February 2008
Subprime Works
This is really kind of brilliant: a good, clear guide to the subprime mess, in a pretty funny and direct style.
http://docs.google.com/TeamPresent?docid=ddp4zq7n_0cdjsr4fn&skipauth=true&pli=1
(Via David Levinger)
Prefab housing rich in the history of the Congo
“The Maison is plug-and-play: there was never any plumbing, and it is wired for electricity. It ships in six containers. Christie’s is compiling a short list of potential bidders with substantial properties in Mustique, Antigua, the Hamptons — name your playground — who might like a 59-foot-by-32-foot–by-16-foot-tall folly/outdoor sculpture/guesthouse/vintage metal toy to park on the lawn, with a designer label attached.”
With a multi-million dollar pricetag and a spotted past as a literal accessory to French Colonialism in the Congo, the Maison Tropicale is not your standard affordable kit-of-parts. But as an antique, it’s rich with history, and there’s no doubt it won’t be orphaned for long.
http://www.inhabitat.com/2007/05/18/prefab-friday-jean-prouves-1951-maison-tropicale/
Works for me! (from the black swan guy)
Random tinkering is the path to success. And fortunately, we are increasingly learning to practice it without knowing it–thanks to overconfident entrepreneurs, naive investors, greedy investment bankers, confused scientists and aggressive venture capitalists brought together by the free-market system.
We need more tinkering: Uninhibited, aggressive, proud tinkering. We need to make our own luck. We can be scared and worried about the future, or we can look at it as a collection of happy surprises that lie outside the path of our imagination.
http://www.forbes.com/2007/05/23/nicholas-taleb-innovation-tech-cz_07rev_nt_0524taleb.html
Some future Nerd God fixes 3D on 2D screens. Permanently.
Just… watch it. It’s huge.
I think this could be done using eyeball tracking without the sensor bar too.
Vacuum-insulated windows patent
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5005557-description.html
Notably it’s about the how, and references older work on the basic concept. Odds-are that means the diode, if it’s covered at all, is under the Australian patents for the Solar Kettle design.
The Heineken World Bottle (beer bottle designed to be reused as a brick)
People keep posting stuff about this. Maybe it’ll actually be reissued if they keep it up. Probably won’t sell any better this time either…
http://www.designverb.com/2007/11/10/heineken-world-bottle-beer-to-bricks/
Brilliant architectural touch: using stairs as a book case
Basically, the space below each stair is storage for books. Very nifty picture at the link below.
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/02/19/library-built-into-a.html
Go read this cartoon
http://www.viruscomix.com/page382.html
Nifty, nifty.
Open Manufacturing - the issue is patent law doesn’t support viral licenses easily
The issue is patents. Open Source derives it’s power from copyright law - they use the property right of “copyright” and then pool it by using the GPL and other such licenses which rest on copyright.
Patent is a huge pain in the ass. You could do an open source patent pool, but that’s a very expensive and hard to manage undertaking.
So… one option is to work in the domain of no property rights - public domain - which is where a manufacturing technology goes if it is disclosed without patents, or is patented but the patent has expired.
But then what if you publish your design, then somebody makes a small tweak which kind of perfects your design, and then patents their tweak - without a patent on the original item, you can’t require them to release their changes for general use, because there’s no property right that you hold which applies to their work.
A problem, for sure, in terms of doing Open Manufacturing in the same vein as Open Source.
Lazyweb, I also want a Solar Energy Diode
This is a bit more complex to describe. Here’s how it works.
Take two disks of glass, one black, one clear. Let us say they are 4″ in diameter, of indeterminate thickness.
Now take a ring, say 1″ thick, 4″ in diameter, made from a strong insulator. Separate the two disks with this ring, enclosing some air.
Now evacuate the air, leaving a vacuum gap between the two glass disks, except at the edge of each disk, where the ring holds them apart.
Now place this ring into, say, the top of a highly insulated box. Let us say the black side of the “Solar Energy Diode” faces into the box.
Infrared energy will pass through the clear disk, hit the black disk, be converted into heat, and then trapped inside the box by the vacuum gap between the black and clear disk. In this way, incoming solar energy can be trapped inside of the box, with only a little energy escaping back through the black disk, vacuum, and clear disk into the surrounding area.
In the converse case, the Solar Energy Diode is turned around, black disk out, making heat flow more easily in the other direction. In this orientation, black body radiation from the items in the box flows through the clear disk, through the vacuum gap, and then strikes the black disk, being converted into heat.
An exercise for the interested reader: can a half-silvered mirror (a one-way mirror) be used to make this Solar Energy Diode more effective?
Couple with a solar funnel to create an effective solar oven, or with a solar funnel, pointed at the night sky, with the disk in the “black-side-out” condition, to create an effective solar refrigerator.
Who’s going to manufacture???