Blog Migration Notice

As of April 2013 this blog has moved to http://martin.softf1.com/g/yellow_soap_opera_blog/ .

A few Thoughts on life's work

The Problem

People work hard to build something beautiful, delicate, helpful, even life-saving, without acting as a parasite towards anybody and then other people just destroy it for whatever reason, convenience, arrogance, ignorance.

Examples

Non-military buildings get destroyed during wars, schematics, research results, software, generally said as "intellectual property" is left to bitrot or totally destroyed due to corporate social processes.

A more technical, software related, example

As of January 2013 Android phones do not use the standard Java byte-code and use their own Java interpreter, Dalvik, because the former Sun Microsystems kept its Java mobile phone edition proprietary and later, when Nokia dumped its Symbian mobile operating system to the history trash can, there were no modern phones left on the market that use the standard Java byte-code based interpreter. The Android worked fine with its non-standard  interpreter, i.e. there was no financial incentive to switch back to the standard Java byte-code that runs on any device and the initial  Java concept, write once run anywhere, is out of practical use. The Java Micro Edition is in the history trash can. Neither Google (the Android developer) nor the former Sun Microsystems financially benefited from the outcome. Google spent considerable amount of money on developing the Dalvik and both companies spent considerable money on lawyers.

A Solution Candidate

Place/build one's creation, life's work, to an environment, where there are no such other people, circumstances, that destroy it. It would be pretty foolish to place a china sales stand to the path of running bisons.

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Updates. A few additional related references:




 

An idea for a 3D Printer that Prints any "Sufficiently" Heat-conducting Metal

OK, material scientists can laugh, but here's the idea that is actually not novel at all.

First, consider the classical experiment, where the feather falls down in a vacuum:




Now, consider the World War 2 era bombings, where planes are flying horizontally and bombs are released at the right moment so that they reach their target according to the simple, Newtonian, mechanics:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnkVPtyGaVA

In vacuum, there are no aerodynamics to consider and the bomb-dropping calculations are usually a piece of cake to almost any modern computer, so the idea is that in stead of bombs, one may use groups of metal atoms that fall down in a vacuum and have been released from a tip of a metal wire by vaporizing the tip of the wire with lasers. The base of the 3D statue is kept very cool to make sure that the falling atoms stick to the statue in stead of forming a molten "lava-like" mass at the top of the statue. I guess that the metal has to be a really good heat conductor to allow the cooling of the top to take place.

The idea is not novel at all and the reason, why I write this blog post is that the apparent simplicity of it really fascinates me, because unlike many of the other solutions, the metal printer that I described in this blog post, seems simple enough to be a small and very practical hobby project. As a matter of fact, one way to simplify the design is that in stead of a "flying bomber" there is a thick metal plate that forms a "rainy sky". The metal vapor rain droplets might be produced by a laser that acts like a "Hollywood spotlight" that draws separate layers on the "clouds". Or may be, for the sake of precision, to make sure that the laser light is fired perpendicularly onto the "clouds", there might be a bomber that flies under the rain-clouds (the thick metal plate) and it flies so fast that the bomber gets out of the way before the batch of atoms falls to the bomber's height.

Here's a random bunch of references to various 3D printing or otherwise related sites that probably inspired, influenced, me:
http://blog.ted.com/2012/01/23/a-primer-on-3d-printing-lisa-harouni-on-ted-com/
http://www.ted.com/talks/klaus_stadlmann_the_world_s_smallest_3d_printer.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/anthony_atala_printing_a_human_kidney.html
http://thekneeslider.com/archives/2010/04/21/print-3d-engineering-models-on-your-desktop-hp-designjet-3d-printer/
http://www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/1215-3D-Printing-Technologies-Explained.html
http://www.exone.com/eng/technology/x1-prometal/process_prometal.html