Technology

After reading a post about 3-D printers, I found out about this assemble-it-yourself 3-D Printer!

http://reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page

Not only is the RepRap cheap to build (people claim it can be done for around $400), but all the software and hardware designs are open-source and free.

But it doesn’t stop there.  If you already have a RepRap, you can use it to build some of the parts you to build another RepRap! In other words, this is a self-replicating machine!  Well, partially at least.

I’m sure there are plenty of people out there with the skills to build one of these themselves.  I’m not sure I’m one of them–after all, building a table that was almost level was a huge success for me.  But this is such a cool idea it might just be worth a shot!

A computer scientist at Yahoo has used “cloud computing” to find the most distant digits yet of pi’s decimal expansion.

This new approach to networking machines and processors, allowing them to act as one super-computer rather than, say, 100 individuals, allowed this record-setting calculation to be in 23 days when, under normal circumstances, it would have taken nearly 500 years.

Apparently a similar approach at Google resulted in verifying that every configuration of the Rubik’s cube can be solved in 20 moves or less.

This is pretty awesome:  an assemble-yourself perhipheral that allows you to draw on spherical/ellipsoidal/other objects:  the egg-bot!

http://egg-bot.com/

Plug it in to your USB port, render your drawing in a freeware illustration program, and voila!  And it’s open-source:  both hardware and software.

There are so many interesting things that could be done with the egg-bot:  sketching grid lines on ellipsoids to illustrate parametric surfaces, investigating how projection affects map-making, graphing closed-curves on golf balls, or maybe just creating the greatest Easter Eggs in human history.