I just recieved word that I got accepted to volunteer at SIGGRAPH 2007. It's a convention (this year in San Diego) put on by the Special Interest Group for computer GRAPHics.
Basically it's just a ton amazing inventions that have just been made.
It's in August. If can figure out how to get to San Diego and back, I promise a Things That Exist blogging frenzy.
Scientists stopped time the other day.1 The say one day they'll make really fast computers that use light instead of electricity and wires. Electricity and wires! How Thomas Edison! Get with the times, computers!
Later that day I beat Allison at Mario Kart 64. It was her first time, but not just Mario Kart; it was her first time playing video games at all!
Then I played SF Rush 2049 against Max. He beat me:
1
Advertising space taken out in a special section on the moon landing:
memo to a great-grandson
Even though you aren't born yet, we are going to save this copy of the New York Times for you to read when you are grown up.
By that time, going to the moon may be commonplace. But in 1969, as you can see from these pages, it was quite a thing. After all, it was the first time that man ever set foot outside the earth.
We'll save the complete paper so that you can see the ads and have a good laugh at the fashions of the Sixties. Those were the days when men's and women's clothes were still differentiated and the abbreviated remains of women's skirts could still be seen.
Men's clothes had just waked up from a hundred year's sleep and there were only eighteen Wallachs stores in the whole world.
Hope you're enjoying the twenty-first century.
It arrived at my apartment in this mailer tube.
The future comes from Minnesota.
Stratasys is a company that makes rapid prototyping machines. A rapid prototyping machine is like an inkjet printer that prints layers of plastic into 3D objects.
It's solid white ABS plastic, the same thing Legos are made out of. It has planetary gears. The entire assembly was printed at once. Empty space was filled with a second material that dissolves in a bath after printing.
There are no fasteners or joints.
This is the future. In less than 10 years we will have 3D printers in our apartments and houses. We will download files for household objects and print them when we need them. Anybody who wants to design an object can do it without too much difficulty and virtually no money. Open source 3D design software already exists. Objects will become the new digital music. Variety will explode. If color and material are limited to white plastic, everything will be about form. Our objects will have not just fit our hands, they will caress them and tell stories with texture and shape. Your bedside lamp will be your new iTunes playlist.
Here we go!
