User:Blacklaser
Blog #3
1, 3D printing with civil engineering
I think combining constructing and 3D printing is absolutely a great idea, however, I think it may not happen in the way showed in the video. I am not familiar with civil engineering or any kind of constructing method but I can still find out many limits for the method in the video. First of all, the size of the building is really limited. Since before constructing a building, first we need to do is to construct a “3D printer” for that building. It may easy to “print” the building in this method but to build a large scale frame with heavy concrete extruder will be a huge project. As far as I know, the largest similar structures existed on earth are the overhead cranes. Samson, one of the largest cranes in the world is just about 140 meter’s high which can lift 840 tons of loads up to about 70 meters. And here is a link of how the largest overhead crane is built[1] (http://gcaptain.com/building-the-worlds-largest-crane/), I mean, probably constructing the 3D printer for the building will be more challenging than constructing the building itself. Meanwhile, the size of the building is still limited, since the largest frame of the 3D printer is limited as low as 150 meters.
Another problem is this technology can only be applied to simple buildings. Now, every building requires miles of cables and pipes. How can these things be assembled to the building? The modern architectures are built with hundreds of materials, they may have steel frames, concrete layers and glass surfaces. How can we construct all the parts one time from bottom to top? Yes, we can construct the concrete parts separately but does it a kind of follow the tradition path? If we want to have revolutionary building method, we have to think a way to “print” these materials together.
Another question mark comes with the diversity of our buildings. In our world, most of the buildings are different, even if we apply same design for buildings, the environment of the buildings vary a lot. For example, I lived in a community called The Pointe, which has about 25 separated apartment buildings. All these buildings have the same design but they all have different environment. The orientations of the buildings are different, some of the located on the top of the hill while some of them are not. Same of them may have stone base while some of the base may not very solid. I think why we build architectures with human labors even we have already entered an industrialized society is because every construction project have different conditions. We have to use our critical analysis and experience to work those out. However, we can still make changes to a building’s “G-code”, can we save money or time?
After I saw the concrete prototype in the video, I have two concerns. The first one is how to make the connection between different layers solid. We all know that the connection between layers for our RepRap machine is always an issue, will it be the same issue for their prototype? Will their machine come out some random problems after, for example, 5 hours operation? Will these problems influence the “printing” quality? I don't know the answer but I think that is a big problem they are facing right now.
Another concern is about the printing material they are using. We know that our PLA filament become solid within seconds after it comes out from the extruder. However, concrete requires hours, even days to be solid. Therefore, probably the concrete extruder has to wait the lower layers to become solid before adding tons of weight to the schedule and printing another ten layers.
Indeed, I think the method showed in the video have too many limitations to become popular in next 20 years. However, I think maybe we can combine the 3d printing with prefabricated method to boost the speed of constructing and reduce the cost. There are some videos that show incredible constructing speed of pre-fab method.[2] (http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=broad+sustainable+building&oq=broad&gs_l=youtube.1.0.35i39l2j0l8.2480.5030.0.7423.9.7.2.0.0.0.186.847.2j5.7.0...0.0...1ac.1j4.UVhnny-ZsaY) Basically, these building are built with pre-fab blocks. It also looks familiar with RepRap but instead of extruding PLA, it “extrudes” blocks. These blocks are small and highly identical, which are great characters for mass production. I think if we focus on printing simple, small scale structures or components, we may make great achievement.
2.
3D printing for Biotech sounds much cooler than civil engineering applications. Many of real world examples have already changed the way people consider future biological technologies. Printed bones and joints are under testing, some of them even have already hit the market. The idea of body fixing interested me a lot. I think this technology can help us deal with burn or cut in a much faster, cheaper and more effective way.
In terms of printing organs, I think that technology will give human a second life. However, I think this technology may have a long way to be commercial. Maybe printing a bladder is easy but to print a fully functioning kidney sounds crazy. I can accept people print normal cells layer by layer but how can they print special cells, for example, neurons? We know that the axon of neuron is very long, some of them can reach about 1.5 meters long for an adult. How can we print a neuron with its axon one thousand times longer than its diameter?
Another concern is, how can we make a huge number of cells work as a whole? I don't know how but a billion cells are not equal to an organ.
3.
I think printed food is too far away, though technologically simple. It is not just technology that limits the use of printed food. Cost is another big issue. Will it cheaper? Maybe we can reduce the price of printed food within ten years, we still have problems related to culture and society. Agriculture is the top industry for every major country. I think it is a very high percentage of jobs on earth are related to food production. If we develop a new technology that can “fire” most of the people on earth, we will be in trouble. Where will these people go? What will they do? How do we use the farmland then? Sometimes we have to slow down our speed to guarantee we got enough job positions for people. China is facing this problem right now, the government has to let its farmers grow plants in an old fashion way in order to keep them working. There will be a huge social problem, even if people are rich, they get to do something. Otherwise people can do anything bad since they got plenty of free time. Sometimes higher technology means higher crime rate.
