A Revolution in Toolmaking

I think we’re going through a revolution in toolmaking… the open-sourcing of everything (bringing with it the promise of only having to work two hours a day to sustain yourself) means that what we’re doing is… going back to the beginning and reworking our entire technological history, at a more human scale.

This covers everything from making steel in your backyard, to using drinking straws for electrophoresis – and an extension of this is using CD readers for Bio lab-scanners… cutting tens of thousands off the cost.

I think this is part of the reason why it’s utterly critical to bypass or destroy the existing system of patents and copyrights. We can’t allow the simple building blocks of our life support systems to be taxed. We can’t allow innovation to be taxed… and really, it isn’t even tax. It’s more like a toll that’s arbitrarily extracted – not at a river crossing, but at a gap in a fence – and the only purpose of the fence is to create a gap that can be tolled.

But I digress… or more accurately, now I will digress: Check out these amazing dolls-house tools from David Brookshaw

via : A Woodworking Odyssey

Amazing. I love it when people do aesthetics to functional (albeit tiny in this case) objects purely for the sake of aesthetics… like this arduino from liquidware which is beautiful purely for the sake of being beautiful… but still works.

For some reason I find it really annoying when people do aesthetics to things that don’t (and won’t) work. What I refer to neo-paleo-futurism. It’s a waste of design talent. Or maybe it’s just playing… whatever, it still annoys me.