shinyhappyrainbows

Pythagoras was a genius. To conceive the mathematical rules of a triangle and recognise a consistent formula for the dimensions and area of any triangle, without so much as a trigonometric lookup table... remarkable. Literally changed the world. And is still doing so. Now, before I proceed, 3D printing a 3D printer is not an original idea. Josef Prusa makes a living out of printing printers that can print printers. The whole RepRap movement is founded on this concept, but today, I want to share the basic concepts of how it can be done, and look at maximising the printing, while minimising the purchases. Essentially, using Pythagoras to conceptually "print" a printer frame. For example, like this... A Pythagorean printable printer frame, showing bed alignment of a single part as it might be printed on an earlier generation of itself. How's this work? Well, Pythagoras worked out that the diagonal of a square is equal to the side of a square time the square root of 2. Fo...

Roger Penrose is not a public speaker. He has a brilliant mind, and like so many extraordinarily clever people, his ability to explain it to less clever people, like you and me, lacks a commonality with how we see the world and how he sees it. I've watched a couple of his explanations using Gödel's Theorems of incomputability and, because of its inherent complexity, it's soemthing he can only explain to the initiated, to minds like his. So, I sought the explanations posited by those who can actually understand him, and I think I begin to understand why consciousness cannot be simulated on any computational machine we can build right now. So, here's my crack at explaining it in lay terms. 1. Quantum Superposition In Schrodinger's analogy of the cat in a box, he leads us to understand that, if we know the cat is alive, we no longer have a superposition that is incomputable, there is now only the state we observed, because the indeterminacy of the superposition has ...

I've written about peer-to-peer technology before. It is essentially the underlying design principle behind DARPA's creation of the internet. Internet technologies were researched during the Cold War as a way of literally bomb-proofing communications networks, as telephone networks were essentially a client-server model. If an attacker wanted to cut off communications, especially for government, all they had to do was blow up the nearest telephone exchange to the facility they wanted disrupted. The internet inherently does what its name says, it inter-networks around centralised exchanges. When built to do so, at least. The trouble is power (and power takes many forms, not just government or authority) likes its perview to have a baked-in central distribution point, so the telcos and tech bros who built the modern, public internet opted for the old client server model and built an infrastructure with a bomb-proof peer-to-peer backend. Then they put the clients on "spokes,...

Capitalism proliferates by manufacturing scarcity. Sometimes, the scarcity looks like a dream - "Here's a Ferrari, but you can't have one. However, you can have this Hyundai in red, if you like." Sometimes the scarcity is a lie - "We simply can't get enough programmers to solve the information management problems of the world, so we need AI." This latter is becoming more prevalent as the venture capitalists seek greater and greater returns from a technology restrained by a genuine scarcity - margins of sustainability. The global energy and pollution limits. The earth can only sustain so many "monkeys" at a given level of consumption. Fewer "monkeys" at greater resource consumption and pollution output, more "monkeys" at reduced consumption and pollution output. Venture capitalists believe in the fiction of infinite growth and, while we are limited to a single earth, this one we all share, our civilisation is built inside a ...