4.
3D printing is a powerful tool for any designers including the people who lead the fashion. However, fashion and production are totally different. When we consider the cost, materials and speed, we realize that 3D printing cannot be applied in the mass production of clothing for another couple of years. For thousands of years, we only wear all natural materials like cotton, wool and silk. There is a long way to go for any kind of 3D printers to extrude these natural materials. Even if we developed one method to print natural materials, it is still hard to compete with the conventional method with speed and cost.
5.
There are also many industrial 3d printing applications involving automobile and aerospace manufacturing. Some parts like turbine blades are being printed now. People want to use 3D printing in almost any area, they want to try it and find a way to make changes.
Blog #2
I was very impressed by this mouse application demo. I think this is one of the greatest moments in the information technology history. This demo showed a new pointing device, the mouse, to the people to give others a new idea: instead of simply using computers with one dimensional user interface, a pointing device, like a mouse, opened 2D application UI. I think at that time, people may understand that this technology would be very important, but without more application showed, it would be very hard to imagine exactly how great/important this invention is and how the future applications would be. I believe that maybe few people can imagine we use mouse, even fingers to do the most commands on our devices at that time but no people can imagine we have games like CS or War 3 that are highly depended on mouse.
People are facing the same problems now as well. For example, Bill Gates’s last presentation at CES was about voice recognition, few people remembered that. Not until Apple announced their siri voice assistant, most people were unclear about voice recognition technology. They just knew that it is important, but they didn't know where and how to apply this technology. Still, systems like siri are developing and they have a long way to go. Other technologies are considered important, for instance holographic display, Microsoft Kinect or LeapMotion, maybe many of them can changed the world. We know that these things are really important and maybe bring us 3D user interface, however the problem is, we couldn't imagine how important they will be without more real applications occurred.
For the other video, I agree a part of what Professor Richard Doyle said. Open sources for many areas are really important, especially in software engineering. In addition, sharing research results is essential for scientists. However, taking benefit from ideas is also very important for protecting the enthusiasm for inventors or creators. I think what is going on right now in this society is pretty good for new ideas to come up. I mean, the current policies can help people to get their fist money to keep developing their ideas to make things better. I think this is very important, as important as sharing ideas to other people. Without being protected, some excellent people's career could be ruined before they can show their talents to the public. For example, if a new talented industrial designer designed a new object, before he make money from his design, thousands of copies have been produced by some factories in China, he may not able to get benefit from his design and fail to continue his career. Therefore, for some industries or some people, it is also important to make sure they works are not shared.
I think we share the work we generated, so other people can take advantage of it to develop something new, or, just continuing our work. Isaac Newton said:"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." By continuing other's work, we don't need to do things again so we save resources, time and labor. By absorbing other people's ideas, we become more knowledgeable, our mind become sharper and we can develop new ideas. By sharing thoughts, we generate common values and we set up same goals to work together. By keeping other people's story, knowledge, even saying, we record our history and build our civilization. It is sharing that make our species human, if we never learn from others and develop by our own every time, we are no more than monkeys.
I think the great people before our generations had developed a great sharing society, the connection of new idea and money makes sure that new thoughts can be heard. I personally have no talent to make new rules to help us better share our knowledge. The only idea I got is to create some new rules for patent. I think maybe we can make a new rule to let the owner of patent to choose to share his idea/ technology for 3-5 years and then start taking money from the patent. The total length for getting money from the patent is still 15 years, but he can choose to let everybody help him developing his idea, after 3 years development, his technology might be better developed and worth more money. This rule can also prevent new ideas died due to the high license fee. Maybe we can make new rules like this to help new technology spread.
Blog #1
Part A: 1. Useful [3]
I like this book-end. I think it is very helpful thing to get our novels or CDs organized. The book-end has simple shape which should be very easy to be printed out. With bright colors, this book-end will looks beautiful.
2. Artistic/beautiful [4]
I find this vase looks very beautiful if it could get printed with a warm bright color. In addition, I choose this vase is because it can full fill the advantage of 3-D printing. It could be very hard to use conventional method to make one of these vases, but it may be easy to print one out. On the other hand, the scientifically design is pretty cool, when I first saw it, the idea about parallel universe jumped out of mt mine. So I picked this one as the art of science.
