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Comment Re:You mean DMLS? (Score 2) 74

From the wikipedia article: "Gas dynamic cold spray (GDCS) is a coating deposition method developed in the mid-1980s in the Soviet Union." Nice. I've never heard of this technology. For a while I was working for a small startup doing some mechanical design and was doing research into exotic fabrication technologies. I came across some truly great technologies -- hydroforming, which uses hydrolic pressure to form metal into deep draw forms and Explosive Forming which, yes, involves using explosive to shape metals were two of my favourites.

Comment Re:Backstory (Score 1) 159

I know the team member who first suggested this research. As a kid, he was obsessed with spinning tops, bicycle wheels and everything else he could find that spins really fast. Looks like that passion of his spun out of control as he grew older!

I could you could say it... spun out of control.

Submission + - Examining the expected effects of dark matter on the solar system

LiavK writes: Ethan Siegel recently wrote a great post for ScienceBlogs discussing the expected total mass of dark matter in the solar system. As far as we can tell, dark matter only interacts weakly, via gravity, both with itself and normal matter. So, it can't collide with itself, meaning that it has no way of getting hotter and radiating away energy and momentum. This means that it remains a diffuse mess, with a density that is ridiculously low, to the point where detecting its local effects is likely to remain... challenging for the foreseeable future. Does Dark Matter affect the motion of the Solar System?

Comment Picking a CMS (Score 1) 70

I just finished a hand-coded revision to my personal website. It's small and modest and after going at it for about a week, it was clearly time to switch over to a CMS.

This is the fourth one I've come across that comes highly recommended (see also, Stacey, Bootstrap, and, obviously, Wordpress). What are the differentiators? How do you decide?

Comment The name (Score 2) 197

There's a nice New Yorker podcast from a couple of years ago that discusses what went into picking the name: http://www.newyorker.com/online/2011/10/03/111003on_audio_colapinto . It was done by Lexicon Branding, who actually write code to break up words into phonems and then remix those sounds into new words. The program spits out lists of candidates that are then vetted by the linguists at Lexicon. I found it a really interesting discussion.

Comment Processing (Score 2) 218

A totally different approach, if you like programming is processing. If you're not a serious coder, it's got a light-weight IDE and is specifically designed to be a gateway drug for artists/designers to the world of computational design. If you're already comfortable with Java, you can import the processing core into eclipse and really go hammer and tongs at it. It's got a ton of libraries, several of which are specifically devoted to creating STLs, meshes, NURBs and exporting that geometry out to STL, dxf, dwg, etc. Take a look at toxilibs for some particularly cool functionality with meshes and physics libraries. There is also a good online forum.

Not familiar with computational design? Check out some of the examples on the processing gallery.

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