When is too young to have a 3D printer?

Well, when is too young to use a computer?

 

I'm pretty jaded about brilliant college projects which are still in the development phase, but this is an intriguing one - a 3D printer aimed at ten year olds. What intrigued me, thouhg, was not necessarily the overarching concept - which is cute and praiseworthy, don't get me wrong - but one of the technical details which I glaned from reading a magazine article about it. Apparently the printing head is st up in a polar arrangement, as opposed to a cartesian one, to reduce movement and wear. I'm not aware of any other printers which do this, certainly not at the lower end of the market. So, that's interesting.

 

Alarming

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jun/12/google-personalisation-internet-data-filtering

Rather disturbing article, this.

BLDGBLOG: Landscape Futures Super-Trip

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/landscape-futures-super-trip.html
Must remember this itinerary if we ever do a road trip in the States...

"Our stops include the "world’s largest collection of optical telescopes," including the great hypotenuse of the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope, outside Tucson; the Very Large Array in west-central New Mexico; the Controlled Environment Agriculture Center at the University of Arizona, aka the "lunar greenhouse," where "researchers are demonstrating that plants from Earth could be grown without soil on the moon or Mars, setting the table for astronauts who would find potatoes, peanuts, tomatoes, peppers and other vegetables awaiting their arrival"; the surreal encrustations of the Salton Sea, a site that, in the words of Kim Stringfellow, "provides an excellent example of the the growing overlap of humanmade and natural environments, and as such highlights the complex issues facing the management of ecosystems today"; the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, with its automated scanning systems used for "robotic searches for variable stars and exoplanets" in the night sky, and its gamma-ray reflectors and "blazar lightcurves" flashing nearby; the Grand Canyon; Red Rocks, outside Sedona; the hermetic interiorities of Biosphere 2; White Sands National Monument and the Trinity Site marker, with its so-called bomb glass; the giant aircraft "boneyard" at the Pima Air & Space Museum; and, last but not least, the unbelievably fascinating Lunar Laser-ranging Experiment at Apache Point, New Mexico, where they shoot lasers at prismatic retroreflectors on the moon, testing theories of gravitation, arriving there by way of the nearby Dunn Solar Telescope."

It’s Not About You - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/opinion/31brooks.html
Is it graduation time again? Already? Where does the tme go, eh? Anyway, an interesting article here which laments the advice given to college graduates - the idea tht they should follow their own paths, live their own dreams... just at a time when previous generations (and in all probability, they themselves) are in the process of tying themselves to a spouse, to a career, etc.

"Most people don’t form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling."

I don't really think we should abandon our dreams and subsume ourselves in othre people's misery as a way of validating our lives, but it does have a grain of truth in it - not sure I could tell you, even now, whether my life is going in the direction it should. Assuming such a 'correct' path could ever exist.

St Petersburg & Moscow

Rafael did this

This has bubbled up to the surface again as I am currently trying to compile the photobook (or as the older generation would have it an 'album') from our long trip to China... so where were we? Oh yes. From Helsinki we took the train to St Petersburg and then onwards to Moscow, spending a few days in each place...

Lego Castles

http://www.mocpages.com/moc.php/230059
Ever since I was a kid with a book on castles, I've always had a yen to visit Krak des Chevaliers in Syria, arguably the greatest castle ever built. And today Google suggested "Krak des Chevaliers LEGO"...



... holy crap.

I poked around a little more on the site, and mostly it's pretty... well, fictional and boring (although the siege reenactment from Lord of the Rings looked impressive). But my favourites are definitely the real-life scale models, which require a bit of ingenuity to get the details right. Check out the Belfry:


That's in Bruges, you know. There's some great little details which you can see in the full Flickr set.

Man Goes on Junket to Avery Island, tastes Tabasco sauce. That's it, really.

http://www.doshermanos.co.uk/2011/03/tabasco-getting-saucy-on-avery-island.html
You have to scroll a long way down to get to the story itself, but when you get there I found it quite diverting.

Rotterdam villa collides with mirror, attractive result

Not for anyone with a thing for rounded curves, this... but wow it sure is pretty. The architects claim that all they did was establish the corners of the maximum allowed envelope and join them up, but I've never seen it done like this!


The architects are a firm called Ooze - which makes me think of blobby, amoeba-like stuff rather than than a farmhouse seen through a smashed mirror. If you can stomach their pretentious website, there are a few interesting pictures of the works in progress.

Economics is flakier than a moulting corn flake.

Possibly.

This is a really interesting resource, if you happen to have done Economics at A-level or something.

"Recently it’s been said that it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Crisis, normalized to the point that it appears proper for extinction events to be assuaged through market-based incentives and the atmosphere pimped out to the highest corporate bidder, is the currency by which the world now turns. But what if, for the sake of experiment, we were to press our thoughts just beyond the thin, strangling curtain of capitalist maximization? "

http://kickitover.org/

Forget looking down the back of the sofa

... and don't sneeze, or you'll never see it again.

http://www.newelectronics.co.uk/article/31740/Researchers-unveil-first-millimetre-scale-computing-system.aspx

I like the idea of an 'extreme sleep mode'. I need one of those.