Month: August 2010

Hyperlocal manufacturing

wow. the future is indeed unevenly distributed. combine with open source blueprints, autonomous power, and you only need a feedstock.

The US Military Special Operations Command is building 8 “mobile factories” that fit into standard shipping containers. Hyperlocal manufacturing is real. Think of it as one of the economic hearts of a thriving resilient community.


this isn’t as far-fetched as it may look like:

Hyperlocal manufacturing is real. Think of it as one of the economic hearts of a thriving resilient community. It’s a revolution already in motion, as you can see in the rapid spread of hackerspaces. Connect these hackerspaces, and the communities they serve, with networks that allow people to share, buy/sell, modify, customize, etc. designs for products/parts, and we are on our way to a resilient decentralized economy that can survive the economic dislocation to come.

2024-05-07: Rheinmetall is another example

The MSF consists of 2 mobile shipping containers, one serving as an office and the other for production. The office container houses a workstation and storage space, as well as a polymer AM machine and handheld scanner for quality control. The production container is equipped with a Metrom P700, a 6-axis hybrid machine combining Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM) with an integrated CNC milling facility. This enables on-site finishing and postprocessing, giving Battle Damage Repair personnel additional options for repairing and overhaul.

The machine can produce components with a maximum size of 700 mm in diameter and 450 mm in height, with a metal deposition rate of up to 600 cm3/h.

Foldit

Today’s issue of Nature contains a paper with a rather unusual author list. Read past the standard collection of academics, and the final author credited is… an online gaming community. Scientists have turned to games for a variety of reasons, having studied virtual epidemics and tracked online communities and behavior, or simply used games to drum up excitement for the science. But this may be the first time that the gamers played an active role in producing the results, having solved problems in protein structure through the Foldit game.

or more accurately, a combined approach leads to the best results.

Robot Traders

The trading bots visualized in the stock charts in this story aren’t doing anything that could be construed to help the market. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending 1000s of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with no intent to actually trade. Often, the buy or sell prices that they are offering are so far from the market price that there’s no way they’d ever be part of a trade. The bots sketch out odd patterns with their orders, leaving patterns in the data that are largely invisible to market participants.

just robot traders crossing in the night, or deliberate addition of noise?

Ultra-christian hobos

If you’re a geriatric, hobo-wizard, Jesus freak with a dirty mop-head hanging from your chin, it’s probably not the best idea to be too critical of others. But that doesn’t stop WinterBand’s namesake, Steve Winter, from attacking Catholics, Muslims, democrats, women and countless others for the intolerable sin of being outside his confusing comfort zone.