Clearly I need hominid casts made of stainless steel:
Shapeways, a company that made its name offering custom 3-D printing in plastic and resin, will now print your designs in stainless steel. All you have to do is upload your brilliant CAD design (or pick from a range of stock items). Shapeways will print it out in cold, shiny steel, and mail it to you.
It ain't cheap -- $10 per cubic centimeter. But I suppose they're dishwasher safe.
Errrgh...I'm beginning to think that there are around five out of print books that I would gladly spring for a Kindle if they were available, because each one used is 80 to 100 bucks. Trouble is, it seems like a lot of professional texts that are on Kindle cost $50 or more.
Since I've already contributed to bellyaching about student writing assignments, it's only fair to point to a Wired article that says students are getting better:
As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can't write—and technology is to blame....
Andrea Lunsford isn't so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students' prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.
"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.
Maybe Twitter will help with composing 140-character thesis statements?
John Zogby polled Americans on whether they'd like to become cyborgs. Some of the questions are about brain implants for health, others for information or "entertainment".
--If you could have the Internet wired directly into your brain, would you do so?
Yes: 13%
No: 82%
Not sure: 5%.
By comparison, around 10 percent of Americans have been prescribed antidepressants of some kind. I can imagine the idea of brain tinkering might be marketed in a similar way. Certainly, when you see actual research on microchip-neuron interfaces now, it's pitched as a way to directly influence pain networks, or rehabilitate lost tissue or nerve connections. In other words, medical utility.
Seems to me, that there's a lot of money people spend on expensive colleges that might be spent on technology instead, if it could enable the same opportunities. Microsoft Encarta destroyed the market for paper encyclopedias; Wikipedia killed the market for Encarta. Could a microchip kill the market for Harvard?
Anyway, you can count me in the 82 percent. It seems to me that Brain Internet has only one really practical use: the Matrix will use your brain to do character recognition. You know, like ReCaptcha.
Which pretty much makes the wetware brain a complicated way of gold farming.
If you're wondering what the story is behind the Michael Phelps super-swimsuit story, Alan Boyle covers the science pretty well.
Can I just say, Bertrand Piccard is awesome?
Adventurer Bertrand Piccard on Friday unveiled the Solar Impulse, which, with its sleek white wings and pink trimming, aims to make history as the prototype for a solar-powered flight around the world.
"Yesterday it was a dream, today it is an airplane, tomorrow it will be an ambassador of renewable energies," said Piccard, who in 1999 copiloted the first round-the-globe nonstop balloon flight.
This is random, but John Dvorak writing about the portable phone craze had me laughing:
In the 1950s (when men were men), the same group wouldn't be around a dinner table sipping Chardonnay and showing off their effete phones. They'd be outside at a drive-in eating beef and showing off the motors in their cars. They be comparing carburetors rather than counting iPhone apps.
Times have indeed changed. Today nobody even knows what a carburetor is, let alone how a motor works. Instead they're pinching photos on their iPhones and thinking to themselves, "Wow, neat-o!" It's out and out pathetic when you stop to think about it.
The physics arXiv blog from MIT Technology Review points to a paper that describes a way to use pulsars as an interstellar GPS system.
With the co-ordinate system established, any interplanetary spacecraft could then use the signals from these pulsars to determine its position in this co-ordinate system to within a few nanoseconds, which corresponds to about a metre.
Yes, I know, after the ant compass post, some of you are beginning to wonder about my sanity. Isn't it interesting that "GPS system" has become the media synonym for basic navigation? I figure it's all because of iPhone marketing.
I follow technology here once in a while, but I actually follow it pretty closely personally. As a research tool, the new Kindle DX is getting close to something I would want. I could really see myself using a good standalone PDF viewer -- something to flip through open PDFs while I'm working on the laptop. And it's easier to carry a flat tablet-profile reader into meetings and talks where a laptop would be unwelcome. Two desiderata:
1. I give presentations as PDFs anyway. So it would be nice to imagine one of these with a video-out. Admittedly, that would probably work against the low-power and super-thin profile.
2. More than 3.3 GB of usable storage. If I'm going to carry my PDF library around, I'm going to need more than 20 -- and that's not counting whatever books I buy. It has a mini-USB port, which means it's easy to swap files with a computer, but I haven't seen anywhere whether the Kindle can mount a flash drive itself.
It's being touted as a vehicle for textbook distribution. This year is the first that I've really noticed a majority of students using laptops in my classes -- I don't know about e-textbooks but I can easily imagine this device as useful for other course materials.
UPDATE (2009-05-10): Lance Ulanoff has more news on the textbook introduction:
While Bezos glossed over the details of the Kindle DX and its university pilot programs with Arizona State University, University of Virginia, Reed College, and Case Western Reserve University, I was able to find someone from ASU who knew a bit more about what college students would encounter this fall. Adrian Sannier, ASU University Technology Officer, explained that the test run would be confined to ASU's honors college, which has about 1,000 students. ASU and Amazon will deliver Kindle DXs to these students, preloaded with all the necessary textbooks, in time for the start of the fall semester.
Cool, but this means the students won't get the full experience of setting up, perusing the bookstore, and downloading books. It does, however, put the pilot program on the fast track for feedback. Sannier was pretty excited about the whole program and shared another detail that Bezos left out: Digital textbooks would cost roughly 50 percent of what their physical counterparts cost. He also said he sees a huge benefit of having digital textbooks, "We're getting much richer text into the hands of students—it's searchable, linkable…the ability to have material at their fingertips all the time is a major step forward."
I should think the publishers would like it, since it would cut out the used textbook market.
UPDATE (2009-05-10): A reader writes that the current Kindles have problems rendering math, which would be a problem if continued in the new native PDF reader of the Kindle DX. That product hasn't been released yet, so we'll have to wait for a review.
This thing about the artificial muscles is incredibly cool:
Carbon nanotube aerogel sheets are the sole component of new artificial muscles that provide giant elongations and elongation rates of 220% and (3.7 x 104)% per second, respectively, at operating temperatures from 80 to 1900 kelvin. These solid-state–fabricated sheets are enthalpic rubbers having gaslike density and specific strength in one direction higher than those of steel plate.
So they're as light as air, as strong as steel, and they can pull faster than natural muscle.
