It's Steve (now in blog form)

A couple of months ago I hit the super awesome Maker Fair in San Mateo.  While I was there, one project really caught my imagination. The picture is of my very own rhombic triacontahedron.

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!

I admit it, there are times when I wonder if the things I do will have any lasting impact on the world.  Can I, as an individual, really make any sort of meaningful difference?  Well, ladies and gentlemen, I have been been inspired.  Allow me to introduce you  to Thomas Midgley, Jr.

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.