Printing in 3D

There is a wonderful online tool, tinkercard, that lets you easily and quickly build simple 3D models entirely in your web browser.  It's a competitor to SketchUp, the very cool CAD software that Google sold earlier this year, except it's browser-based and therefore cross-platform.

It took literally minutes for me to build a simple model in Tinkercard:

 

and then, with the press of a button I was able to host that same model on a commercial site, Sculpteo, where it is now for sale to anyone who wants it:

 

My crude, simple model can be printed in 3D for $165. I'm not sure why it's so expensive. You can print the object in different types of plastic, ceramic, or aluminum, some more pricey than others. You can also choose your own size, which I presume affects the price as well. 

Mass, customized 3D printing is still in its early days, so the objects you print are usually not as well-made as something built the traditional way, and it's more expensive. But it can be ideal for special situations where customization is ideal. Imagine giving custom objects to attendees at a wedding, or as sales promotional items to valuable potential customers.

I'm still trying to understand where this industry is at, and what its future will be. It brings back memories to me of the very early days of PCs, i.e. around 1980, when the field was populated by just a few hundred thousand hobbyists. Back then, many of the people most knowledgeable about the technology -- the academics and successful computer industry engineers -- didn't bother with PCs because they already had access to much better computers.  But their expertise actually held them back in the end as they were outrun by new entrants to the field. History is repeating itself…

Decentralization in the ancient world

The Terra Cotta warriors of ancient Xi’an are an impressive legacy of the early centuries BC, and they better be: during that period, something like 10% of the Chinese population was involved in Big Government-sponsored construction projects, including those tombs for the Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China. The Great Wall, the Grand Canal, and many others are distinguished high points of Chinese civilization, and all of them were built by a powerful central non-elected government.

The Chinese legacy puts to shame the comparatively modest monuments that sprang from the market-based democratic economy of Ancient Greece. From the long viewpoint of history, this seems to show the advantages of powerful centralized governments.  A thousand years from now, nobody will remember the achievements of our greatest corporations, but who will forget the government-sponsored Apollo moon landing (or today’s Mars Curiosity probe)?

Or will they?  That’s why I thought this Econtalk podcast interview with Josiah Ober was interesting, because it shows that in fact Ancient Greece was a thriving, economically successful place that in general was almost certainly far wealthier than anything in China at the time. The legacy they left behind, while not visible like the monuments of the Qin Dynasty, is far more influential today.

From Ober’s Princeton/Stanford Working Paper, Wealthy Hellas.

Here are three reasons to believe that, compared to other ancient societies, Hellas was wealthy:

· Premise 1. The Greek economy grew steeply and steadily from 800-300 BC, both (a) in its aggregate size and (b) in per capita consumption. 

· Premise 2. By the fourth century BC Greece was (a) densely populated and (b) remarkably urbanized, yet (c) living standards remained high. 

· Premise 3. Wealth was distributed relatively equitably across Greek populations; there was a substantial “middling” class of persons who lived well above bare substance, yet below the level of elite consumption.

A few more claims:

• 30% of Greeks lived in cities with populations greater than 5000 (versus only 10-12% of the later Romans)
• 25-35% of the population lived on imported grain (evidence they were producing important trade goods)
• The Gini index of 0.7 corresponds favorably to 1472 Florence (0.788) or 1998 USA (0.79)

Many other fascinating thoughts throughout.

Michael Crichton’s last book: Micro

 

[I sent this from the iBooks app from my iPad]

From the first chapter, in a discussion about how children now are raised without an appreciation for how little science actually knows about the world:

Perhaps the single most important lesson to be learned by direct experience is that the natural world, with all its elements and interconnections, represents a complex system and therefore we cannot understand it and we cannot predict its behavior. It is delusional to behave as if we can, as it would be delusional to behave as if we could predict the stock market, another complex system. If someone claims to predict what a stock will do in the coming days, we know that person is either a crook or a charlatan. If an environmentalist makes similar claims about the environment, or an ecosystem, we have not yet learned to see him as a false prophet or a fool.

