I’m keeping an eye out for articles on 3D printing – here’s a good one at The Economist.

3D printing looks like it’s going to be a really important and disruptive technology: I mean let’s be clear, we’re talking about replicators. Download a template, tweak it, make  your own and sell them; the rest is a matter of feedstocks. They say they’re expensive, but they’re in the range of early inkjet printers. The path is unmistakeable: 3D printers will be cheap, ubiquitous; if you can’t afford one, chances are your village can; and that will be a stupendous political and economic transformation.

As the Internet is to creating and sharing information, 3D printing is to creating objects, and sharing design templates for printing objects. For example: it appears likely that it will become possible to manufacture untraceable and undocumented weapons. I got that story from Rachel Maddow, who wisely offers light commentary, she’s just letting you know about this new thing in the world.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

This is to be a story about the politics of food, and about food as a place to begin the revolution.

I’ve been puzzling for a long time over my intentions for this weblog. I’ve also lately been browsing through various popular online discourses, across the political spectrum, about our future as a species.

There’s a lot of millenial end-times thinking and speech, swirling about these days. Of course, we’ve just come through the turn of the millenium, and so that should surprise no-one. Prognostications of doom are mostly just ceremony; they have little predictive power. Really good futurists are rare (I’d count Arthur C. Clarke as one, and John Brunner as another). However, in the range of futures we can imagine for ourselves, we can at least map out the possibilities.

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I like what Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to say, in his first inaugural address: “[L]et me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

I heard something today that reminded me: there are those who profit by fear, who have an interest in encouraging it. I did a quick Google search on that concept, and discovered (of course) that others are taking an interest and writing about this:

www.businesspundit.com/25-people-and-industries-that-profit-from-fear/

It’s my understanding that the economist and political theorist Friedrich Hayek has enjoyed attention of late, among American conservatives. Many years ago, as an undergraduate, I read a little of his work, and I remember being quite taken with some of his ideas (I have a strong libertarian streak). I decided to see if I could learn what might be drawing a contemporary audience. To my delight, I found this essay, apparently quite well known, and an interesting read:

Why I Am Not a Conservative by Friedrich August von Hayek

One hears so much these days about the anemic American economy — it’s striking to read a different account. Here’s an article on the Daily Beast about a stronger, faster America.

Freedom thru strength! This is a story about safety and security features that (wealthy) people can add to their houses, to protect them from intruders.

Presumably these things are available because there are customers for them. I’d guess there might be places in the world where a facility like this would be worth the expense. That would be a different way of life, to be sure.

This is how to build the next world:

The story of an illegal garden in Brooklyn.

Today I went for a drive in a brand new Nissan Leaf. The Leaf, as you may know, is an electric car. There aren’t that many true electric cars on the market (the Chevy Volt doesn’t count because it has both electric and gasoline engines).

The Leaf is surely one of the butt-ugliest cars I’ve ever seen in my life, but otherwise it’s a pleasant ride, a typical small hatchback. I took it out for a drive of about 25 kilometers, and was, of course, worried that the battery would run out. However, the car was fully-charged when I picked it up, and is capable of covering up to 140 kilometers on a charge, depending on driving conditions.

If I hadn’t known it was electric, I probably would not have known from the driving experience, except to say that the car was unusually quiet, particularly at low speeds. The Leaf is comfortable, well-appointed and solid–there are no compromises that I could detect in the way it’s made. Driving it is quite straightforward once you get past the fact that there’s no ignition key (you start it like a computer, by pushing a power button on the dashboard). The dashboard is designed, unmistakably, to address range anxiety. It’s reassuringly informative about the available charge, the projected range at any given moment, and even an estimate of the time you’ll need to recharge the car. When you plug it in at the end of your day, there’s a flashing blue “charging”  light on the dashboard, easily visible from a distance, so that you might look at the car in the driveway from your house, say, and you’ll know if it’s still charging. For today’s 25K trip, I racked up an estimated charging time of 2.5 hours.

Kudos to Nissan for a brave innovation. I hear tell the car isn’t selling well, and some people put that down to skittishness about an expensive small car with a limited range. My two cents: if Nissan wants to sell more of these, the first problem is aesthetic. The new Ford Focus EV, by contrast, is quite a handsome vehicle, and it’s what I would go for if I cared to spend 40K on a car.

Rachel Maddow had a great show tonight, including an interview with the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and a clip from a recent address by President Obama, that frankly made me cheer out loud. Watch

the Rachel Maddow Show, 2011 Nov 21

I just found this on Time.com, in one of their lists of coolest inventions… I am ceaselessly amazed by what people are learning to do these days, with computers. File this under improbable tech:

How a Common Sandbox Is Battling Arizona’s Wallow Fire | Techland | TIME.com