I’ve long thought that it would be great to have a manufacturing machine that could take basic raw materials and some downloaded information to assemble them into a finished product. There’s actually a name for this concept. It’s called a Santa Clause machine. I could imagine a machine that took in recycled aluminum, possibly empty beer cans, and produced car parts like the frame, body, wheels, and engine. After downloading the information, the rate at which you could produce a car would only be limited by your rate of beer consumption (or you could collect cans from along side the Read more…

What we can learn from the Amish …  “The Amish and minimites have something important to teach us about selecting what we embrace. I don’t want a lot of devices that add maintenance chores to my life without adding real benefits. I do want to be slow to embrace technology that I can back out of. I don’t want stuff that closes off options to others (like weapons). And I do want the minimum because I’ve learned that I have limited time or attention.”  –Kevin Kelly, The Technium http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2009/06/why_technology.php