EXCERPT FROM

Crichton, Michael. "Micro." HarperCollins, 2011-12-01. iBooks.

(Almost) leaving China

Bubbles are fun! I lived in Tokyo for most of the late-80s and early-90s, Silicon Valley during the dot-com days, Seattle during the real estate peak of the 2000s, and for the past three years, my family and I have been living here in Beijing. For somebody whose first eighteen years were spent in Wisconsin farm country, I feel lucky to have had a front row seat watching the froth around me expand and expand and expand, until, well, until…

It’s recently been fashionable for departing expats to write about why, finally, they are giving up on China. Environmental issues (bad air, unsafe food), education, uneasiness about the political situation: there are many reasons for concern, all of them perfectly justifiable and in varying degrees applicable to anyone who lives here, including me. My situation is different because, although I first moved to Asia thirty years ago, I’ve only lived in China since 2009 – I am no “China expert” – and perhaps as a result of my shorter tenure, I’m still far too ignorant to “give up” on the place. When you’ve been through several bubbles, you see problems as just the inevitable growing pains that go along with life on the front lines of the future. China, I’m sure, will be fine.

Truth is, I enjoy China a lot, and intend to stay focused here, even after this month when I move back to our home on Mercer Island. There are still too many opportunities, and too many things I like:

People: I find the Chinese generally to be incredibly and refreshingly hard-working, long-suffering, and pragmatic about work and life in a way that I don’t always see in America anymore. My work colleagues are among the best I’ve ever known.

Vastness: An overwhelming population, of course, but also a huge land area, hundreds of major urban areas whose names you don’t even know, at least eight different cuisines, countless dialects and minority subgroups – China is impossible to describe without superlatives.

Inevitability: you can’t study China (and world) history and culture without recognizing how central the Chinese are to the entire human race, and will be even more important no matter what happens next.

Most of my friends and colleagues already know that this was the right time for me and my family to return to the US for a few years, but as you’ll see if you continue to follow me on Twitter and elsewhere, I’m not really leaving. Bubble or not, China will be a big part of the future for all of us.

The inevitability of human enhancement

I watched a TED talk by Juan Enriquez (Will our kids be a different species?) that wasn’t particularly informative if you’re up to date on biology, but it got me thinking about how quickly some of these technologies are going to affect us.


Human enhancement technologies range all the way from tattoos to adding a new chromosome, and many of these are straightforward to implement to anybody with some basic knowledge of the field.



A generation ago, computer programming was a specialist skill that was mostly practiced by well-educated people employed by large institutions. Although it’s still true that most of the mainstream computer programming happens that way, there are millions of “amateurs” with no particular specialized education or access to expensive capital equipment, and those amateurs are doing as much heavy computing as the top experts thirty years ago.  You don’t see these people much because the mainstream experts are doing so much more, and the world has simply moved on to a stage where the bar for money and more is so much higher.



The same thing is becoming true for biology. An entry-level college biology lab now exposes students to the basics of recombinant DNA, and once learned, a fairly intelligent and curious person can do it on his own, without particular access to specialized equipment. There is already a large movement of DIYBIO people who find refurbished or underutilized biological instruments that they repurpose for amateur uses, with costs a fraction of what the mainstream people pay. And as much of biology moves into computers, the costs go even lower: you can design what you want and have a third party “print” manufacture it for truly citizen prices.



The amateur in America may have some interesting access, but this pales in comparison to professionals from other countries who using the state-of-the-art knowledge available to everyone on the internet, can make seriously interesting biological products with the help of a national-scale lab.



The implication is that even if the United States or Western countries try to ban or regulate something, it will be possible for motivated people in other countries to do it anyway – and the competitive pressures will be enormous. Imagine a gene modification that makes for slightly better math performance. What responsible parent would ignore a technology like that, especially if they feel other parents are doing it?



