Yesterday I attended an academic conference at the Future Places festival that’s happening right now right here in Porto. I normally tend to be wary of such conferences, having previously seen my fair share of the “I’m a genius who knows magic and you’re not” attitude, so I was very pleased by the “Just do it, things do get easy when broken down in small problems!” message that prevailed in today’s presentations, which included, among others, a very interesting and entertaining keynote presentation by Golan Levin. However, by that time I was already dumbstruck by the relatively small presentation by Zach Smith of Thingiverse and Makerbot, about the subject of 3D printing — that is, desktop factories.

For now (and probably for a few decades still), 3D printers only ‘print’ plastic, but still — I held objects that felt right out of the fucking Diamond Age. Need a plug for your bath? Print it! A toy train for your nephew? Print it! A coat hanger? Print it! In time, no doubt people will be sharing the 3D models that will allow you to print more complicated things. Right now, everything that is made of plastic can be ‘printed’ (wouldn’t ‘sculpted’ be a better word?) right there on your desktop. At the moment the Makerbot 3D printer is sold as a kit you have to assemble, but so did the MITS Altair in 1975, and it only took a couple of years after that for ready-to-use microcomputers to hit the retail shelves. I’m only wondering how much will HP ask for a plastic ‘refill’…

The music video for The Blow’s Parantheses has some crazy recursions in it. Especially if you are watching it embedded in a Facebook page (wait for the end). ···

The Last Days of the Polymath. After finishing high school I took a one-year computer technology course and possibly the best thing about it was one of the instructors’ recurrent rants against overspecialization. Specialization is for insects, but it is hard to be a human nowadays… ···

Would you rather be rich or appear rich — you kinda choose between the two, you know? Here’s a thought: After all the things that happened because people borrowed more than they afforded to, shouldn’t interest rates be higher? I mean, why should my money in the bank and in investments be worth less while people who got loans to buy private condos are partying away with the surplus of their lowered payments? ···

Bad science story of the week: Early humans started walking upright for sex and food. Here’s a newsflash: every single living species that still lives started for sex and food! Duh! ···

A psychedelic Nigerian movie about Satan. I trully think Nollywood is closer to the future of motion pictures than Hollywood. If only those guys read the DV Rebels’ Guide. ···