Another use for low cost 3D Printing, think about it, exact models of all sorts of biological specimens: surface, organs, bones, shells, exoskeletons, etc, scaled to a size that students or scientists can use for discussion, learning, planning, etc.
New type of solar structure cools buildings in full sunlight | phys.org, new technology based on nano tech material that tunes reflective / radiative properties of a surface, so efficient that its as effective as air conditioning powered by a similar sized PV panel. But this passive tech does not need to face the sun, radiating the heat back to space through the narrow band of frequencies that provide a window through our atmosphere.
Your first e-vehicle could be an e-bike, I was thinking this very thought watching some guy in full gold wing touring togs whining along on his bright metallic red red scooter. The monocoque bodied eBike with 0-60 times as good as a good sedan and space for modest shopping would be an ideal 2nd / 3rd vehicle, useful 80 to 90% of the time.
Gyro stabilization makes the vehicle practical, if reliable enough.
Magazine ad, America’s Independent Electric Light and Power Companies
Why Silicon Valley Is Winning the Robocar Race
By Virginia Postrel Mar 17, 2013 6:30 PM ET
Good short piece, I think it’s pretty obvious but needed saying. Articles out of ‘Detroit’ talk about decades, about lawyers killing it, about the joy of driving, no the joy of striving. In fact this is another area where differential change is required, relative change, change suited to the specific here and now of the individual or local group, not society writ totalitarian.
Will Anyone Create a Killer App for Google Glass? | MIT Technology Review.
Yes! The question is how broad the appeal is. For certain jobs, medical care providers, law enforcement, field journalism, meter readers, etc it seems natural but for more general use? Shopping, running, biking, skiing, … anything where recording and displaying data while being in the world seems natural.
In the long run the tech in glass would appear suited to supplant – or subsume – other interfaces, when the camera can watch your fingers interact with a projected ‘underlay’ and let you type, write, talk-edit, etc while capturing audio,video, local, context. To do this a high speed ultra low power, ultra high bandwidth link to a cellphone / superphone type device and then the web will be needed for a half decade or so.
The combination of wrist, ear, eye and belt/pocket modules of your personal retinue plus remote computing will capture the world around you in a 24/7 data-log.
And a great reason to show a picture of a beautiful woman ( “muse and model” Dita Von Teese),
Photo: Andrew Tingle/Wired
Article in Wired, clothes cusomized to you are coming. The dress was made from several panels of laser sintered nylon giving the dress the ability to conform to the wearers body, cool and slinky sexy, if a bit Metro Goth.
Wired | The Common Space Fleet (1968) BY DAVID S. F. PORTREE 12.26.12 7:50 AM
Even as the moon landing was approaching futurists were looking to what should follow. They were looking at manned multi year missions based on the technology they had, reuse and incremental development of Apollo – Saturn technology. Just reading this article sent me of into a dream of what could have been. Just thinking about it made me sad, mad, glad: sad for what might have been, mad at those who sidelined the dream because of shortsightedness, glad that at least some had the sense to think-dream based on common sense.
Today Elon Musk and a few others are dreaming similar dreams maybe having read a few of the NASA documents though the basics are so common sense they do not have to have.
The iPad is the premier tablet and it’s probably nearly the perfect size and weight for its form factor. That’s not to say that within the form factor there is no room for improvement. A screen that takes up most of the face should be a near term target, as should an auxiliary screen on the back face that provides bright light reading and low power / speed interactivity for those who don’t live indoors all the time. To support the iPad as a companion device, multi level security is a growing need.
Make the bezel the same on the iPad as minimal as possible (get rid of the push button) push the screen out to the edge, don’t change the shell size. This with continued pixel densification will put the screen on another level altogether. Make thumb and palm detection native and intelligent enough to enable me to rest my palm on the screen and write with a stylus as if the screen were regular paper.
Put an eInk reader panel on the back to enable the display of text and graphic art, this will enable high light low power reading applications and some other limited visual bandwidth applications such as phone etc. (This will be accomplished with a smart cover but it would be cool if it were integral with the iPad.)
The radio suite & battery life along with the camera, face time, GPS, and other built in sensors are probably good enough not to call for increases in size weight, but neither should they be decremented.
The iPad is far to big a part of many people’s eLives to leave to the pitiful protection it has today. We need multi level security, enable me to turn the iPad on as if there is no security for consuming web pages, playing games, and using certain apps. But for other functions use face recognition, symbolic coding other than a number pad, voice recognition, retina image recognition and even finger print recognition in combination to protect various levels of data in the unit.
Enable cyber security with one or more over watch processors that is not linked to the outside world for some level of checking to make sure that the tablet has not been compromised. A version of this ‘chip’ may be linked to a secure remote system (short-range) so businesses or organizations can disable certain functions of the iPad remotely to make sure that pictures, audio, or other data cannot be put into memory without authorization. This Big Brother functionality is a bit daunting but at least the over watch processor is probably going to be needed. The full BB may be an external attachment and not integral so one can shed it easily….
I think there is some weariness in regards to apple product intros these days, I sense that the press (in general { there have been folks who’ve kind’a felt this way for a while}) is actually beginning to feel a bit used by Apple (and they are probably right though they only have themselves to blame.) I feel the same way though I totally blame the press for not having the guts, smarts and knowledge to branch out more generally into tech reporting, there are vast areas of technology that are poorly covered and even ignored because they are boring old tech. Much of this old tech is boring because no one reports on it and promotes it like Apple promotes their products…making it easy for the press to hang on like lampreys.
Apple uses the press as an advertising amplifier, its one of the things that the other tech companies have either lost or never had the ability to do. It costs a lot to be a showman but it pays back, however its probably impossibly hard to quantify the cost or the payback to a financial guy before you go and do it. Jobs knew what he was doing and how to do it in his bones, and inculcated it in the bones of his legacy but the MBA’s hate anything that is not quantifiable…this aborts new ‘Apples.’ But even at Apple, without Jobs, there is a good chance that the MBA’s will chip away at the Apple marketing/sales/advertising/etc machine in the name of profits and kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
This World and Others 