What's Been and What's Ben

The democratization of the means of production is going to experience something new over the next decade. Localized manufacturing will no longer require large capital investment that relegates it to serving the purposes of rapid prototyping. The replicator from Star Trek in a primitive form.

Current home systems for rapid prototyping/3D printing/localized manufacturing extrude hot plastic in layers that cool on contact with the existing structure. This is limited because you can’t add material if it doesn’t have proper support below it. So no “floating” rings or overhangs sharper than about 45 degrees. The professional systems use lasers and special resins pools that allow for these suspended objects. I assure you as an optical engineer that involving lasers makes things expensive/high-maintenance/complicated. How can this issue be resolved?

All manufacturing can be broken out to additive and subtractive processes; atoms selectively go somewhere. Hot plastic 3D printing can add material, but it can also add materials. MakerBot’s Replicator can extrude two materials at a time to make things like globes:

But in addition to different colors, it can print different materials like water soluble PVA plastic.Why would you want to print something that can dissolve away in water? Because you have now doubled the number of operations you can perform by the addition of a subtractive process. Now “floating” objects can be created (like a chain with seamless links) by just melting away the support material in water. Now any possible shape can be printed with the only minor sticking point is that if you don’t want the support material inside complicated shapes, then you must leave a hole for it to escape (duh!).

So one issue is resolved, that thing still costs $2000 + Materials + Software + Computer! Part of that is that the scale of production is not in the millions. There are simpler solutions on kickstarter ($500 3D printer, $390 CNC, $2000 PCB CNCer). These three projects are just the start. I think literally printed circuit board will be the winning technology, although perhaps not in the bendable form. Inkjet printers are really 3D printers that take one pass. Materials are a market issue and you can make it from corn. Software is a matter of open source development drive. FreeCAD is alright. Computers are falling in price like a rock (Raspberry Pi – $25 dollar computer). For $1000 you can put together a desktop that is ten times as powerful as my Rose-Hulman laptop (which had some juice).

Will everybody want this at first? No. Personal computers were just recipe storage machines until the Internet. Will people want a remote control for the TV that is molded to their hand from their medical data and has buttons auto-arranged to their viewing habits (one button for CNN)? Probably once all of that is automated. The only future beyond it is bacterial-assisted manufacturing and full organic manufacturing (living, reproducing iPhones) because they own us at sub-micron machining efficiency, for now.

Hippies are the double-reflection through popular culture of the gospel of Jesus.

I knew I had seen Huntsman’s logo before!

My conception of 2011 spans the time between KAUST and starting my job at FiveFocal. I returned from Saudi Arabia just in time to go to the Rally to Restore Sanity/March to Keep Fear Alive in Washington DC. I spent almost a full year unemployed, living off my KAUST savings, in Boulder, Colorado. I’ve only applied to one full-time job in my life and got it. It is awesome with robots, lasers, gyroscopes, and magnets.

Zeitgeist – the events and ideas of the last year:

