Point B is particularly interesting. Perhaps complexity allows the gifted to reach higher planes of achievement, even as it limits the level of the normal run of people?

I came across this rather ignorant (and inadvertently ironic) piece here: http://eamonnmallie.com/2012/02/will-we-ever-learn/ (ironic because he decries the irrelevance of much education to employment and begins his argument with a discussion of the irrelevance of , um, maths)
and I thought of this theme we’ve discussed before.

On revisiting this blog post, I am a bit sceptical of the Gladwell theme of Asian language words conferring an advantage, for two reasons

A) as far as I know the majority of mathematical advances in the last few hundred years have come from the West

B) Surely the corrolarly to this would be that the relatively complexity of Asian language and alphabet systems means they are doomed to a disadvantage in linguistic / literary areas – don’t think there’s much evidence of this

Thanks for the overview. One factor to consider in your analysis is % of fans that actually see the post from a fan page. Typically this number ranges from 6%-9% depending on the size of the fan base. This means that the potential eyeballs is lower for fan page posts. Additionally, considering the % of friends that see a status update is important.

Overall, I agree with your thesis about peer-to-peer retail. Take a look at Karmaloop and Sneaqpeek for a few interesting examples.

Best,
Erik

Really good point about virgin materials.

The problem is, for a Moore’s Law, something really simple, like components per transistor, or pixels per dollar, is needed. Pixels alone do not correspond to quality, nor to components. There are other elements of design that can improve performance but which these laws do not attempt to allow for. So, what in your view is the most simple metric to use? I think there must be one, and it may be that only when we have the data we can see what it is.

Johnny

Your best bet at measuring the quality of AM is to have benchmarking parts made, 3d scan them, and measure quality by how much the scan differs from the CAD model. To get useful data you’d need to have many different parts made on different machines of the same make and model, as part quality varies from part location in build chamber, build to build, machine to machine, and operator to operator. Unfortunately, this would be a very time consuming and expensive proposition… Even then, it would be hard to design a benchmarking part that would be useful across a wide set of machines, especially with machines having build chambers that range from the size of a large apartment to cubic millimeters. Benchmarking and developing standard metrics for AM happens to be an active area of research…

Speed in mm/s isn’t a useful metric, as it is only useful for quantifying point scanning processes(IE, scanning a laser point across a surface). With line(scanning a line of inkjet nozzles across a surface) and area based processes(using a DLP projector to cure photopolymer), which happen to be gaining popularity, it is completely useless. It might be more correct to speak in terms of deposition rate or kilograms of material deposited per unit time. Of course material deposition rate is often variable on many machines, so one can build faster at the expense of resolution.

On the cost of materials, do you mean the cost of virgin material or the cost of actually making something in a machine? For some processes, like laser sintering(LS), a percentage of material from a previous build(in LS the powder degrades each time it is recycled) is mixed with virgin material to decrease the cost of actually making stuff from the machine. Thus, the cost of making stuff in a machine can differ greatly from the cost of virgin material.

One factor you should take into account is surface roughness before post-processing, as it happens to be a good way to measure quality. Surface roughness of AM’d parts tends to be higher than parts fabricated by traditional manufacturing due to pixellation and stairstepping( on curved/diagonal surfaces, layers tend to look like stair steps). Though, it’s likely that surface finish will not continue to exponentially improve after it reaches the point of traditional manufacturing. Indeed, some researchers are already churning out parts with the stereolithography process that have surface finishes on par with injection molding…

You also might want to consider build chamber size, overall build chamber size seems to be increasing. Though you might run get some funny data, every once in a while some companies build monster size machines, like the apartment size one mentioned above. Though you might find some way of scaling build chamber size with resolution, as these monsters don’t tend to have very high resolution.

So to get something like a Moore’s law metric you might want something like a dimensionless factor that takes all of these into account like the build chamber size/resolution factor mentioned above.

I Need a Fork!”

Today we opened up the first session of the Discovery Charter School North Henry Avenue Annex Design Lab (DCSNHAADL) with a group of students and parents coming by to see what 3D Design & Printing are all about. Even though school has just been “officially” over for a week, we had a workshop full of students and their parents here for a good chunk of the afternoon.

After walking everyone through the software and demonstrating what the printer did and how it worked by printing another well executed Mini Mug, we gave student copies of SolidWorks to everyone and then turned our attention toward creating and printing a design. After a fair amount of fooling around with impossible designs (A flamethrower!) or impractical (A dragon!) we settled on the practical: A fork.

Vernon created the original design on the HP workstation and with some creative support from Amanda, Doug & Riley got the code into BFB, on to the SD chip and thence to the RapMan. It was amazing to watch a group of kids and adults jostle for space around the printer as the fork took form before their eyes. There is something magical about the whole 3D printing process as layer-by-layer an object emerges.

We were all rapt as the RapMan laid down the strands, filled in the spaces and slowly created a very recognizable dinner table item.

I’ve been thinking about this recently, and wondering if you’ve had much response from the classical music sector. The ideas you put forward sound perfect for contemporary popular music in which things like karaoke and audience participation are fairly well established; and more fundamentally, the musical culture is one that emphasises either passion, attitude and style rather than virtuousity per se.

An orchestra costs a hell of a lot money, not only in terms of direct wages and so forth but also in the many many years of training that the players require – there’s a reason so many are allied to major broadcasters or (in the US especially, ironically) municipalities. Of course, there are lots of levels of classical music, of which the symphony orchestra is just one.