www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMd8avktg8s

Brought to us by the folks at http://bulatov.org, this little guy is what I would have previously considered an impossible shape. It’s made out of steel and I have no idea if it would even have been possible through a CNC or casting process. It was executed using a 3D printer developed by MIT that can use bronze steel instead of the plastics most common in 3D printing. Think of this being built up one thin layer of molten steel at a time. That is freaking cool any way you think about it. I’m usually pretty adverse to buying things for myself, but this completely blew me away.  Some of the other options. It was really hard to pick one.

This is why I picked this particular one. Look how she spins!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JW6gZZKA6A8

I know I’ve been off of the radar since I left MySpace, and I’m happy to finally be able to talk about my newest project: gravity.com. We’re officially out of stealth now, and it is a great feeling to be able to now talk about something I have been pouring my heart and soul into over the past six months. We’ve assembled an amazing team here, and today we’re unveiling the site and the problem we are tackling.

The online conversation space has been historically undeserved, with outdated tools that create fragmented and unwieldy discussions. Our mission is to help people engage in meaningful conversations about their passions. Be it gadgets, cooking, Voltron, or whatever you may fancy, Gravity will provide users with a place to have discourse with other people who share their interests. Traditional tools like forums, group email lists, and collaborative blogs haven’t offered users with simple, functional, and fun way to interact and share. When we talk about what we’ve built, we like to describe it as a turn-based conversation site. This isn’t about allowing for chatter, but instead about creating a destination where we provide a framework for people to better share and communicate. We’re focused on building out the Interest Graph for the web to help people connect with their passions and discover people and topics that are personally relevant. Additionally, we’re embracing the distributed nature of the web, current movements in open API’s and technology, and are looking at how we open up our technology while inter-operating with others.

Please check out this TechCrunch post that delves into more detail on the company and our mission, and be sure to follow us on Twitter at: @gravity. This is an exciting moment for me personally and professionally, and I can’t wait to share more about the project, and more importantly, give everyone a chance to play with the product and tell me what you think.

Midgley was an inventor.  Celebrated in his lifetime, he died with over a hundred patents and accolades from his peers.  He also singlehandedly jacked the environment six ways to Sunday. Midgely became a household name for solving engine knock by adding lead to gasoline. His tireless efforts to show how safe high lead levels could be, despite the numerous deaths from lead poisoning in refineries, legitimized the process and landed him only briefly incapacitated for lead poisoning (he publicly demonstrated the safety of lead by running his hands through a lead solution and nearly died after the press had gone home).

Now, the wide dispersal of lead throughout the environment for the next several decades is quite a legacy, but Midgely would not simply fade into obscurity. Remember that hole in the ozone from all of the Freon and CFC’s? Well Midgely is up in heaven right now looking down at you through it. He invented those too. Yup, the lead in the gasoline guy is also the CFC guy.

On an interesting note, in his later life he contracted polio. In designing an elaborate system of pulleys to help get himself out of bed, he became tangled and was strangled (the whereabouts of Captain Planet cannot be accounted for that day).

So the next time you run into someone going insane because their well was a little too close to leaky gas tanks, or you see a polar bear who misses the snow, remember one man really can make a difference.

Why does DC have a truck that delivers salt? How much are they using?

I got to touch a moon rock.  Sure it’s just basalt, but it’s SPACE BASALT (that’s the best kind of basalt).

If nuclear armageddon had happened in the 80′s, this is the last thing you would have seen.

This is where all the Tang goes

All of the non-tech dorks can skip this one.  For the rest of you: Holy Shit! That’s a CRAY!!!!

I like dinosaurs…a lot.  How did I ever manage to get married?

These two pics make me laugh.  The fossil processing lab has been turned into an exhibit.  I like their sign

I just missed feeding time.

So there you go, my science dork afternoon in DC.  Stay tuned for our next dork adventure: LEGOLAND!  (I’m a little embarrassed about all this actually.  No idea why I feel compelled to share.  *sigh*).

Let me bore you for a minute with the details.  Western archers shoot off of their index, middle, and ring fingers.  Eastern archers shoot off the thumb.  Turns out that ancient Roman archers utilized the thumb technique as well.  They protected their thumbs with a specialized archer’s ring that lined in the inner length of the thumb with bronze.  

I didn’t even know that these existed until I saw the one in Vegas for $600.  Vegas shops are always a rip off so I headed to ebay.  Turns out that they are pretty readily available given the fact that they were so common.  After a few failed auctions I finally just won one for $60 with shipping.  It’s from the 1st to 4th century AD found in the Balkans (going to try and get more details to place which provence of the eastern Roman empire  that would be).

Here are some pics.  So cool.