• news sources: The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Morning Joe, Charlie Rose, Fareed Zakaria GPS, Foreign Affairs, Gizmodo, Lifehacker, AnandTech, New York Times, Star Tribune
• I broke my arm and got a horrible poison ivy rash that took a month to go away.
• The Republican party went through Trump, Bachmann, Perry, Cain, and Gingrich attempting to find their version of Obama (or just not Romney).
• Save Tibet: reinstate a strict theocracy
• Socialism is not communism. Socialism is medicare, social security, and other ingrained part of America.
• Home-birthing is a dangerous practice designed for the ego of the mother and anything but the safety of the mother.
• No peer-reviewed study has found health benefits to organic foods. People would starve if we tried to be all organic.
• China/America airport comparisons aside, the difference in governance effectiveness isn’t about system, but that China is run by engineers and America by lawyers.
• Global climate change should be called global climate instability.
• Cutting benefits for public sector unions is taking away what they got in exchange for descent pay.
• With all due respect, republican candidates need to realize the boring reality that Canada, not Israel, is our closest ally. We co-built the bomb with them and share a relatively unguarded boarder.
• Apple: Steve Jobs passes away just as I get my first Apple computer, a 13″ macbook air.
• Definition of marriage is a funny thing. I’ve never known what government is doing interfering with what should secularly be seen as contract law. Be it polygamist, monosexual, or otherwise, conscious being have rights to enter into contracts. Although I’m against polygamy, I don’t see it as my place to be against it. It doesn’t lead on a slippery slope to beastiality because animals aren’t able to consciously make decisions.
• Nuclear power came under attack as Japan suffered a horrible meltdown crisis. Imagine if we stopped making new cars two decades into development and were surprised when they broke down. We need new power plants to bridge to safer renewables. Meltdowns are horrific, but so is a steady trickle of West Virginia coal miners dying.
• I get uncomfortable when politicians defer all judgement to the military. It is a cop out of the important tradition of having a civilian-run military. The military’s job is to do whatever the president says and the congress pays for.
• Growing income inequality became an issue with the rise of Occupy Wall Street. I like to call them OWLS and most are anarchist – a group I sometimes feel just think they should be the ones in power.
• Dictatorships are toppled while others remain in the Middle East.
• Why are foreign languages taught more than computer languages in K-12?
• Citizens United v. FEC changed how money works in politics. Now foreign governments can secretly pump money into campaigns in unlimited volume and money laundering becomes trivial; a big stack of money gets put on the scales of justice (including election of judges).
• Obama orders Osama gets shot in the head and dumped at sea. Nobody mentions that it would have been nice to have put evil on trial like at Nuremberg.
• The conflict in Iraq official ends again without a “Mission Accomplished” banner.
• China’s real estate bubble looks about ready to pop as the European Union faces a crisis of definition of scope.
• With the coming wave of genetic data’s incorporation into our regular medical evaluation, why not turn over medicine to giant computer and nurse practitioners to free up doctors to work on the master database and their golf swing?
• I learn that NASA developed the space pen over the pencil because pencil lead can break off and cause a fire/short.
• Bad Television uses irrationality to drive the plot because it instantly creates tension.
• Good Television exists:
• ABC: Modern Family
• AMC: Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Walking Dead
• Comedy Central: Futurama, South Park
• FOX: Fringe
• FX: Archer, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Justified, Louie
• HBO: Boardwalk Empire, Curb Your Enthusiasm
• IFC: Portlandia
• NBC: Community, The Office, Parks and Recreation, 30 Rock
• The descending Shepard Tone of life continues as we experience a continuation of rapid expansion of general societal progress. More cancers are curable, video games look sharper, combustion engines become more efficient, artistic production techniques become more democratized, fewer die of hunger, violent conflict on average decreases, Woody Allen continues to make great movies, internet bandwidth expands, the desire for freedom spreads further across the world, and our economy is at least back in raw output to where it was before the great recession. Good is winning against evil.

My first memories of Apple computers were about how inoperable they were with anything else. Unix was better. Function following form with a condescending interface; I wanted a middle click and needed a right click. In the early nineties they seemed like the crap computers schools bought for mysterious reasons. They weren’t x86 until 2006. Despite persistent annoyance like not having a delete [forwardly] key, Apple is ahead of every competitor when it comes to industrial design. OSX 10.7 (lion) bring improvements over past user experiences that I found confusing coming from Windows – which most users do. I now consider OX superior to Windows 7. I almost went over to the Apple-side in 2008 before Microsoft released Windows NT 7.

===================================================================================
Year    Mfr  Model    Screen Size ODD Resolution CPU  lbs. GB  Discretion
===================================================================================
2005   Dell  Precision M70   15.4  X  1920x1200  580  6.7  50  engineering beast
2008   Dell  Mini 9           8.9     1024x600   304  2.3  16  no moving parts
2010   Asus  UL30VT-A1       13.3     1366x768   981  3.7  500 post desktop deaths
2011  Apple  MacBook Air     13.3     1440x900  2358  3.0  128 wonderful
===================================================================================

The universal Rose-Hulman laptop was a monster. It bent my bicycle rack over time. The optical disk drive was removable, so I usually left it at home. So after I got on the KAUST Discovery Scholarship I bought the mini 9 and a $40 USB DVD-burner drive. I wrote many, many lab reports with giant spreadsheets on it with no problem. The Asus was okay, but just something to fill in after both of my desktops mysteriously failed. The 2011 Apple Macbook Air is the best computer I’ve ever used, and I recommend it for everybody.

Apple is successful because of supply chain management (businessweek). Their technology seems like it is from the future because it is less delayed. They deal with vendors to get stuff exclusively ahead of others. They don’t make the iPhone display, but they pay to be the only people who can sell it. That is partially where the apple tax comes from. Volume allows them great power, but also huge reliance since they make a very small array of products. Apple doesn’t approach design from the perspective of maximizing margin on a commodity product. They are also allowed freedom by not providing backwards support. On Windows everything can work, on OSX what does just does work.