3. Pointless/ useless[5]
This special .38 round design seems pretty useless to me. I think this design is very simple, simple structure, boring surface effect, small size and pointless topic. A .38 round printed by PLA weighted nothing, the surface would not be very smooth but very difficult to have good curve on the top. I believe if this bullet is printed out, instead of being a bullet, it will just look like a small piece of plastic junk. In a word, useless.
4. Funny/ weird[6]
This garden toad looks very cute and funny. There are a few designs for toad but this one is the best. I also reviewed some other models printed out by other people. I have to say this funny toad has really good design, all models printed have very good quality, and especially a green one looks awesome.
5. Scary/ strange[7]
With highly detailed designs, this Celtic skull looks great. Since it looks so realistic and crazy, it a kind of scary, especially printed with green PLA with some transparency. Imagine you wake up early in the morning and see this thing sitting next to your bed……
Part B
I thought I was not entered the level of a tinkerer, however, after I watched the video and read the webpage, I feel I am in the right track. I started to know about PC hardware when I was 9, started to assembly PC all by myself in 2002. I kept focusing on PC until 2006 then I stopped paying too much attention on it, basically because, first, I was familiar with every kind of hardware, I knew most of the parts in market, I could list all the parts that needs to be purchased for every price level without doing any kinds of research, but I think that is stupid. After paying attention to that industry for years, I was tired about what was and is going on in that industry, more cores, higher operating frequency, more stream processors and higher power required. It seems the whole industry is trying to double everything but half the price, year for year. I felt it is useless to know what the timing for a RAM is and how much money should be paid for a good motherboard with correct chip set, since I know which data is valuable and I can take five minutes to look them up on the internet and make the decision. Instead, I started to think about questions like, what should be the next breakthrough, what is more valuable for a PC for a buyer with typical use, where is the trend. When I first heard about the acquisition between AMD and ATI, my first thought was, “WOW, Nvidia must work on their own CPU, or, die.” I discussed this with my friend roger, I said, Nvidia must develop their own CPUs and they will, I bet $100 that they will have their processor product within one year. Several months later, NV announced their CUDA and I got my $100. Now, NV is the leading company for making mobile processors, now their mobile products are better than the original CPU maker AMD, even Intel.
I have maybe hundreds of examples which can show I am thinking ahead of other people, no matter PC hardware, mobile electronics, industrial design or many other areas. There are a few people I know that also think a lot, but many of them are only interested in one area and most of them are one step behind me.
For the readings, I do not quite agree with the author for some points. He thinks large corporations are killing the tinker tradition. I agree that try to make something new to make more money is a kind of nature, however, since technology is greatly developed and systems are getting much more complicated, many things can only be done by a large group of people. I have a good example. In the year 1903, two tinkerers, White Brothers, designed and flied the first airplane in human history; given a dozen of talented engineers, they can build pretty amazing airplanes in the 1940s by themselves. However, there are only 5 countries in the world that have completely independent modern aircraft industry, USA, Russia, China, France and UK. Though Germans are really good at machines, Japanese are talented and hardworking, they can’t. A modern aircraft industry requires thousands of different industries’ support. An industry chain for a modern airliner may have tens of thousands companies, even more than one million people involved. Not all the problems can be solved by individual tinkerers. Furthermore, many areas need people that only have really high level of education and good sense of specific knowledge. Many engineers, maybe an aerospace engineer, spend their whole life working on a very small piece of a big system, i.e. an engineer focusing on only the tip of the wing, which is probably short than one feet. In many areas, people have to test a lot to get a good result, they have to see the result to make designs, or decisions. Another aircraft example, all aircraft configurations have to test many times in the wind tunnel before hit the market, some of the models are tested more than one millions times. So, it not like 18th century that one bright idea comes out a tinkerer’s mind and changed the world, it is not impossible, but very hard. I agree that to think like a tinker is good, but corporations are not the reason that slows down the society, critical thinking plus people working together will have better result.
As an international student, I think Americans always think interesting things and always have good ideas, which is good, but to let people think critically and effectively plus hardworking is the ultimate way to get the nation stronger.
I think one important idea I got from the video is to always ask user “what drives you crazy with our product”. I think this is a very effective way to get better feedback and then better design.
The first second I saw their 3D printer project, I felt a little bit disappointed. Since he talked a lot about design, a lot about new ideas and get his daughter trained to be a creative thinker, I thought the project he and his daughter working together should be much more complicated than building a simple 3D printer with all instructions online. Another thing is, as a pioneer of the design industry, I thought he may start the 3D printing project earlier. One principle I learned from his company is try to let people from different knowledge bases working together. Now I am highly agree with him that let people come from different industry sitting together and talk can generate many brilliant ideas.
