countries like Iraq.  Virtually all of the oil that’s left is contained in harder-to-reach, tougher reserves. These include deep-offshore oil, Arctic oil, and shale oil, along with Canadian “oil sands” — which are not composed of oil at all, but of mud, sand, and tar-like bitumen. So-called unconventional reserves of these types can be exploited, but often at a staggering price, not just in dollars but also in damage to the environment.

So what’s the answer?  Adapt.  Oil will continue to get more expensive and more rare.  We need to work hard to wean ourselves off of that addiction, for the longer we wait, the more difficult that transition will be.

Blue strawberry?

Wow, talk about genetically modified food.  A BLUE strawberry?  Crazy stuff.  It seems the goal wasn’t to create a blue strawberry, but rather, one that would be resistant to freezing – which this one is – and the color was just a side effect.  Scientists took the gene that makes a type of antifreeze in flounder fish, and added it to an otherwise normal strawberry planet.  This abomination is the result.  This GMO field is one that really scares me…I recognize we may require widespread adoption of GMO in order to feed growing populations, but I’m concerned about the unknown side effects of creating living organisms like these.

Read more over at Care2.

The Earth is full – CNN.com

How many people can this planet support?  According to Paul Gliding, The Earth is full.  Or rather, it’s not the number of people that’s the problem, but the amount of resources we require from this plane to sustain our economies.  It’s possible to transform our economies to live in balance with this planet, but let’s face it, that’s not going to happen until we reach the breaking point first, and that’ll probably be within our lifetimes.  I’d like to believe that my blog will help influence enough people to achieve change here…but I admit I’m pessimistic, due to the global cooperation required.

Here’s his TED talk:

Proudly powered by WordPress | Theme: Baskerville 2 by Anders Noren.

Up ↑