Sunday, March 20, 2005

Happy new Persian year. 1384 years has passed from when prophet Mohammad started his mission and Iranians have never been less religious. We always say that a good year will be judged by its spring, and by what I've seen so far, I believe we'll have a good year. Both Bush and Khamenei have appeared much more reasonable and easy-going and apparently are listening to people out of their offices. Therefore, surprisingly, I'm very optimistic about the coming year. Let's wish all people, especially in the middle-east, a more democratic, yet peaceful year.... [Editor: Myself (English)] 11:01:12 PM    comment []

Edward Jay Epstein. Journalist Edward Jay Epstein has a new book about Hollywood that looks interesting. It discusses, for example, how the money made from movies these days comes not from theater screenings but from home video and other outlets: The benefits of prolonging a fillm's run in the theaters are now negated by the loss that would be sustained by delaying its video opening past the point at which it can benefit from the movie's advertising campaign. I used an article that Epstein wrote about DeBeers and the marketing of diamonds in a high school media class I taught a couple of... [Stay Free! Daily] 11:00:28 PM    comment []

R.I.P., John DeLorean, Innovative Automaker, Dead at 80. John DeLorean was a flamboyant automobile industrialist whose dream of running his own car company dissolved into bankruptcy. By DANNY HAKIM. [NYT > Business] 8:51:19 PM    comment []

Now You See It: An Audit of KBR. There are new questions about how the Pentagon, at Halliburton's suggestion, chose the items it edited out of an audit of Kellogg, Brown & Root. By ERIK ECKHOLM. [NYT > Business] 12:50:37 PM    comment []

A Life in Reruns: Watch Out, The Ending Goes Quickly. An advertisement for DirecTV recounts the baby boomer life cycle as a succession of instantly recognizable TV moments. By JOSH OZERSKY. [NYT > Business] 12:50:37 PM    comment []

The Kind of Future Fabbing Suggests. One of my stranger moments took place this week on the stage at South by Southwest, handing Bruce copies of 3D printed objects as part of our keynote speech. I have rarely had such a sense of the future being now and here, or the possible being bigger than our aspirations. After all, we were sitting there tossing fabber-printed stuff into the audience, and it just really wasn't any big deal. We explored the implications of fab labs, of mobile fabrication factories, for helping people in the developing world solve local problems. Bruce held forth on mobjects before in Wonder, Fiction and Design: And then there are mobjects. Objects created by a mob. Noncommercial, free (or at least cheap), distributed, authorless objects. Could they exist? Where’s the killer app for something, some object, made by an underpaid, intelligent mob? Who’s the consumer? Who needs this most? It is mobs that need mobjects. Mobs of refugees. Mobs of the dispossessed. This is a perfect technology for disaster relief or refugee camps. People arrive there with nothing. They’ve had to abandon everything they owned. They need everything, and they need it fast. Disposable, temporary, cheap. They have no money. They have no resources. They’re not picky. They need mobjects. How does this work in practice? I envision some kind of universal fabricator. A big, bad, cheap fabricator that makes stuff out of utterly worthless raw materials. Straw and mud, perhaps. Or chopped grass, cellulose, recycled plastic and newspaper, even sand. A big, rugged, dirty, emergency thing like an upended cement mixer. But smart. There’s a lot of code in there. Free, unpatented code. So, how does it work? You’re a mob. You’re panicked; you’re shell-shocked; you’re thirsty. You need buckets. The mobject-maker spits out these generalissue buckets. Khaki-colored maybe, the color of mixed dirt. Ugliest buckets in the word, but they work. They carry water. Now you need latrines, so out come a few hundred of them. Sewer pipes. Shower stalls. Faucets. The appurtenances of urban life. Squeezed out in molds, on the spot. Basic, safe water infrastructure so you don’t die of dysentery like every other dispossessed mob in the world. You wouldn’t normally put up with this mobject way of life, but if your town has been smashed in an earthquake, then mobjects are kind of handy. One helicopter and one fabricator and a week later you’ve got a town. It’s not a pretty town, but at least you’re not dead. That's great stuff. But it seems to me that we've all been playing down the real implications here. I don't buy the end of scarcity. I do believe in the end of slop. The reality of our "heat, treat and beat" industrial base lags absurdly behind the frontier of the possible, and much of the developing world is using hobbled-together agglomerations of technologies that lag a generation or two or three behind ours. All of it is massively, and unnecessarily, wasteful given even our current abilities, and our current abilities are exceeded almost the moment we understand them.  . . . [WorldChanging: Another World Is Here] 12:46:07 PM    comment []

To-Do List: Shop, Pay Bills, Organize Brain. Two new visually oriented programs are designed to organize everything from tasks and obligations to ideas. By JAMES FALLOWS. [NYT > Business] 12:44:08 PM    comment []

Americana, Old & New. On this edition of New Sounds, hear Joel Harrison's interpretations of Johnny Cash, and Johnny Cash's interpretations of Nine Inch Nails, among others. The Possibility of Zombies. This week on Selected Shorts, the dead rise, sort of, in a sinister tale from Fuentes, and a slyly funny Sedaris piece. [WNYC New York Public Radio] 12:42:53 PM    comment []