Even if the United States tries to make that illegal, the motivation is too strong to stop it internationally. Once a Chinese lab, or company, starts offering the service, people from everywhere will travel there to get the procedure done for themselves. This will be very hard to stop.

(FlickR photo by jacob earl )

Medicine and Anti-Fragility

Black Swan author Nassim Taleb in his highly-anticipated upcoming book uses the term anti-fragility to describe systems that are the opposite of fragile. He coins the term after a lengthy search of the world’s languages convinced him that there is no other word to describe something that is the opposite of fragility. The obvious “robustness” doesn’t capture the sense of how some systems not only survive, but thrive when exposed to attempts to break them.

He’s been leaking chapters regularly on his web site, and a few days ago he released Chapter 21, about medicine. He looks at iatrogenics, the study of medical mistakes, as evidence that a large amount (perhaps the major part) of what today’s doctors take for granted is as unproven as bloodletting:

• Put ice packs on a fresh sprain.
• Eat breakfast 
• Lower the temperature of someone with fever

To him, statin drugs are a dangerous example of intervention “to get a grade to pass a school-like test”. Yes, it effectively lowers cholesterol, but so what? It’s like muzzling a baby to stop the crying: sure, it works but you haven’t addressed the root cause. 

He has similar concerns about antibiotics and disinfectants, insulin injections, and even toothpaste: each effectively treats a “problem” but do we really understand the implications?

I’m sympathetic to the whole perspective, especially how “experts” are often (usually) wrong, etc., but I think Taleb is in danger of being too correct. Like the old joke about the two economists who ignore a $20 bill laying on the ground (“it can’t be real, or somebody would have picked it up already”), finding ways to “improve” things is pretty much what humans are for. 

In the wrong hands, Taleb’s concerns might sound like a defense of the precautionary principle, the easy-to-refute idea popular among environmentalists, that a theoretical, even unproven potential harm is enough to justify restrictions on new technology or development.

You could apply Taleb’s reasoning to say that we shouldn’t make gardens because by artificially hedging trees or cutting grass, we are interfering with natural processes we don’t understand. Well, yeah. But if we don’t interfere with nature we don’t get a garden – and maybe I want the garden. Sure, maybe there will many unintended consequences (my fruit trees will attract annoying birds, my vegetables will attract deer, etc.) but I’ll deal with those problems as they come up.

I apply a compress to a fresh wound and take aspirin for a fever because maybe I want to treat the symptoms. Forget the long-run issues of the consequences of “unnatural” treatments: in the long run, we’ll all be dead.

Asymco's Dediu in China

Horace Dediu's asymco.com (Twitter: @asymco) is one of the best mobility analysis sites out there, so I was excited about his recent trip to China, hoping that he'd have some special insights in his Critical Path podcast with Dan Benjamin.

Alas, apparently he was only here for five days, and it was a vacation with friends, so his observations were purely as a tourist, though of course a smart guy like him can't help but notice interesting things.

He visited a PC Mall and bought some cheap cables. He was frustrated to find that Twitter/FB don't work here.  To him, China is the familiar case of a developing country that follows the Japan/Korea model of Asian development, converting "peasants into factory workers" for a straightforward boost to GDP that will bring them a long way but won't necessarily translate into an innovation powerhouse.

Most of all, he saw lots of smog, as you can see in this photo he took in Shanghai:

He points out that soon China will be Apple's biggest market, but he didn't dwell on the possible consequences and instead devoted most of the podcast to his take on how this year's WWDC shows Apple is becoming more friendly to an ecosystem of partners.  

Bottom line: worthwhile podcast if you want to hear more about Apple and the mobile industry, but not much insight about China.

By the way, I was intrigued to hear that, like me, he gave up regularly reading the Economist some time ago. Though filled with great writing, their perspective puts too much faith in macroeconomics which I think perceptive readers after a while lose confidence in its explanatory power. I mean, they provide an interesting well-written narrative to explain what happened, but I just haven't seen many cases where that macroeconomic viewpoint helps you see the future.