• Optical Disk Drives – When is the last time you used a CD drive? When was the last time you needed to use a CD away from your primary computing area? Booting from a USB device has been standard for years now. Most software installs over the intertubes now. Blu-Ray at 1080p plays just fine over USB.
• Screen Resolution – This is an essential part of the user interface. All operating systems and browsers allow for scaling of text and objects. 1366×768 is a curse on this earth and is the result of being a convenient multiple of several numbers. IPS are much better than TN.
• Hard Drives – SSD is the best upgrade that can make an old computer seem new again. If you machine is just a bit sluggish, $100 bucks can be a good investment. With accelerometer equipped classical hard drives, 5400rpm drive speeds should be banned for 7200 rpm drives.
• Keyboard – Backlit keys are amazing. I dislike the trend towards Chicklet/Island keyboards with flat keys. Curved keys allow for faster typing by autocentering with each stroke. Curved keys do increase case thickness.
• Trackpad – I miss the Thinkpad-style keyboard nub. Multitouch gesturing done well is critical.
• Horsepower – CPUs and GPUs are crazy today. It is hard to go wrong with anything but Intel Atoms. If you note the “CPU” column above, these are PassMark CPU scores. Modern Intel processors are a huge step up and Ivy Bridge promises 40% power reduction and gaming-grade integrated graphics for next summer.
• High Speed Ports – USB 3.0, eSATA, and Thunderbolt/Light Peak provide next generation connection speeds. Especially on laptops, some future-proofing is needed for power-users.
• Magnetic Lock Power – It isn’t perfect, but is relieving.

Steven Jobs’s vision fought against a world that always seemed to come around to his side in the end. His second act began after being forced out of Apple only to return after starting Pixar to create the bleeding edge of consumer electronics – his brand names becoming synonymous with the generic term. Without him, there still would have been iPods, iPhones, and iPads, but they would have sucked if only because his products drove others to push the envelop as hard as at Apple. He understood the large-scale control of the supply chain that allowed them to simultaneously announce and release a device with new technology to millions. I assume the enigma of Jobs will become part of American folklore along with Johnny Appleseed. The recent disappointment at the iPhone 4S (and it not being 5) is a testament to the regularity we assumed in the release of miracles from Steve.

This is not a drill. Arrested Development is coming back (source). After going off the air prematurely in 2006, the lingering question remained if/when the instant-cult-classic would come back. Rumors of movies, TV, and live theater has persisted until an interview with creator Mitchell Hurwitz; later lead actor Jason Bateman tweeted there would be ten episodes and a movie.

There is a new quadruped robot jumbo dog thing called AlphaDog (source). You can see the original Big Dog video above. I don’t know why people feel the need to kick them so much. It is the first time I ever felt bad for a robot/our-future-overlords.

I’ve got a job!

I’m going to be working full-time for FiveFocal LLC here in Boulder, Colorado. They (We) work on really cool optics stuff in commercial and defense applications. It is a small start-up with some impressive projects, people, and possibilities. It’s a career I want instead of a job I must take; I still have a few months of savings left. I would like to thank Kevin Zekis for alerting me to the job. It astounds me when I think of all the smaller things in my life that have lead to much greater things. I went to Rose-Hulman after my high school guidance councilor mentioned the school off-hand as I was heading out the door. KAUST came about from a school-wide email – which I had almost universally ignored. It is great too that I don’t need to move again as FiveFocal is less than three miles from me with bike paths and lanes along the way. I get a healthcare plan, a dental plan, a bus pass, a month of vacation, a SIMPLE IRA, and salary that will ensure that I don’t have to buy store-brand food – although Target store-brand potato chips are actually Old Dutch potato chips that you can’t otherwise get outside Minnesota. I start within two weeks doing the cool engineering stuff that makes me feel justified in spending an hour on the bus each way to go to the good Middle School (Anwatin) and High School (Southwest), travelling the equivalent of around the world on Greyhound buses for Rose-Hulman, and flying the equivalent of around the world for KAUST. Yay being a productive member of society beginning to pay back the roughly million dollars in education invested in me.

And the employment rate inches down by that much.

I sing to myself “first-world problems” to the tune of Foreigner’s “Juke Box Hero” when I run into problems streaming video on 3G in the Flatirons or other trivial problems of modern convenience. It comes from my a former roommate’s frustration with load times while playing Guitar Hero.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is punishing a woman for driving in public in with ten lashes (source). Woman can’t drive there, except on the KAUST campus where I often forgot about the outside until driving out when women would put on their abayas. My joke about it that sure, women couldn’t drive there, but one cab ride shows that none of the men can either. The men there are horrible, horrible drivers – even for the region – that seem to take every merge as an affront to their masculinity that must be countered in a constant game of survival of the fittest. Traffic circles work the opposite way; drivers in the circle get cut off by other drivers coming in. She was driving as part of a protest movement around Jeddah – where I lived for a month before moving to KAUST. For all the effort The Kingdom puts into economic development, underutilizing half your potential workforce represents a monumental barrier when you factor in the drain of having drivers for [rich] women.

In 2015 women will get the right to vote in local elections, a massive step forward (it was 1920 here), but how will they get to the polls? Will this be more than doubling the number of votes married men can cast? Keep in mind the elections are for positions that are advisory, not legislative/executive.

UPDATE: The King, who is doing his best in many ways in a ultra-conservative land, granted her a pardon.