Odd Lots
- Here’s something you could give your geeky sweetie for Valentine’s Day next year: A giant pink 3-D printable heart made of gears. I can’t quite see enough of the mesh to know if the gears actually turn. Someone in the 3-D printing community might know more.
- I certainly didn’t expect this: One of my manuscripts is in the University of Kansas collection of Ted Sturgeon’s personal papers. (Look for item 61b.) It’s the Clarion first draft of “Our Lady of the Endless Sky,” which I wrote at the workshop, the story that went on to be my first professional sale in SF.
- My Favorite Extinct Creature of the Month: Cynognathus, which was half-wolf, half-tiger, half-dinosaur, and all trouble. (No wonder we’re descended from him.)
- From Tom Roderick comes word of a Harvard engineering project that assembles robot bees on a little scaffold only a little bigger than a quarter. Each bee weighs about 90 mg. The bees interest me less than the assembly technique, which suggests that we have barely scraped the surface in the micromanufacturing arena.
- I was having a hard time finding news reports on the killer cold weather in Europe (my older nephew is there now, studying at the London Business School) until I happened upon Ice Age Now. Good aggregator on cold weather issues, to which the MSM is peculiarly averse these days.
- This may be true if you’re a trilobite. It may be less true if you’re a jellyfish.
- From the Tell-Me-Something-I-Didn’t-Already-Know Department: My hometown has the most corruption convictions of any city in the country. Backstory: I used to repair Xerox machines in City Hall circa 1975. Nobody pays attention to the Xerox repairman. But the Xerox repairman was paying a great deal of attention to City Hall. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Also from Pete Albrecht comes a link to something I might characterize as The Couture from the Black Lagoon.
- Bill Higgins points us to a brief collection of rejected Tom Swift, Jr novels.
- The person ahead of me at the Safeway autocheckout machine did not pull his receipt, so when I grabbed my bag and ran earlier today I took the wrong one. What I found was evidence of someone on the Cross Purposes Diet: three line items, of which two were Atkins bars. The third was DONUTS BULK. Good luck, dude.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: humor · politics · science · sf · weather · writing
"
I believe the big pink heart gears are a scaled up version of this, and like their smaller brethren do turn. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQqVajeg2Vo
-JRS
It’s possible the donuts the guy bought were for the office, so that his happy coworkers could gorge themselves on tasty, tasty fried-dough sugar bombs while he gnawed on his Atkins bars.
On the Harvard MoBee… I don’t quite know what to make of this. On one level, it’s very clever and imaginative. On another, it is an amazingly complicated, expensive, brute-force way to do something that should be very simple.
What a pop-up book does with paper and glue, they are doing with dozens of exotic materials and processing techniques.
Why couldn’t essentially the same thing be done with ordinary PCB laminates, and sent to any of the many PCB houses to be etched and routed? Press it the right way, and the various sub-boards pop up and fold. Reflow solder the places you want rigid, and leave copper foil hinges on the ones you want to flex. Heck, you could even have entire circuits on these same boards!
Look at some of the incredible mechanical automatons built hundreds of years ago. They were works of art; a combination of ingenious design and meticulous craftsmanship. They were amazing! So, if some modern CAD shop scans it and programs a milling machine to crank out a copy, is this also amazing? No; it’s still a copy. Just clerical work.
Projects like this strike me like someone making a model of the Eiffel tower out of toothpicks; but he used a robot and software to assemble it for him. What does that say about him? What did he actually create?