8/25/2006
You can spend an entire career analyzing the numerous reasons as to how and why factories came into existence.
Economically, one of the primary reasons was that it brought productive labor into a relatively small geographic area; this gave entrepreneurs an advantage over the old sneakernet of yore. It cut out a prohibitive mobility cost; or in other words, the longer the distances between assembly points, the longer it would take to create a finished product (a tautology, right?).
This summer’s issue of DigitAll magazine has an interesting piece on how the modern-day workplace will once again be radically transformed. Here is a choice quote:
Rapid prototyping has already had a significant impact on product design. It gives designers the opportunity to work faster and catch problems in products before they reach production. It also allows users to participate in the design process, something that appeals to industries with demanding customers and a taste for ethnography. Snowboard manufacturer Burton and white-water sports company Watermark give working prototypes to fans, incorporate user feedback into the CAD files, then generate new prototypes in a cycle lasting days rather than months.
Rapid prototyping is now morphing into rapid manufacturing. Hearing aid manufacturers Siemens and Phonak are laser sintering silicone earbuds encasing supersmall hearing aids, and makers of artificial limbs and orthodontics are following suit. Aerospace companies are bringing rapid prototyping to the factory floor to make small runs of highly complex aircraft parts. Boeing even spun out an On Demand Manufacturing subsidiary in 2002. Experts predict that machines that fabricate electronics and displays along mechanical structures will be available by decade’s end.
I have mentioned rapid prototyping before. And it is showcased throughout various shows on the Discovery Channel and History Channel (the reconstruction of an ancient hominid skull was produced in one of these machines).
It’ll be nice if you could put one of these manufacturing plants in your garage: “Computer, synthesize a GI Joe figurine, stat.”
Two weeks ago, I walked across the stage. I first walked across it 3 years ago and not much had changed (although the degree came in an A&M maroon-colored tube instead of white).
I even shook some of the same hands: Dr. Robert Gates, former director of the CIA, became president of the University the semester before I finished my undergrad — he looked just about the same.
The only downside is the colorful hood graduate students wear. We only got to rent it (for $35) and had to return it after the ceremony.
Damn those tariffs on textiles.
Also, you know that announcer guy who states the name of every degree candidate as they walk across the stage? What do you think they do when a group of them has their annual get-together? Challenge one another to a sound-off of verbose, cacophonous syllables?
Our guy put the pro back into professional, but then again, once you hit the 30th non-hyphenated character, everyone sounds like John Moschitta (the Micro Machines guy).
Oh, and it was an MS in Kinesiology (emphasis in Sport Management) which is an odd specialty considering just how much I spend studying other disciplines. See my Mises Institute archive here.
And I’m finishing up another masters, this one in education (Curriculum & Instruction).
Over the past year, The Onion has published a weekly magazine cover that parodies Sunday morning zines like Parade.
See all of their Sunday Magazines.
Several days ago I noted that Bell Labs had successfully transitioned into a commercial firm and that Edison himself was a fan of practical real-world applications over “basic” research.
Bloomberg’s Markets magazine has an excellent cover story on the State of Nanotechnology from an investors perspective. One quote that caught my eye was from a venture partner, Conrad Burke, who became the CEO of a hi-tech firm called Innovalight:
Now, Innovalight has to figure out how to roll its nano ink onto sheets, cut the sheets into tiles and attract customers for solar panels it says will be cheaper and lighter than the ones on today’s buildings. Burke expects the first products in 2008. He says his backers won’t be satisfied with a nifty panel that consumers don’t buy, even if scientsits discover new ways to manipulate tiny materials. “If all you do is move nanotechnology forward from an academic perspective, that’s a sad outcome,” Burke says. “Nothing matters unless you build a successful outcome.”
Via Paul Kedrosky.
You have seen pictures of solar panel farms and large heat sinks that dissipate the “excess” energy produced by a transformer.
Several engineers have proposed placing large solar panel farms, the size of Texas, on the surface of the Moon, in an effort to collect as much “free” solar energy that is otherwise irradiated into the interstellar medium. The energy would then be beamed back to Earth (via microwaves) and used to power our cornucopia of electrical devices.
While the feasibility and practicality of this concept is scientifically doable and economically desirable (which is not the same thing as economically viable), some other far-thinking engineers have an even more grandiose plan.
What if you built a free-floating array of solar panels near the orbit of Venus or Mercury? What if this array was the size of not just Texas, but an entire planet? And what if you built an array that fully enclosed the Sun?
Doable? Well, in order to supply the building materials, you would first need to deconstruct and mine a large asteroid or perhaps parts of another planet. This structure is known as a Dyson Sphere and has several different variations, all of which involve capturing the solar energy and converting it to useful, productive means.
And if this was possible to construct, a more complex structure is something called a Matrioshka brain.
You have undoubtedly seen a Russian Matrioshka doll, it’s the doll-within-a-doll. One doll nested inside another, which is nested inside another.
So, imagine several Dyson Spheres nested inside one another. If done efficiently, the end result is the shell closest to the Sun would be extraordinarily hot, whereas the one furthest out is about as cold as “space” itself (near absolute zero).
In turn, engineers could use the temperature variation to extract energy and convert it into some kind of usable means (e.g. Stirling engines).
The end goal in the minds Matrioshka Brain theorists is that you could set up an elaborate space station on these shells. The space station could house biological occupants or simply a series of computers which would spend their time calculating and communicating with one another — a gigantic server farm called “computronium.”
These ideas are presented in numerous works of Hard SciFi, however their existence becomes more plausible every year. For instance, material such as titanium carbide and aluminum oxide can withstand temperatures in the 2000+ °K. While the surface of the Sun is approximately 5700 °K, a shell, comprised of these metals and located a distance equivalent to the orbit of Mercury or Venus could withstand the intense temperatures radiated from the solar mass.
For more, be sure to read Robert Bradbury’s detailed paper on Matrioshka Brains.
Coyote Blog points to a video of a plastic cup stacking contest broadcast on ESPN.
I should note that I’ve seen some pretty good arrangements and speeds (aka Flip Cup) in my college days. No one was injured either.
My latest piece has very little to do with economics per se, and everything to do with George Santayana’s maxim: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
See: These Days, Everyone Dares Call Everything Treason
The title is a pun of a quote from Ovid, a Roman poet: “Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? Why if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
