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MOD: Manufacture On Demand and 3D Printing

I wanted to break from my usual kind of entry for a moment and cheer on the MOD production process, meaning Manufacture On Demand. Warner Brothers, Shout Factory, MGM, and several others have done this with a lot of titles which have not been available for a while, and it is a great business model for the digital age. You pick one of the titles in their MOD catalog and put in your order, at which point they burn you a copy of the CD or DVD on their industrial grade reproduction gear, print out a label, and send it your way. For the customer, thousands of titles you could not previously get your hands on except possibly in very low quality bootleg format are now accessible. For the manufacturer, titles they own but were not previously making any money on can now turn a small but steady profit for them, without the loss incurred by going to a full press run when the demand for the product is not there. If it turns out the demand is there as evinced by the number of folks putting in orders for an MOD title, they can then release the disk or box set as a full press run (“press” being a leftover term from pressing vynal records, the original media distribution format).

Obviously this process is good for both music CDs and video DVDs, but it doesn’t stop there. With the advent of 3D printing, objects of all kinds can be put through the manufacture on demand process. Even better, they might be designed anywhere in the world, but you could have them printed locally and avoid the shipping costs, downloading the printing template across the web. Did you know this is the same technology Jay Leno uses to produce mil spec perfect replacement parts for his vintage automobile collection? This stuff is available today, and although it can be a bit pricy, there are also open source 3D Printing options worth looking into, such as the ongoing MIT research.

Let’s Go To Mars!

It turns out that NASA’s Mars Explorer Program still has a shot at getting a manned mission to the Red Planet! Which means I was wrong when was afraid we had gone totally third world, abandoning our future in space for a few bucks in local pork barrel projects used to line some politicians pockets. But I wasn’t completely wrong; if you want the future of humanity to include some Americans colonizing our new homes in space (and not just the Chinese and their other western pacific rim culture allies) you need to make your voices heard. From now until July first, go to the Mars Forum, register as a forum member (it’s free), read through the entries, and make your voice heard. There are some great ideas there, some flames, and some irrelevant commentary, like every forum you have ever been to. But this time the stakes may just be the future of the human race for the next half million years; wouldn’t you want your children and grandchildren to have a shot at being part of it?

RI Channel

Yes, the Royal Institute has a great web site with a ton of great resources there, including a lot of video footage of various talks and lectures. They are currently featuring the 1977 Christmas Lecture, which that year was given by Carl Sagan on the topic of the Planets. The quality of the copy on the RI website is much better than the one I could embed here, so you should watch the entire thing from that site.

Brain Toy

The folks over at NeuroSky have come up with a brainwave detecting headset about the size and shape of a pair of headphones, which plugs into your Android or iOS device. Right now it works with around a hundred Apps for some hands free control, and not all of them are games. It is a bit pricy, but at $130 it is hands down the cheapest and most portable EEG mapper you can buy. Thanks to the folks at Gear Patrol for the heads up on this one.

Nikola Tesla: Super Geek

This is the man who invented the Florescent Light off the top of his head, and then came up with a system for delivering electrical power to it without using wires, 4 years before Tommy Edison started trying to make his employees figure out how to make an incandescent light bulb. This is the man who invented AC power, the electric motor, and audio speakers, all of which he patented. He invented a bunch of other stuff he patented (Marconie’s “invention” of radio relied on 17 of Tesla’s patents to make it work), but he also invented some stuff the patent office couldn’t figure out how to process, like broadcast energy, wireless charging of batteries, Ball Lightning, Radar, and oh, yeah, that earthquake machine he almost sank Long Island with (he had to move to Colorado and build another lab to avoid going to jail for that one). Yet another great site in a long list of web pages honoring the genius of Nikola Tesla is Oatmeal Comics: Tesla. I recommend you read it and begin to learn what a true geek he was. Another site worth checking into is The Man Who Electrified The World, as is The New Prometheus. Each of those sites has their own perspective on the man and his works, but what I find interesting is the things they are forced to agree on by the historical record. I personally only ever had 5 heroes in my life, and Nikola pretty much tops the list, with Albert Einstein coming in a very close second.