pHood Printer
December 26th, 2010Is there an unwritten rule that members of the grant swindling class have to be batshit insane?
Via: BBC:
Christmas dinner traditionally centres on the turkey or goose. But if US scientists have their way, everyone may be sitting around a printer.
The team at Cornell University’s Computational Synthesis Lab (CCSL) are building a 3D food printer, as part of the bigger Fab@home project, which they hope one day will be as commonplace as the microwave oven or blender.
Just pop the raw food “inks” in the top, load the recipe – or ‘FabApp’ – and the machine would do the rest.
“FabApps would allow you to tweak your foods taste, texture and other properties,” says Dr Jeffrey Ian Lipton, who leads the project.
“Maybe you really love biscuits, but want them extra flaky. You would change the slider and the recipe and the instructions would adjust accordingly.”
The goal is to blow the lid off cooking as we know it and change the future of food production.
People lacking even basic culinary skills could download the recipe files of master chefs or print out nutrition-packed dishes recommended by their doctors.
Research Credit: JH
http://ihistory.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/leunig-tv-sunset.jpg
but Kevin, its Progress™!!!
i say, send them all off on one-way tickets to the next galaxy.
Innovation.
This development technology sounds eerily like the device known as a “Maker” featured in Warren Ellis’ comic book series, “Transmetropolitan” – where one can load trash into the Maker, and dial up steak, croissants or a pair of Doc Marten boots. It’s really simple, we just rearrange the atomic structure from garbage to guacamole (come to think of it they look similar some of the time) The best results in Transmetroilitan came from using dedicated “matter blocks”, but simple varietal garbage was acceptable for low level transmutation. Spider Jerusalems Maker had a drug habit ! Once again life imitates art.
Crassly quoting myself from an earlier thread about mounting sensor arrays on postal vehicles here @ Cryptogon:
“Social engineering is as real as rain. It’s pervasive, coming at you from every direction all day every day via the open veins of the media. That intellectual goon Roddenberry puked it up exactly backwards for the rapidly modernizing industrialized masses, thereby confusing generations into an overeasy tech-worship (truth be told, myself included): your MIND is the final frontier.
Even more ironically, a HUGE portion of the modern mobile device’s appeal is the STAR TREK nature of the thing: “Beam me up Scotty…”
However, technology ALWAYS carries a double-edged sword. That which enables some glorious new efficiency also runs out of batteries at critical moments. Pervasive monitoring is surveillance, no matter what costume you choose to tart it up with.”
Perhaps this is what they plan to feed the post-singularity Übermenschen from Kurzweil’s wettest dreams.
As near as I can tell, “Roddenberry Syndrome” (as in the blind worship of technology as mankind’s latest “savior” is not only pervasive, it is tragically endemic.
I’m using it, and even abusing it myself. I’m as big a hypocrite as anyone who complains about the changes it has wrought to our world, even as I revel in a select set of said same changes.
Next thing you know, they’ll be telling everyone that nuclear waste is actually a good thing, along with hydraulic fracturing, tar sands and every other ecological disaster unleashed by our industrial taskmasters.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m no deluded green, “believing” with all my might that MORE regulation will actually change anything except the specific illusion of control in operation.
As for transmutation, that’s an alchemical process with one foot in allegory and the other in practical chemistry — and carefully monetized into all of the planet-fouling industrial concerns propagandizing today, from worse to worst.
Goebbels would feel right at home in our modern world. Odds are good he’d still be making policy and charging seriously wacky consulting fees.
As ever: “The more things change, the more they stay the same…”