Better living through custom 3-D printing. This is going to shake up a lot more than the aerospace industry.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
In Case You Missed It
Iowahawk has the scoop on the vice president’s plan to jump the Grand Canyon with Amtrak. Speaking of which, Ray LaHood showed up at the Commercial Space Transportation Conference on Thursday. The topic of his speech? High-speed rail.
The country’s in the very best of hands.
Talking About Our Space Future
Over at Second Life today. Sorry for the late notice (but it will be recorded) — I got in late from DC last night and just noticed myself.
Toyota, Exonerated
They were stepping on the gas instead of the brakes. That’s actually a pretty good metaphor for the Congress and spending. And we’re about to crash into something.
Space Stasis
Thoughts from Neil Stephenson on how we got stuck with our current space transportation schemes. It’s unclear, though, what he means when he says “rockets,” or what different directions wold be fruitful. If he means “expendable launchers,” then yes, we need to break out, and start building space transports. But those are still “rockets.”
[Update a while later]
Thoughts on the development of reusable vehicles from Clark Lindsey.
Obama’s Antique Technological Vision
Thoughts from Michael Barone:
If you put together Obama’s resistance to just about any serious changes in entitlement spending with his antique vision of technological progress, what you see is an America where the public sector permanently consumes a larger part of the economy than in the past and squanders the proceeds on white elephants like faux high-speed rail lines and political payoffs to the teacher and other public-sector unions. Private-sector innovation gets squeezed out by regulations like the Obama FCC’s net neutrality rules. It’s a plan for a static rather than dynamic economy.
Leftists only like change when they are in control of it.
[Update a few minutes later]
Sorry, link is fixed now.
[Update a while later]
This seems related somehow: Network news anchors struggle to understand the Internet in 1994.
I had been using email for over ten years prior to this.
Faster, Please
Researchers at Scripps have converted skin cells directly to heart muscle:
“This work represents a new paradigm in stem cell reprogramming,” said Scripps Research Associate Professor Sheng Ding, Ph.D., who led the study. “We hope it helps overcome major safety and other technical hurdles currently associated with some types of stem cell therapies.”
I found this an interesting (and flawed) analogy, though:
“In 11 days, we went from skin cells to beating heart cells in a dish,” said Ding. “It was phenomenal to see.”
Ding points out the protocol is fundamentally different from what has been done by other scientists in the past and notes that giving the cells a different kind of signal could turn them into brain cells or pancreatic cells.
“It is like launching a rocket,” he said. “Until now, people thought you needed to first land the rocket on the moon and then from there you could go to other planets. But here we show that just after the launch you can redirect the rocket to another planet without having to first go to the moon. This is a totally new paradigm.”
Actually, I don’t know anyone who thought that except for people who were promulgating a straw-man argument against the Vision for Space Exploration. For instance, some claimed that Bush’s plan was foolish because it proposed “building a Kennedy Space Center on the moon.” But the plan was never to land on the moon, and then depart from there for other planets. It was to utilize the resources of the moon to provide propellants and other consumables to interplanetary ships already in orbit, and save the expense of launching them all from earth. It may well be that this is equally economically impractical in the near term, but it’s not what the critics (and the Scripps researcher) seem to think it is.
By the way, the article says that these researchers are scientists, but I think they’re engineers. Or perhaps some blend of both.
The ISO Of The Human Eye
It’s pretty damn good, even though we can’t really measure it, and better than any digital camera. But maybe not for much longer.
The Wrong Solution
We might be able to save the planet via artificial meat, but for some reason…
In a typical Malthusian-panic green response, one group recommends going vegan to save the planet. But Dr. Mironov has another approach: grow the stuff in labs without all the methane. I have no idea whether this will work at all or whether the meat produced that way will taste more like Kobe beef than like the anonymous gray ‘mystery meat’ they used to feed us when I was a promising young sprout back in pundit school. But if Dr. Mironov is even partly right, the dynamics of the world’s food supply, energy use and atmospheric composition are very, very different from what the greens say.
You would think that smart greens genuinely interested in saving the planet would be all over Dr. Mironov’s work like white on rice. You would think that the vast and well organized enviro-agricultural lobbies like the ones that brought us ethanol and the enviro-industrial lobbies like the ones bringing us bad electric cars and expensively subsidized alternative energy sources would be pumping billions or at least hundreds of millions into a relatively simple scientific concept that, if successful, would make the world cleaner while dramatically raising the living standards of much of the world’s population by making a high protein diet more accessible and sustainable.
It’s almost as though they had a different agenda than the one they claim.
Is SF Becoming More Conservative?
An interesting discussion. I agree with the commenters, like Eric Raymond, that there seems to be a confusion between conservative and libertarian.