tingilinde

makerbot - $750 3d printing kit

MakerBot Industries will support hobbyist 3d printing projects.  It appears to be a source of hard to find parts and a prototype design.   The initial product is a kit of pieces.

Look to thingverse for inspiration 

These are still very early days for home 3d printing, but people seriously interested in hacking should check this out. (Mike,  Jan, Yann...   :-)

private jets v jet blue

A great ad campaign from Jet Blue

edward james olmos at the un

a neat paper

Fernando coauthored a position paper The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data - very clear and a recommended read.  In a recent blog post he responds to a few criticisms.  

clothing that fits

Clothing is mostly mass produced and one hopes to find pieces that roughly fit.   I have a friend who is outside normal design ranges and fit just doesn't happen, but a surprising percentage of "normal" people have problems finding clothing that fits well.  Some surveys suggest more than half of women can't find jeans that fit well enough to please them.

About a decade ago mass a few companies started working with schemes for mass customization of clothing - usually a person would have their body scanned producing a large number of accurate measurements and this data would be used to create very customized patterns which would drive automated cutting machines. Cornell even had a program studying the process.

A bit of this is done today, but it is still very rare.  Others, like Lands' End ask you to make measurements and hope to provide something that fits better than off the rack clothing.

The current model of having clothing made in in the third world with several middlemen and huge profits is well established and anything new will be difficult - particularly when one has the difficultly of getting good measurements (unless you use a tailor or scanning booth, measurements by hand are not terribly accurate), a time gap of several weeks before you see the product, and a higher price.  There is a lot of room for clever innovation.

But there is great promise.  Americans spent about $439 billion on shoes and clothing in 2007 - about $1500 per capita and seriously more than many other "hot" economic activities. 

walking, biking and health...

I was looking at some obesity numbers and decided to find some numbers  on human powered transport - short trips in various countries.   An interesting plot emerges - it is *not* causal as several things have not be accounted for, but Americans were about as svelte as Europeans in the 1960s and had similar levels of activity....  hmmm

A link to a guest post I wrote. 

Here is the plot - check the link for details.

creationists in texas win

students and everyone else looses 

relentless stupidity

Rep John Shimkus (Republican-Illinois) shows an amazing amount of scientific illiteracy during a House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment last week speaking to a British global warming denier: 

 

it gets better...

   

wow thanks for the links Jim

the leading edge - four centuries ago

One of two surviving telescopes used by Galileo - when an instrument opens up a new vista and the right intellect uses it, the world changes.  Curiosity and bravery were involved.  The religious dogma did not allow thought.  (some things don't change much)

To celebrate the event a much better telescope is available for $15 for people who want to begin to probe the sky on their own.  The review is positive and I've run across a few other positive reviews.

We've come so far.  Now instruments like WMAP, ACBAR and the Cosmic Background Imager have revealed the power spectrum of the cosmic background to a precision that we know the age of the Universe since the big bang is 13.73 +/- 0.1 billion year.  An amazing result and a fantastic example of human curiosity and ingenuity.  Soon Planck will fly and give a better result.

a visual little red riding hood

a Röyksopp-ish interpretation  (tip of the hat to Jheri)